Barnabas File

If your church is not interested in reaching young adults, it should be! For many years, campus ministry was the laboratory for the church in reaching young adults. Denominational collegiate ministry was a place of experimentation and innovation in finding new ways to tell the old story. I am not so sure that is true today (but that is a story for another time). From time to time, a new resource surfaces to aid churches and church-related ministries in their outreach to young adults. My friend Dick Olsen of Central Seminary introduced me to a new one recently: Googling God: The Religious Landscape of People in Their 20s and 30s by Mike Hayes ( Paulist Press, 2007). I did a quick survey of the book and have to start with a couple of disclaimers: First, it is written from a Roman Catholic perspective, so the reader will have to work through that and interpret the comments in his or her own context. Second, if Hayes talked about postmodernism, I missed it. He takes a generational cohort...

In his book Christmas: A Candid History , Bruce David Forbes "deconstructs" the holiday. He is not attempting to be the Grinch, but he points out that much of what we love about Christmas predates Christianity. Romans, Scandinavians, and others attempted to break the hold of the coldest and darkest time of the year with celebrations that involved hospitality, gift-giving, eating, and drinking. Forbes points out, One idea I do not recommend is a campaign to turn Christmas into the purely spiritual holiday it never was. My understanding is that the Christmas message is "incarnation," that God entered fully into the world. So combining Jesus' birthday party with at least some worldly celebrating seems appropriate. We talk about being a missional people--those who are on mission with God and speaking the truth of God to our culture. Perhaps we should adjust our paradigm a bit and consider Christmas as a model of how the Christian message can engage the culture by br...

In his book The World Without Us , journalist Alan Weisman poses an interesting question: "What would the world look like if humankind were suddenly removed from the planet?" Actually, he develops this idea in two steps. First, he speculates what the world would be like today if humanity had never developed, then he looks at what the earth would be like if we no longer existed. He makes a good case that, from the beginning, humanity has impacted the ecosystem through pollution, farming, and species extinction. Wherever we have lived, we have both used and abused the environment. Weisman gives some fascinating examples of how the environment has experienced a resurgence when a certain area--such as the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula--has been abandoned by humanity. He argues that nature tries to restore the proper balance when given the opportunity. In an interesting thought experiment, he discusses both the consequences of a sudden absence of humanity for the ...

I finally got around to watching the DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth", the award-winning documentary about Al Gore's presentation on global warming and climate change. Although it comes across at times like a political campaign film, the film makes quite an impact on several levels. For one, it shows us a man's passion. We don't know what kind of president Al Gore would have made, but it is interesting to see an interesting, articulate person who was once "the next president of the United States" (as he jokingly notes) make a clear case about a difficult issue. That's rather refreshing. Humankind is a force of nature. Even if one wants to skip over the Genesis account and its theology of stewardship of all creation, there are others besides Gore who make this case. In his book The World Without Us , Alan Weisman argues that humankind and its progenitors started affecting the ecology very early and were responsible for the annihilation of whole sp...