#231-Liberal Youth Pastors (A Lament to why the liberal position within the UPC is simply a codeword for: "Apostolics who say much, believe in little, and spend their lives designing sermon artwork on a computer")
It's the Creedence Clearwater Revival week here on Sal which means music from one of my favorite 60's bands...
Something at the turn of the millenium went terribly wrong. I'm not precisely sure what it is, but I can guess:
Liberals Apostolic preachers started reading books.
And while we were taught all our lives about the immense reward for reading, I want to go back ten years or so ago and tell those liberal preachers "whatever you do, don't read a book."
And I mean it.
Because, it's not that reading is in itself bad...
But rather, Apostolics have an amazing ability to walk into any bookstore and somehow bypass all literature that could indeed change themselves or change the world, they manage to come out with the weirdest, overpriced Christian inspirational book there is because the author was the pastor of a megachurch, and the design of the book is eye-catching and the title of the book is offensive. Shocking. Disturbing. And almost always, the book promises to change your life or cause Holy Ghost fireworks, or make you see Christianity in a whole different light. All of this translates to in actuality is that the book offers just another spin on a certain Biblical verse, a life-altering habit that will enrich your walk, and a jaw dropping story to two.
In other words: The book will be the next young minister's sermon for a youth service or youth rally (if the book is long enough, it can be a preaching series making being a minister that much easier!)
Seriously, I have higher hope for a 4 year old to be a fan of the films of Bergman or Hitchcock before a Liberal Apostolic Youth Pastor is caught reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ayn rand, or Melville....
......
And just because I lost my train of thought watching the Tigers play baseball, I have decided to make a flow chart instead to calculate what exactly you should read if you are an Apostolic...
Basically the idea of being a liberal youth pastor involves whether or not you have the attention span to read.
If you don't have a good attention span, listen to a podcast of your favorite non-Apostolic preacher.
If you have a short attention span, and hate woman, you should listen to Mark Driscoll and also believe in predestination.
If you like woman, you should listen to a large number of other preachers depending if you want to be more theological oriented (e.g. John Piper) or want to be talk about helping poor people but doing nothing about actually helping (e.g. Rob Bell). ..
But if you want to think yourself of the educated type of youth pastor, read books with disturbingly large font that are under 200 pages that talk about how a certain, hip pastor was able to help the poor and watch his church grow three fold in church growth.
And then the actual books.... what do they end up actually doing? You know, those "fluff" books that I have been talking about? Well, all they do is make one feel guilty and cry about how little they are doing and condemn other preachers and peers for not reading those same books and therefore not feeling equally as guilty as the liberal youth pastor for being lazy and doing nothing. The best case in point: Francis Chan books. The dude is pretty cool, i suppose....
But what he does well is talk about how much of a burden he has for the lost and poor, etc....and how he actually did something about it. And then we as Hip, Apostolics read the book and see that we don't have the same burden as him which makes us cry and feel guilty so we can say we "finally" have a burden and now we can recommend Francis Chan to everyone, but after a month of reading the book and recommending it to all our friends, we have done nothing but whipped ourselves on the back for our lack of care...*I owe this point to fellow SAL writer Chady Hosin*
So essentially, all being a liberal UPC youth pastor tends to amount to is condemning conservatives for not caring about the poor (True) and reading books that make you feel insufficient, but in the end, doing nothing about it....
There is one more think that is frustrating about the Liberal UPC youth pastor, but that will come later on in the week...and here's the hint
Arise ye young generation....the Revival is at hand
Fin.
I'm surprised there are no comments on this yet. I found this entry hilarious in its broad-sweeping accuracy. You missed "the rest of the story" for these liberal youth pastors.
ReplyDelete10 years down the road these are the guys that go start a "community church" with UPCI home missions funding. The name of said church must consist of one word and must not sound like a church. "The" something. "The" Rock. "The" Praise. "The" Power. "The" Hope. Oh, and their services are never longer that 59 minutes and 58 seconds...that includes preliminaries, music and sermons.
After their home missions funding runs out, they then pull out of the UPCI and go independent. Not because of standards, mind you, because they weren't following those anyway, with the lead guitarist in their church band wearing torn jeans. No, they pull out of the UPCI so as to become a GM, as the previous post indicates, because they don't want any of their "community members" going to the UPCI website and seeing that baptism and the Holy Ghost are essential elements of the salvation experience. They don't want to be associated with any stance that indicates their people have to do anything more than show up every week and enjoy the music in order to "be saved."
love Francis Chan. Rob Bell...not so much. For those who feel insufficient, here's are great starting place. http://www.ptl.org/. Along with learning how to distribute the Bible, it gives you an evangelism boot camp through e-mail. Life changing if you don't just read it but do it.
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