When Leonard Sweet came to Trinity a few weeks ago, he reminded us of some wise words from Charles Wesley, (paraphrasing) "We should spend five hours a day mastering the dominant media forms" For Wesley, this meant becoming well read, and well written. For us it is more complicated than that. Consider the variety of media available to us: books, TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, the internet.
For many Christians it seems to be in vogue to talk about how removed we are from the culture. We use phrases like, "Oh, I don't watch TV" or "I just don't know anything about popular music." The translation of this statement is, "I am culturally illiterate."
Isn't it strange to think that it could actually be a part of our Christian responsibility to watch TV, or to listen to the radio? I don't think that it is out of line to ask people to listen to 3 hours of radio, watch 5 hours of TV, 3 hours of internet time, and read the newspaper once a week, and to see a movie once a month. Sounds like alot though doesn't it? Add all of that in with other responsibilities like a job, family, studies, and devotional time and you have quite the full plate. I guess I'll close with one of my favorite quotations from Martin Luther, "Everyone should pray for 30 minutes a day, unless they are very busy, then they should pray for 60 minutes."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Christians in their truest form should be setting the standards in all the creative categories for me are truly children of the Creator. We should not be making all things Christian based on whatever is popular in secular society. We should be trend-setters. Not reactionaries.
Post a Comment