Keeping in Touch with Pop Culture
My husband shocked us the other night, leaving our two daughters gaping and giggling for ages. We were out for a family dinner as an end-of-holidays treat and he started the whole thing by offering a weekend away, all-expenses paid, for whomever could guess what band sung the song that was playing in the restaurant. Well, I am clueless at things like that, but he kindly awarded it to me anyway because I was the only one in our family that could spell Def Leppard. (Unfair competition, I guess, considering most our kids are too young to read.)
Our girls, who are 8 and 11, declared the contest rigged because it was clearly "old people music". In retaliation, they held their own quiz. Reciting a few lines from a current pop song, they asked us to guess who sings it… That's when their dad blew their minds by listing three of the top pop artists appealing to young kids today, and then guessing from his list which artist it was.
"What?! How do you know these people, Dad! They're, like, totally cool," (As in, too cool for "old people".)
His response got me thinking. He replied that it was his job as a pastor to not only know the timeless truths of the bible, but also to know the popular "truths" of the day that people are holding up and believing in. "I need to know what people believe and value, I need to know how they think, so that I can teach them in a way they can understand."
It occurred to me that this is the job not only of a pastor, but of any Christian wanting to disciple people, and certainly of any parent who wants to teach their children the Truth. We need to know what they believe in. We need to identify the current beliefs that are common with the truth, so that we can use them as a place to start our teaching, to establish common ground and therefore relevance and credibility. And we need to identify beliefs that are in conflict with the truth, so that we can expose them and rebuild our children's pattern of thinking. We need to understand the language that they communicate in and the methods that they communicate with so that we can reach them in a way that they will be able to comprehend and be willing to receive. We need to understand the childishness or maturity of their minds.
We CANNOT be so caught up in our "old people" :) language, pattern of thinking and behaviour that we are unable to reach our children. Let's open our eyes to observe our kids and the world they are growing up in. Let's question which of our own ways are defined by the Truth, and which are just a product of the pop culture of the olden-days that we grew up in.
Let's be willing to change the way we see and hear and think and communicate, so that we can walk a road alongside our children, teaching them the timeless truths that never go out of fashion.
