Perpetual Adolescence

I have just finished preparing my adult Sunday School class on the topic of perpetual adolescence. It is based on a chapter of a book by John G. Stackhouse Jr. Evangelical Landscapes. The chapter is curiously called Perpetual Adolescence. The preparing took the form of, after the xth time of reading the chapter, highlighting the important bits (most of it) for purposes of reading them to the class. In a direct way I feel that it is cheating, but at the same time I do not for even one instant that I can better express what it is that Stackhouse has to say. For a glimpse, here is a quote from said book and chapter:

We aging baby boomers have made a cult of adolescence. We still want to be eighteen or perhaps twenty-five, and we have transformed popular culture around us as we always have, through the power of our numbers and our wallets. So radio stations keep playing the music of our youth - not of today's youth - even as one wonders how appropriate it is for a fifty-seven-year-old executive to be listening to hours of adolescent love songs. So jeans companies let us stay in our Levi's or khakis by bringing our "relaxed fit" pants to suit our ever more relaxed bellies and bottom. So the ordinary necessities of the middle decades of life become glossed and airbrushed and jazzed up to let us maintain the facade of perpetual youth: Minivans are sensible for this time of life but terribly dull, so we buy impractical SUV'v instead.

(For the record I drive a really beater Tercel. It has 366,000k on it and gets north of 40mpg.)

Now I may not be able to express this as well as Stackhouse but recently when reading The Pyromaniac I came across something that I thought was a succinct statement on the topic. From his article Still more from the e-mail out-box.

the methodology is all wrong and completely without any credible biblical warrant. I realize making Jesus seem cool is the dominant evangelistic strategy of this age, and everyone from Rick Warren to Brian McLaren is trying in whatever way they think best to make Christianity more hip and trendy.

But I still think it's a bad idea.

Incidentally, I grew up in the 1960s in a liberal church with a fairly sizable youth group where dances with live rock music were the bait used to draw us on a regular basis. So there's nothing particularly fresh or innovative about this philosophy. It didn't work in my generation, and it's not really working now. It's made the church more worldly; it hasn't made the world more spiritual.

In fact, I'd say that this strategy represents the wholesale abandonment of the church's responsibility to a sinful culture

I am not sure how this will go over tomorrow. I hope that it is taken in the light I intend to give it. A sincere hope to bring our local body to a greater depth of thinking.

I'll let you know tomorrow how it went.