Since You Asked

I am often asked, “What is your take on today’s culture and, what role is the Church to play in our culture ?” I want to begin to answer this question, using this past fall’s academic freshman entering universities as a starting place. (I undoubtedly will do this “Since You Asked” many more times on this website blog).

Most college freshmen who enrolled in U.S. universities in the fall of 2025 were born in 2006. The world they brought into the classroom was very different from the world I was born into in 1954.

Since 2006:

• Neither Mother Teresa or Princess Diana were alive.
• Telephones are used more as computers, media centers or cameras than a communication tool.
• The CDC reports the average teenager spends more than 5 hours online compared to any other single activity (some reports show as high as 7 hours online).
• College freshman have never licked a postage stamp.
• A cougar is an older woman dating a younger man, not an animal.
• Bruce Jenner is a reality media star not a former Olympic sports icon (I could go further…)
• Apple is a computer industry not a fruit.
• The national reading score for incoming freshman was at a seventh-grade level.
• AI is rapidly outpacing actual intelligence.
• Today’s college freshman might attend a church if they thought the preachers actually believed what they were saying.

Times have changed…are you ready for 2026?

Churches have also changed, and not necessarily for the better. One seminary professor stated there are principally three ways today’s preachers can approach the teaching of the bible. First, the bible is taught as a wonderful book that has good stories. Given this approach, you might as well-read Hemmingway or Dickens.

Second, preachers, if they value their jobs should present the bible as a practical book, full of principles and practices or as someone has quipped, “It is more about “narcigesis” (“What is in it for me?”). This approach represents more self-help than theology.

The third way of presenting the bible is an unapologetic revelation of God’s voice. This third approach is held in tension with the homiletical designer disguises (a sermon?) that are paraded into Sunday morning gatherings like a “Religious Academy Awards”. Faithful preaching and teaching were always intended to mold and shape responsive hearers, much like that of malleable clay. If a person hardens their heart to the touch of God, they will eventually crumble under the force of the world’s pressure or most certainly be scorched by the heat that comes with everyday life. This third understanding of “the sermon”, like Elvis, is quickly “leaving the house”.

Turning to our contemporary culture and the church it can be said, without apology or explanation that values, mores and core beliefs continue to unravel fastest in the very places where the church is most silent.

‘Eating disorders’ are commonplace in the church—

• Church goers tend to, “binge eaters” (eat when they ‘feel’ like).
• Spiritually anorexic (starve themselves from healthy substances)
• “Joy eating” is eating with no nutritional value (NY Institute of Health)
• Excessively overweight because they do not exercise or apply that which they have “taken in”. 

In postings to come I will address real topics in ways that are faithful to God’s word while offering prophetic expression that is rightly spoken (Proverbs 16.24; 25.11) that connects and confronts issues of the heart and mind. If my website is meaningful to you, “share” it with friends. If you have a private message or topic of request, “message me”, and I will do my best to bring it to the table.