The Church and MTV

Attention Youth Workers
If there’s anything that’s crucial to those who work with youth, it’s the challenge of remaining relevant. How do you connect with someone ten, twenty, etc years younger who’s barely seen a cassette and certainly never an 8track?

I have been reading an interesting article that deals with the issue of relevancy. The article is titled “Can MTV Stay Cool?” It is primarily a business piece tracking the efforts of the CEO of MTV to ensure the media empire continues to dominate. But her challenge is much like a youth worker’s: discovering what’s important to a young generation, using it to make a connection with them, and then selling an agenda. Her trick: be a voracious media consumer and listen to any creative ideas, regardless of where they come from. That model may or may not work for church youth workers, but it’s interesting to see that someone else recognizes the challenge of remaining relevant too.

Factoid
An excerpt from the article:

"Studies done for Nickelodeon recently found that kids aged 8 to 14 send an average of 14.4 text messages and make 8.8 calls on their cell phones a day."

What does that say about the next generation’s media intake? As much as we debate tv, I hope we realize that media encompasses so much more.

Once and Again
One year ago, Nathan Nicholls proclaimed “Media is the new bus ministry.” It’s unrealistic to think church organizations can keep up with a $7 billion a year monster like MTV, but can we accept the hard facts about media trends and find our own way of using media to connect with youth? Or the masses at large, for that matter.

Monolingualism and Taxes

Taxes Update
Congratulations to all you dutiful Americans who turned your taxes in on time. As it turns out, the Gestapo doesn’t show up at 12:01 a.m. to haul you away if you don’t pay up. But the guilt is just as bad. Being late on taxes for a self-imposed OCD overachiever is like locking a claustrophobic person in a shoebox. I'm taking a minor comfort in the rumor that if you have a rebate coming, there's no penalty for being late. I don't know anything about it, but this news is slight relief, though all so mystical and scary to me. Anyways, let's just hope I am due a rebate when it's all said and done. For that matter, let’s just hope I can ever contact my CPA and get my records back so I don’t go to jail when it’s all said and done.

Confessions of a Hopeless Monolingual
Can monolingual be used as a noun? Is it even a word? Well, it is now.

This week at our youth prayer meeting, a Latino man arrived who couldn’t speak English. He tried to communicate with one of our young men but couldn’t. I was asked to help and was once again reminded of how horribly I need to pick up Spanish. (My intermediate French skills weren’t doing the job.) One of our girls knew enough Spanish to pick up the words “sick”, “pray”, and “Guatemala.” Fortunately prayer picks up where our human communication abilities stop. I’m trusting that God is going to help this man and meet his need. But I’m still left feeling a little helpless and frustrated that all we could do was nod stupidly and make over-exaggerated charade motions.

News: Azusa, Festival and Book Release Blogging, and More

A/P News
Did you know that this month marks the 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival? What a good occasion to celebrate, and celebrate we will. Pentecostals of every organization will be gathering April 25-29 to commemorate the event. This week Ninetyandnine shares “Azusa Street Centennial Celebration”, an interview with the event’s primary organizer.

Ninetyandnine Cultural Coverage
As always, we are doing our part to bring you the latest news from the world around us. This week brings a special week of live book release and writing festival coverage. I’ll leave the details to our diligent blogger, so be sure to check it out!

Ninetyandnine News
A reliable source hinted that Ninetyandnine apparel is on its way! And it may be available before month's end. Stay tuned!

Flashback: American Idol Dialogue

The Need for Dialogue
I’ve always thought we were very fortunate to have a forum via Ninetyandnine and the blogs, but I guess I failed to realize how extensive our need (and want) for dialogue is in the Apostolic/Pentecostal (A/P) community. Over the last two and a half months, however, it’s slowly dawned on me how much we have to say about A/P issues. This realization has been directly proportional to the growing comments on the famous/infamous Apostolic American Idol blog.

A Legend among Blogdom
In a medium where single digit comments are the norm, last week the Idol blog hit a record 34 comments. That’s remarkable for a single blog entry. It goes to show that two and a half months later the entry is still getting hits, probably as a result of the link being forwarded via e-mail.

Synthesis
So what does a whopping 34 comments on an issue two and a half months old say? I think it says we A/Ps really have a lot of questions and need a place to talk things out. Maybe there are no simple answers to the questions this topic has stimulated, but we mustn’t bury our heads in the sand on mixed-opinion issues. When we're confident enough to debate issues in public, we create dialogue that can possibly lead to better understanding of the issue and help us move forward in the right direction. The concept of insisting complex issues stay behind closed doors isn’t practical in this generation. We need discourse and the thought it generates. I think it is great that conversation continues on this topic. Thanks for the dialogue.