What Really Hurts Children

What is the real danger to children? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Recently, I wrote about the hysteria that comes whenever any new piece of technology comes out. It’s always argued that this will lead to the children being corrupted. The reality comes and goes and there’s no major change. Most of us look at what happened with comic books in the past as silly today. Odds are years from now today’s fear will seem silly.

But yet, no one can deny that children are being hurt. Yes. We do have problems with children committing violence and we do have problems with sexual promiscuity in children. Children often do drugs and children struggle with suicide, depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide.

It’s really easy to blame this on the surrounding culture. It’s comic books! It’s TV! It’s movies! It’s music! It’s smartphones! It’s video games! It’s the internet! I am not denying that some of these can play a part, but there is something far more influential that comes beforehand that if this gets wrong, the others are far more likely to be hazardous to children. If this gets right, they are far less likely to be hazardous.

What children most need right is a stable family.

By this also, I mean that children living with a mother and a father both, and preferably their own biological parents. I realize that sometimes this can’t happen. I have a wonderful friend who’s a widower raising children on her own which is wonderful. A cause like being widowed suddenly due to a tragedy often cannot be helped.

Technically on my end, my sister is my step-sister as we have the same mother, but my mother left an abusive marriage and remarried my father and I come from that one, but my Dad has never treated my sister like any less of his own flesh and blood. I never got preferential treatment growing up that way. You could ask my sister and she would say the same thing.

Today, divorce is often prevalent because if the parents aren’t happy, well surely the children aren’t. Often, with a bad divorce, it doesn’t change the happiness of the children. Sometimes what they want most is their parents to work matters out and it can set the path for them to do the same.

If anyone thinks that’s what happened on my end, no. You can ask most anyone and I fought tooth and nail for my marriage and this was even when wise people told me I should seek divorce. I always said no. If it ended, it would be on her end, but I also told her when she was telling me she was going to divorce that I didn’t want her to do that, but if she sent me papers I would sign them. I wasn’t going to hold her hostage or anything.

Children can wrestle with abandonment over divorce and issues of trust. One reason I am sure of this personally besides my own reading on the topic is I am 42 and divorced and I still wrestle with this as a result of my divorce. It’s far harder when you’re a child who doesn’t have a fully developed cognitive faculty to know how to handle this or a whole worldview behind it. I remember the story of a man in his senior years who at the age of five had his Dad kill himself and he still wondered why his Dad didn’t want him.

Don’t think that just having the right parents is all that matters either. No. Invest in your children. If your children are engaging in media you think is harmful, talk to them about it. Find out why they like it. What are they really gaining out of it?

Don’t think also that if you’re in ministry, you can bypass this. You can’t. Some people can be so committed to ministry that they fail to be committed to their own families. I hate saying it, but Billy Graham was even like this. There’s an account of how he left his wife behind sick once because he had to preach somewhere. If children think your ministry matters more to you than they do, they are more prone to resent your ministry and the God that ministry is about.

Children need to be invested in. We can often think that if we take them to church every Sunday, which we should, then we’re okay, but it needs to be more. Christianity needs to be lived in the home. It needs to be shown. Christians need to do actions that will speak love to their children.

If this is actively going on, you have far less to be concerned about with the media around them. I have been in the world of video games since I was in kindergarten, and yet I have never had a violent streak or anything like that. I was a virgin until I married and will be one, God willing, until I marry again. I never use profanity and I have never had a drug problem. I have struggled with anxiety and depression, but overall, my upbringing has been very helpful for me.

Also, if you are someone alone raising a child, get them involved with someone who can be a role model of their own sex. If you are a man raising daughters, find a woman who is a role model for them and vice-versa for a woman raising sons. Let them know how they are to be.

Your children are yours and they are to be a great investment. You will be the greatest influence on their life. Use it well.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Nintendo, Sega, and the Gospel

What do the console wars of the 80’s and 90’s have to tell us about Christianity? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A friend recently gave me a Kindle gift of the book Console Wars and I have started reading it. It’s all about the war between Nintendo and Sega in the 80’s and 90’s. Now I had always been a Nintendo guy. What made me get into Playstation also was just one thing. Final Fantasy. Reading through this book, I think back to my own growing up time and all the events going on behind the scenes that I had no idea of and the connections Nintendo and Sega had with other events that I was unaware of.

I also am thinking about the Gospel. Sega did take on a giant in Nintendo. Ultimately, we know that they eventually lost to the point that now they make games for Nintendo. Still, there is something we can learn here. If we’re in apologetics, how do we take on the giant of unbelief today? If your objection is that Sega lost the war still, then I remind you that there is no silver bullet in evangelism. Perhaps we can learn from where they succeeded and from where they failed both.

The usual reply I get to something like this is that using some sort of marketing technique will mean watering down the Gospel. Not at all. We do not need to change one thing about the Gospel. We need to say sin is sin and Jesus is Lord and everything else still. What we can do is change our presentation to better reach the people.

Part of this is finding out what drives the desires of the people. For instance, we can consider that we think a series that has a great actor or actress in it could sell well, but this doesn’t follow. The Crazy Ones had Robin Williams in it and yet it only lasted one season. The Big Bang Theory did not have an all-star cast at the start and yet it is just now finishing its tenth season. What did the latter have that the former didn’t?

We’re seeing a lot of superhero movies coming out nowadays. Why? What is it about superheroes that drives us so much? This also includes retro heroes. I went to see the Power Rangers movie as soon as it came out as an example. That is a series that has been going on for over twenty years despite the basic theme never changing. What is it about all of these that is the draw?

Music. This is one area I do lack a lot in. My taste in music is pretty much restricted to Weird Al Yankovic (the greatest musical genius of all time) and video game music. If I had to choose a decade, I would go back to the 50’s and 60’s. I consider too much of modern Christian music to just be light and fluffy. Still, why do people like the songs that they like?

As we come to understand people and what they like, we can come to learn how to approach them. If you go to an honor-shame culture and you give the Gospel in a Western way, you will not reach a lot of people with it. Describing God as a judge to them means He’s someone who can be bought off easily with a bribe. Talk about sin and they’re confused. Talk about broken relationship and dishonoring God and they will understand. In the same way, we have to work with our culture.

We often go on to the truth question immediately, but that might not be where they’re at. If it was truth that was the driving force, everyone would be going to the library regularly trying to study and learn. Perhaps we need to find out what drives the culture and how we can use that.

C.S. Lewis did this with the Chronicles of Narnia. Few little children would really go to a library and get a book about Jesus and study it, but in learning about Aslan, they found they learned about Jesus. Lewis managed to sneak past the watchful dragons of his day. If we present just an argument and have no reason for people to really care about the argument, then the fact is they will not care about the argument.

If you think I’m changing the Gospel, again, I am not. Christians have adapted themselves to the internet, social media, and any other new forum that has come along. My own ministry partner makes apologetics-themed cartoons on YouTube. The material he presents does come from scholarly sources. Again, few people will go out and read those scholarly sources, but having it in an entertaining format brings it to the people. The entertainment factor also makes a point of it. Several years ago Boss Tweed’s biggest problem was a cartoonist named Thomas Nast. Why? Because he knew people would not read articles against him, but they will read cartoons.

As we go into these other areas, we need to make sure we’re producing high quality material. If we make Christian movies and only Christians see them, we really haven’t done much. The Case For Christ movie recently has been a great exception to this. Even Richard Carrier said that it’s a good movie. There was no scene in it that you had the Gospel rammed down your throat. Too often in Christian films, we have thought we had to spell everything out because otherwise, the audience is just too stupid to catch on. It’s worth pointing out that Lee Strobel’s original book The Case for Christ caught on so well because he made it not just a book of facts, but a story with real discussions going on. We could argue that the Da Vinci Code did the same thing. Sure, the information was bogus, but the concept was the same. People started thinking about the claims of the book more and if we wanted academic discussions, that was a gateway to those discussions.

At this point, I’m still pondering how all of this will work out. The main point I have is to find the people where they’re at and start with what matters to them, why it does, and see how the Gospel meets that need. For instance, we can talk about the truth question all we want, but it’s not likely to faze a guy who is not becoming a Christian because he wants to keep having sex with his girlfriend. If you think that scenario doesn’t exist out there, you’re incredibly naive. What we can point out is that the Gospel has an extremely high view of sex (I find it amazing that so many non-Christians treat it as if just a biological function and physical activity alone and we’re the ones saying it’s so much more) and that if we go the path of Christianity and its rules on sex and marry with those, we can have a far better sex life than we would without. We are not opposed to his desire for sex as there’s nothing wrong with that, but we think that the Gospel has a much better way to appreciate it. Note that in all of this, I did not say that sex outside of marriage is okay. It isn’t. It’s just going to be convincing someone that they can hold off on something now so that they can appreciate it in a greater way later on if they marry.

Like I said, I’m still pondering. I’m only about a fourth of the way through the book and I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn. I’m taking Kindle notes regularly to try to see what steps were done that I think correct and what steps were incorrect. How did Nintendo successfully share their product? How did Sega not?

I appreciate any suggestions anyone else has on this. Consider this blog some thinking out loud as you will. This is not the final word on a conversation, but I hope it will not be the only one either. I prefer it to be the first of many here.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Deeper Waters Podcast 11/22/2014: Adam’s Road

What’s coming up on this edition of the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s dive into the Deeper Waters and find out!

First off, for all interested in hearing about my debate with Humphreys, I am pleased to say that in my opinion it went very well. I will be getting a link to it ASAP and that link I plan on putting up on the podcast feed. For now, let me tell you what’s coming up!

Last week I interviewed Lynn Wilder on her book “Unveiling Grace.” It was about her escape from Mormonism. Her son Micah was highly influential as he was the first to escape. He went on later to establish a band of ex-Mormons called Adam’s Road. They will be on the show to talk about their escape and also do some music. So who are these guys?

Let’s start with Micah.

Micah_Bio_New

Micah Wilder grew up in Yorktown, IN, raised in the Mormon religion. At age fourteen, his family moved to Alpine, Utah, where he continued to grow in zeal towards this religion. By 2004, this nineteen-year-old young man took his dedication and zeal for Mormonism to Orlando, Florida, where he would spend the next twenty-three months representing the Mormon Church as a missionary. In Florida, a Christian minister challenged Micah to read the Bible as a child. Hoping to validate Mormonism through the Bible and prove this minister wrong, Micah read the Bible vigorously for a period of about eighteen months. During this process, God opened his eyes to the truth of the Gospel, and he chose to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God in front of a mass of Mormon missionary peers. Micah’s LDS leadership sent him back to Utah early from his LDS mission as a result—but his life was just beginning as a missionary for Jesus Christ. In early 2006, Micah left Mormonism, family, and career pursuits for Jesus. He has served with the Adam’s Road Ministry since 2006, where he has a zeal for passionately sharing the Gospel and love of Jesus Christ through testimony and music. He resides in Winter Garden, Florida, is married to Alicia Wilder, and is the proud father of three boys.

Next his brother Matt.

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Matt Wilder was raised as a Mormon in Yorktown, Indiana. He spent a couple of years in Utah before serving a two-year LDS mission in Denmark. After his Mormon mission, Matt pursued studies at Brigham Young University as a pianist. While at BYU, his younger brother Micah was released early from his two-year LDS mission trip for testifying of the Biblical Jesus. Micah then shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Matt and encouraged him to read the Bible. As Matt read the Bible, he was eased of the burden of trying to earn God’s forgiveness, and came to realize and accept the free gift of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone. He walked away from BYU to join Adam’s Road Ministry, where he has served since 2006. He married Nicole Wilder in 2006; they have one daughter. Matt enjoys sharing the Gospel message through music and testimony.

And their brother-in-law Joseph Warren.

Joseph_Bio_New

Joseph Warren grew up in Kaysville, Utah, in an LDS (Mormon) home. In 2004, he left home at age nineteen to serve a two-year Mormon mission in Florida. While in Florida, Joseph was challenged to read the Bible as a child. He had considered himself to be a good and righteous person. As he read the Bible, however, God convicted Joseph of his sin. Yet he also learned about God’s grace and the beautifully simple Gospel message of Jesus Christ. As a result, he would walk away from the Mormon Church for a personal and saving relationship with Jesus Christ in 2006—at the peril of damaging relationships with his LDS family members and friends. Singer and songwriter Joseph Warren currently serves with the Adam’s Road Ministry in Winter Garden, FL. He has a heart for glorifying God through his musical gifts and his testimony of God’s grace.  He married Katie Warren in 2007.

And finally Jonathan Paul.

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Jonathan Paul Garrison (JP) spent the bulk of his childhood years in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At age seven, he accepted Jesus Christ into his life. He knew the grace of God, and felt as if he was growing in his Christian walk. As a teenager, he served on the worship team at his local church, and had a passion for both music and film. In his late-teens, JP felt as though he was becoming disenchanted with certain aspects the “Christian religion.” After high school, he attended Regent University at Virginia Beach for film, where he also began seriously investigating the Mormon Church. After three years of investigation, JP was baptized into the LDS Church at age twenty. In the spring of 2013, he also joined the Mormon missionary ranks in Hawaii. While on his LDS mission, God pursued him, reminding him of the grace he once knew as a Christian in many ways. For example, JP read “Unveiling Grace”: Lynn Wilder’s account of leaving Mormonism for Jesus. Through this book, he connected with the Adam’s Road Ministry and was encouraged to follow Jesus regardless of the worldly cost. JP’s prodigal journey met a joyful ending as he left Mormonism and returned to his former faith. He joined the Adam’s Road Ministry in the fall of 2014. He is a singer and song-writer for the group. JP has a powerful testimony about God’s unfailing love and relentless pursuit of His children.

We’ll be hearing the story of these four gentlemen on the show as well as hearing some of their music. I hope you’ll be listening!

In Christ,
Nick Peters