If you are looking for a good primer on culture and worldview, John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle have written a real gem. A Practical Guide to Culture comes close to being a must-read for parents and anyone who works with young people. The book is very readable and engaging with wit and humor mixed in.
Stonestreet and Kunkle spend 19 chapters walking their readers through contemporary American culture and suggestions for how to navigate culture within the home and how to engage culture with the gospel. The authors do not advocate for a retreat and hide mindset in regards to culture, but more of a love and engage with caution and awareness mindset. The book is broken up into four parts. The first section address what culture is and why it matters. In the second section, A Read of the Cultural Waters, the authors point to several culture-shaping undercurrents including the information age, identity, technology, and isolation. The third section is the real heart of the book where the authors address issues including pornography, the hookup culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, addition, entertainment, and racial tension. The final section, Christian Wordlview Essentials is the worldview primer. It is a basic look at how to engage the culture.
This book is important, but it is not always fun. As a father of four children and a pastor I try to keep my finger on the pulse of our changing culture, but it is not always easy for me to digest. Wrestling with the realities of our shifting culture as identified by Stonestreet and Kunkle often left me feeling depressed and frustrated. The culture into which my children are growing is a complicated, confused, depressed, and lost culture. Maintaining an active Christian life in our post-Christian society will not be easy.
But, the best way to prepare my children to love Jesus is to help them understand their faith and the culture and wrestle with how their faith can be lived out in a culture that is increasingly hostile to the Christian faith. If you are like me, you may find parts of this book difficult to swallow, but I urge you to trudge ahead. The information shared in this book is important and in some ways the faith of our children depends on our ability as parents and pastors to understand the times and prepare young people to live faithfully.
Buy this book and read it. You may not enjoy everything you learn and wrestle with in this book, but not everything worth doing is easy.
Quotable:
- Teach your kids to ask two questions over and over again: (1) What do you mean by that? and (2) How do you know that’s true?
- It is not enough to teach our kids the “what;” we must also teach them the “why.” Thus, apologetics–defending the Christian faith and providing reasons and evidence for its truthfulness–is an essential part of our kids’ discipleship (1 Peter 3:15).
- Four essential questions our kids must be able to answer before they graduate from our homes:
- Does truth exist, and can we know it?
- Does God exist, and what’s the evidence?
- Did Jesus rise from the dead, and what’s the evidence?
- Is the Bible trustworthy, and what’s the evidence?
- Most kids suffer from NDD–nature deficit disorder. They spend too much time indoors.
- Our souls are thirsty for fulfillment, but affluence is a false god unable to quench any thirst.
- Screens change us from participants into spectators. The screen comes on, and our minds turn off.
- Only one in twenty young adults and one in ten teenagers report that their friends thing watching porn is bad.
- Kids who wallow in adolescence won’t be men and women who stand against evil and injustice.
- Kids are tempted to confuse information with knowledge and completely forgo the pursuit of wisdom.
- According to Sherry Turkle, students tell her that they long for eye contact with their parents.
- From 2004 to 2009, according to a Brookings Institution report, the combined average time each day spent watching television, browsing the web, and playing video games for children and teens increased by ninety minutes.
- Our culture leaves kids in perpetual moratorium, constantly barraging them with new ideas and information, tempting them to seek pleasure and self-fulfillment while offering them a dizzying array of choices about what to believe, how to live, what to buy, where to go, and what to love. They are constantly told to question everything, to explore every alternative, and to keep an open mind on everything from politics to religion to gender. Social media, porn, and affluence offer relationships and pleasure without commitment. Kids in moratorium are incredibly unstable, prone to deception, disappointment, and cynicism.
- Worldviews are caught more than taught. Like a cold, most people “catch” their worldview beliefs from the culture around them. If we never stop and examine our worldview, we’ll still have one, but it may not be the right one.
- You may not live what you profess, but you will live what you really believe.
- In the information age, plenty of voices are willing to talk with our kids if we aren’t.
