Thursday, October 18, 2007

'Nother Article

Check it out from USAToday.

And of course the comments at the end are very entertaining.

Also started reading ANOTHER book this weekend for a seminary class: The World is Flat. I thought it was a fairly new book, but turns out its been around for a couple of years. The main crux of this book has to do with not just the shrinking of our world, but the flattening as well as countries are more intertwining. He takes a look at a lot of the technical driving factors in the last couple of decades that helped us get to where we are today (where I can write this in a blog and anyone from around the world can read it, abeit unlikely). One of the interesting factors for me however is that I grew up in the tech industry before becoming a youth pastor, so many of the technology references being made in this book, I feel as though I lived it and could remember when and where I was when some of these advancements occurred as well as how my life changed as a result. This happened during my time in college, at&t, chesapeake, and juniper networks. Most of this stuff I used to know about the change when it happened because of my proximity to the core of everything going on. Nowadays however, its a little tougher to keep up as I'm no longer 'playing' in that industry. But still very interesting to see the changes happening globally.

My bigger question now is, what will this do to youth ministry down the road? It used to be that students competed academically locally within their own school, and maybe nationally with SATs, AP tests, and College entrance. Now with IB exams and other international tools, many of our students are competing globally. Does this affect how we do youth ministry when there is so much more of an awareness of global issues going on in the lives of our teens?

1 comment:

Tom said...

this book is one of my favorites. enjoy chris!