Your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading (and watching) around the web.
Articles of the Week
Why White People Don’t Want to Talk About Race, Barnabas Piper. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made an intriguing little splash this week with his Race Together campaign—an attempt to cultivate dialogue by having baristas write #racetogether on their cups. The brief initiative was widely panned from many sides (much of the criticism, in our estimation, correctly aimed). But discussion does matter. So why are white people seemingly allergic to discussing race?
What Is Your Exit Plan? Tim Challies. It used to be that only the most famous children had their lives on public display—the rich, the royal, the Kardashian. But with the prevalence of social media, most of us have begun to create an online portfolio of our children’s identity long before they know it. Challies isn’t asking us to pull the social media plug altogether. But he asks an insightful question: how are you going to make the switch, to stop creating the profile of your kids and allowing them to choose their online persona for themselves?
Should We Pray for the Defeat of ISIS…Or Their Conversion? Russell Moore. “Praying for the salvation of our enemies, even those committing the most horrific of crimes, is not a call to stop praying for justice against them. The cross, after all, is not forgiveness in a contemporary therapeutic sense—in which one is merely absolved of wrongdoing as though it were all a misunderstanding. … The gospel does not say, ‘Don’t worry about it; it’s okay.’ The gospel points us to the cross where sin is absorbed in a substitute.”
Millenials Will Change the Abortion Conversation, Charles C. Camosy, USA Today. We beat up on the millenials last week, implying that they were—broadly speaking—a generation predicated on the faulty principle of self-fulfillment (a.k.a. rampant selfishness). But not everything about these young guns is negative. For one, contrary to conventional wisdom, they tend to be more ardent defenders of the unborn than their parents.
Three Ways to Kill Your Sermon-Based Small Group, Ed Stetzer. Many churches (ours included) try to align their small-groups with weekly sermons. The benefits of alignment are legion: it reinforces church values; it keeps people focused; it can prevent rogue elements of suspect theology. But simply aligning small groups with the weekend sermon won’t make the group a success. It’s actually pretty easy to kill a group with some common mistakes.
On The Lighter Side
If People Left Parties Like They Leave Facebook, College Humor. If you ever get up enough courage and enlightenment to abandon social media, make sure to do it right. (Side note: also a fun idea for leaving parties!)
Wisdom For Your Weekend is presented to you by Chris Pappalardo, with occasional guidance from J.D. Greear. This is our attempt to reflect Proverbs 9:9: “Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”
