Tag Archives: Influence

J. Warner Wallace: influence the culture by encouraging young Christians

02/06/2014 Wintery Knight 2 Comments

Excerpt:

I came to faith at the age of 35. I didn’t have a deep relationship with any Christians at the time, and I had no strong Christian influences in my life. Without a mentor or role model, I felt like I had to work through the evidence and claims of Christianity on my own. Many years later however, as I was preparing to write my own book and start a modest journey as a public Case Maker, members of the apologetics community surrounded me with support and encouragement. While I wasn’t much younger than any of them (and was, in fact, older than some), they recognized I was the “new kid” on the block and surprised me with their generosity, wisdom and assistance. I was humbled by the response, and began to look at my own sphere of influence, searching for young men and women I could encourage in a similar way.

Those of us who hope to influence the culture for Christ typically think of our own efforts to communicate and reach the world. What can I write today? What can I say? How can I effectively use the internet to promote and defend the Christian worldview? Like others, I’m guilty of viewing my influence through the narrow lens of my own efforts. As a guy who started this season in my 50’s however, I’ve come to realize the limits of my own impact and the role I can play as an encourager. My questions are starting to change: Who can I inspire as a young Christian Case Maker? What small piece of wisdom can I provide to someone who is a few steps behind me in this journey? How can I impact the younger generation of Christian Case Makers? I know I won’t be writing and speaking 30 years from now, but there are men and women out there who will be. What can I do to make them even more effective?

I wanted to add to what he wrote and tell you a little bit about what I do. Through my blog, I have been able to meet young people in high school and college who are making decisions about what to study and where to work. I’m been able to help people in some specific ways:

helping them to know what to read/listen to/watch in order to build up their worldview
helping them learn how to debate with skeptics
helping them to decide between college and trade school
helping them to choose the right major
encouraging them to work in the summer instead of taking time off
helping them get funding for apologetics events that they organize
rewarding them for doing well in school or work
listening to the conflicts with teachers and professors
helping them make plans for their lives
helping them make good decisions with the opposite sex
spending time playing games with them or just talking
asking them about their classes, assignments and tests

It’s always rewarding to seem them studying hard subjects, getting good grades, entering competitions and getting summer/full-time jobs. I like to give rewards to people who do try to grow their skills and produce results. It can be small stuff like games or books, or bigger stuff, like sponsoring an apologetics event that they’ve organized. Sometimes I can get a young person connected with a mentor. For example, one young lady wanted to start a pro-life club, and I was able to connect her with someone who started a large pro-life organization and the office manager from that large pro-life organization. I also provided her with some helpful pro-life books. It’s important that we not understimate how much good it does to try to be supportive when young people want to grow their skills and take on challenges.

I think that mentoring young people is especially for those of us who are not married with children. We typically have more disposable income and time than married people do, especially married people with children. Not only is it good for them to get the advice from someone more experienced, but it also gives you parenting practice, and that’s something that you can talk about in a courting situation. This is the kind of thing that signals to a candidate spouse that you are going to be interested in mentoring them, and in raising effective Christian children. The most challenging thing about doing this is that you really have to think about how to please God with your mentoring, and that means that you have to put yourself second a lot of the time. It’s good for singles to learn how to do that.

Commentary

When pastors undermine the relevance of Christianity to the culture

07/12/2012 Wintery Knight 1 Comment

Eric Metaxas has posted another dynamite Breakpoint commentary. (H/T Kelli)

Excerpt:

Here’s a particularly egregious case in point: the recent campaign to remove a great movie, The Blind Side, from the shelves of LifeWay Christian stores. Remember, The Blind Side was denounced as Christian propaganda by many liberal critics. It explicitly depicts an affluent white Christian family devoting itself to helping an impoverished black kid because it’s the Christian thing to do.

The film’s offense, according to a Florida pastor who started the campaign to have LifeWay stores pull the DVD, is that the movie contains “explicit profanity, God’s name in vain, and racial slurs.” It doesn’t seem to matter that the objectionable language is used to depict the palpably unpleasant world from which the young black man, Michael, was rescued by his adoptive family.

What seems to matter to this pastor is that if we “tolerate” the presence of this movie in Christian bookstores, our children and grandchildren will “embrace” this kind of behavior. I’m not making this up – this is the exact reason given by the pastor. And frankly, I think it’s insane. I saw the movie myself. I even let my 12-year-old daughter see it. That’s because it is a great film and I recommend it highly.

But sadly, LifeWay caved in and removed the “offensive” discs from their shelves.

For outsiders looking in, the moral of the story is that “there is no pleasing Christians. They always seem to be looking for something to be mad about.”

We complain about the calumnies and caricatures of Christians on the big screen; and then, when an Academy Award-winning film shows us at our very best, we complain that scenes depicting harsh, inner-city reality are too true to life!

We are, in effect, making our participation contingent on all our possible objections being met beforehand. Since there are many people who would be happy if we stayed within our cultural and religious ghettos, it’s difficult to imagine how we Christians can hope to be taken seriously in cultural discussions and debates with this kind of an approach.

Concerns about the language in the film also miss the larger point: what made the Tuohys — the family depicted in the film — such great Christian exemplars wasn’t their non-use of profanity; it was their willingness to reach out and embrace someone in need.

If we Christians can’t get this, then maybe we really should refrain from commenting on culture in the first place.

The Blind Side is on the very very exclusive Wintery Knight list of great courting movies: (not in order)

These are the movies that you show women to get them to understand what it is that men do in a marriage, so that they can recognize, understand, support and affirm men in their married roles.

If you missed his last Metaxas Breakpoint commentary that I featured, it’s about how pro-abortion people are uncomfortable with the evidence for the humanity of the unborn from things like ultrasounds and sonograms.

News

The New York Times on Christian marriage guru Gary Chapman

11/20/2011 Wintery Knight 4 Comments

From the liberal New York Times.

Excerpt:

“As a senior in high school, I had a strong sense that God wanted me in some kind of ministry,” he told me. “There were only two things I knew in a Christian framework that I could do. One would be the pastor of a church, the other would be a missionary. I didn’t particularly like snakes, so I decided I should probably be a pastor.”

As a young pastor in Winston-Salem, N.C., he began offering classes on marriage and family, and was stunned by the number of couples who asked if they could stop by his office to chat. “I had the personality that listens and empathizes,” he said.

But he also had the personality that sought out patterns of miscommunication. Combing through dozen of years of notes, he identified different ways that individuals express love. As he explained to the audience near Nashville: “Adults all have a love tank. If you feel loved by your spouse, the whole world is right. If the love tank is empty, the whole world can begin to look dark.”

The problem: individuals fill their tanks in different ways.

To illustrate, he told the crowd a story of a couple on the verge of divorce who came to see him. The man was dumbfounded. He cooked dinner every night for his wife; afterward he washed the dishes and took out the trash. “I don’t know what else do to,” the man said. “But she still tells me she doesn’t feel loved.”

The woman agreed. “He does all those things,” she said. Then she burst into tears. “But Dr. Chapman, we never talk. We haven’t talked in 30 years.”

In Dr. Chapman’s analysis, each one spoke a different love language: he liked to perform acts of service for his wife, while she was seeking quality time from him.

“Each of us has a primary love language,” Dr. Chapman said, and often secondary or tertiary ones. To help identify your language, he recommended focusing on the way you most frequently express love. What you give is often what you crave. Challenges in relationships arise because people tend to be attracted to their opposites, he said. “In a marriage, almost never do a husband and wife have the same language. The key is we have to learn to speak the language of the other person.”

He eventually labeled these different ways of expressing love “the five love languages”: words of affirmation; gifts; acts of service; quality time; and physical touch.

He outlined his ideas, along with some homespun wisdom and a sprinkling of homily, in the book, “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate,” published in 1992 by Moody, a division of the Bible Institute. It sold 8,500 copies the first year, quadrupling the publisher’s expectation. The following year it sold 17,000; two years later, 137,000.

In a feat of endurance that would make New York publishers swoon, every year (except one) for the last 19 years, the book has outsold its haul for the previous year, putting total sales in North America at that 7.2 million figure; the book has also been translated into 40 languages.

Even more striking, those numbers were achieved without Oprah and without an appearance on a broadcast network. (Though in a rare bit of publicity, Elisabeth Hasselbeck held up the book on “The View” earlier this year and credited it with saving her marriage.)

I really recommend Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages“. My love language is words of affirmation. I like Gary Chapman because he is an evangelical Christian having an influence on the culture by defending marriage. It’s important for people to be thoughtful about marriage, and not to be swept along by emotions. To think about how the other person is and to be ready to treat them as a different person with different needs. It’s good to look at other people and to think “what’s my responsibility to you?”. When you make a commitment to love someone else for life, you have to think about actually achieving that goal, and that means knowing what counts as love to them.