Worth Reading - 1/5

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. This isn't new, but Jen Wilkin wrote a helpful article about raising expectations for students in youth ministry. If you have kids or go to a church where there are kids, this is worth considering:

“Today’s high schoolers learn physics and calculus and foreign languages. They are expected to annotate literature and draw critical conclusions about its meaning. They complete hours of homework. They seek tutoring when a subject is difficult. They work hard to learn because learning points to definable future outcomes. They are disciples of their teachers, learning with great discipline the various disciplines those teachers instruct.

By contrast, when these same students show up at church to be discipled in their faith, what will be asked of them? Have a quiet time for ten minutes each day. Read a few verses and journal about them. Listen to a testimony. Read a devotional book. Discuss what you’re reading with some of your peers once a week.”

2. In essay that cites Wilkin's article from above, Trevin Wax lists three reasons we shouldn't tell people that reading Scripture is easy:

“In a valiant effort to get people into God’s Word, pastors and church leaders sometimes stress the simplicity and ease of Bible reading. We want to make the Bible seem more accessible than it is with the hope that more people will read it. This is the wrong approach.

It’s true that, at one level, it’s easy to pick up the Bible and read the words on the page. But at the deeper level of reading (the act of interpreting correctly and applying well), we face a number of challenges. When we minimize these challenges, we also minimize the great reward that comes from devoting ourselves to something difficult, a Book that demands something of us.”

3. From the blog of the International Mission Board, a post with reasons The Lord of the Rings makes a good companion for missionaries:

“My flight to South Asia took me farther away from home than I’d ever been in more ways than geographical. I stepped off that plane and deep into a land of shadow, a land where precious few had heard of the Light of the world. But Tolkien’s world was a familiar path through a strange forest. I could journey with Strider and his hobbits as they journeyed with me, and they gave me space to feel my homesickness while staying true to my quest. “I feel,” as Frodo does, “that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.” Middle-Earth was warm and familiar, even if it was fantasy, and I needed that breath of familiar air as home faded fast behind me.

Because, for many missionaries, even the flight back to the States is not truly a homecoming. We’ve changed. We no longer fit into the spaces we left. We’re surrounded by friends and family who love us deeply but who can’t really understand the world we’ve seen, any more than Sam’s Gaffer could understand the songs of Lórien or the dungeons of Moria.”

4. For no reason other than it might interest the curious, here is a list from Smithsonian Magazine of ancient documents of significance that have been lost:

“Sibylline Books
Roman leaders consulted these oracular sayings during political crises for perhaps 900 years. The originals burned in 83 B.C. Their replacements were allegedly destroyed by a 5th-century Roman general who feared that invading Visigoths would use them.

Sappho’s Poems
In the 6th century B.C. she composed 10,000 lines of poetry, filling nine volumes. Fewer than 70 complete lines exist. But those have made Lesbos’ most famous daughter (as classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has called her) a revered lyric poet of erotic love.

Aeschylus’ Achilleis
The famed Greek dramatist’s (c. 525-456 B.C.) tragic trilogy is thought to have reframed the Trojan War as a reckoning with contemporary Athenian democracy. An estimated total of more than 80 of his works are lost to history. Seven plays survive.”

5. Christians need to balance the urge to go with the urge to stay and build into the lives of their community. This long-form essay from The Gospel Coalition gives a helpful perspective that may encourage some of those who stay behind.

““Do you want to move to New Zealand?”

We were only two years out of school, married three, when he said these words. Neither of us wanted to stay in the mid-sized Southern city where we’d attended university and seminary, but without a clear call somewhere else, we were beginning to feel directionless. Then one day, he found a short-term position with a church more than 8,000 miles away.

“Sure.” I shrugged and shifted my attention back to our 4-month-old daughter. “Why not?”

Growing up, we’d heard from those who had left family and country to follow Christ. They assured us that just as Christ is right here with you now, he will be present with you there. And we believed them. But we’d learned something else, something they didn’t necessarily say.

Somehow, we’d gotten the idea that spiritual maturity meant uncoupling ourselves from dependence on any one place. To be unfettered by geography—to be willing to go anywhere—seemed next to godliness. Because if God is everywhere, then he’s nowhere in particular, and if God is everywhere, then it doesn’t really matter where you go. The prevention for homesickness, it seemed, was simply to never need home in the first place.

But if God is everywhere, then how can you know for sure where you’re supposed to be?

The paradox of place is that while God may exist everywhere, human beings don’t. Made from the dust of the earth, we’re forever linked to it and can no more escape its boundaries than we can escape ourselves. In fact, we each owe our existence, at least in some small way, to geography. We can’t trace our heritage without simultaneously tracing the map, the places where our forebears lived and loved forever bound up in the strands of our DNA.”