What is Riven About?
Our cultural education matters.
Over the last twenty-one years, I’ve engaged in ministry on several different levels. Each level, however, has held to one core value: discipleship.
Discipleship, from my experience, is dynamic and takes many different forms. A person engages in discipleship as a mentor, modeling what it looks like to follow Christ for a younger believer. A life theology is caught and taught through relational trust.
A person can also disciple others through the use of different mediums. Writing, for example, can be used to mentor others in a more general—yet highly effective—way. I have, with great joy, utilized both methods.
In this sketch of my vision, I will ask you to help me take another step in fulfilling my calling to disciple an emerging generation through life modeling, general mentoring, and writing.
The world needs people who walk the path of enchantment. Who speaks in songs. Who live in wonder, with eyes fixed on heaven.
A Background of Creative Discipleship
Early in my ministry career, I served as a lay leader for senior high and college students, I toured the United States and Southern Ireland full-time, playing in a band that ministered at national festivals, colleges, and churches, and I also coached high school varsity volleyball.
These experiences allowed me to develop lasting relationships with young Christians, discipling on the personal (one-on-one) and general (speaking to an audience) level.
My engagement with the emerging generation also reaches into the professional world of writing. For the last thirteen years, I’ve written and developed content for leading organizations such as Catalyst Conference leadership curriculums, the Society Room curriculum published by Q Ideas and Zondervan publishing, and Chick-fil-A’s Leadercast event magazine.
In the publishing world, I have collaborated and co-authored over 23 books, all published by major Christian publishers such as HarperCollins Christian Publishers (Zondervan/Thomas Nelson), Waterbrook/Multnomah, and FaithWords, among others.
My foray into publishing has allowed me to work with clients such as founding member of the most awarded group in country music, Rascal Flatts, Jay DeMarcus, noted author and pastor David Platt, President and CEO of Chick-fil-A Dan Cathy, Founder of Hobby Lobby David Green, along with his son, CEO of Hobby Lobby and co-founder of The Museum of the Bible, Steve Green, platinum-selling rock artist Lacey Sturm, Grammy Award winning Gospel singing BeBe Winans, and former NFL MVP Randall Cunningham.
I’ve also published three books of my own, including the critically acclaimed Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society, Longing For More: Daily Reflections on Finding God in the Rhythms of Life, a 52-week devotional, and the forthcoming The Life-giving Adventure of Chasing Beauty (Eerdmans, 2020).
These writing opportunities, then, have enabled me to disciple at a cognitive level. Whether I’m teaching and modeling real-life Christianity to high school young adults or producing leading content in areas of leadership, creativity, and discipleship, I’ve maintained the simple truth that praxis—the act of leading and living life as a Christian—requires strong theology. A strong theological underpinning is the bedrock for discipleship.
The Need for a New Kind of Discipleship
In recent years, our culture has shifted away from public discourse founded upon solid theological grounding. This shift reveals the vacuum of discipleship rampant in our churches. Who is teaching our young leaders and creatives how understanding God better affects their careers and work?
Now, reactionary communication, either written or spoken in haste, rules the airwaves and the ether. In order to grab a place at the cultural table, Christianity has exchanged the depth provided through discipleship for a headline-grabbing-shallowness.
We’ve moved away from developing cultural theologies and moved into the observation postures of secular pundits.
The world of social media, blogs, and the 24-hour news cycle has created a demand for instant reactions. But the advent of instant-everything produces thoughtless content.
Sadly, Christians are guilty of creating such content.
Os Guinness, in his book Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, says, “Knowledge has fallen prey to the “specialization” of its content and the “universalization” of its transmission.” We’ve become readers of anything and thinkers of nothing—what Guinness refers to as an “idiot culture.”
We’ve all clicked through a CNN Belief Blog, Vox article, or Daily Beast column and grimaced at the thoughtlessness of the piece or the sheer theological inaccuracy.
Guinness suggests that even with all the information at our fingertips, we are a dumber society than the founding society of the United States of America—a society that valued ideas.
I find a glaring irony in our cultural malaise: In my experience, contrary to popular thought, when challenged with thoughtful teaching young people exhibit a deep desire for more. And yet, the church continues to ape a culture drowning in a pool of shallowness.
Discipleship, therefore, has fallen from dynamic mentoring to moral checklists that do not demand sound theological reflection.
The loss of a deep and thinking church comes at a bad time. The church faces major generational issues: the breakdown of the family unit, same sex marriage, questions of personhood, and questions of sexual identity.
The church relevance movement provided us with the conversational tone needed to converse with the greater culture. The problem? We know how to say things, we just have nothing significant to say. Church leaders display great communication prowess with regard to marketing and entrepreneurial vigor. But too often they offer a wafer when a spiritual steak is needed.
So, this is what I want to offer:
I want to continue to write, model and speak into the lives of young people and mentor young adults in their theological underpinnings. Tim Keller provides this now for an older group of Christians—I want to do this for the emerging generation.
In an age where aesthetics and beauty are esteemed by the popular culture, my research will prove relevant not only to the specialized mind but to the lay person in church, the questioning college student and the parent rearing young children.
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Jonathan Edwards believed Christian theology should be built upon the virtue of beauty. Beauty is the platform from which the Christian engages with the world.
Edwards, like Augustine and Aquinas before him, believed God was beauty itself. God’s moral and natural excellencies, as in his holiness and power, draw all people to him.
Beauty touches every aspect of our lives. It is effusive. The Oxford philosopher Roger Scruton defined four categories in which humans beings experience beauty: human beauty, natural beauty, everyday beauty, and artistic beauty. Beauty moves upon us. It is not passive. It demands not only our emotional response, but it also requires us to think critically of meaning in our every experience.
Did you know aesthetic taste “tends to become fixed in late adolescence?” Cultural education—what is beautiful, good, true—is essential for young minds. And yet the majority of their education comes from gaming, social media, and YouTube. It is not bad to bring high culture to the young. Experiences of beauty nourish the soul, promote humility, and refine society. The lack of the beautiful removes the supernatural from the world. When we empty the skies of wonder, our souls yearn for a holiness we ourselves have removed.
The world needs people who walk the path of enchantment. Who speaks in songs. Who live in wonder, with eyes fixed on heaven.
One of the most effective ways to engage with cultures to live counter to its pace; to cultivate soul-riches for a world starving for the Spirit.
