Dear CPC family,
Join us for a time of fun and fellowship at the summer picnic at Beaver Lake on August 17th. RSVP by emailing Laura Hauck or signing up at the book table. If you can help with setup or grilling, let Laura Hauck know.
Men, join us for the men’s breakfast at 8am this Saturday. The topic I’d like us to think about is: To whom do our children belong? This question is being answered in many different ways. The evangelical church is no exception in tacitly embracing unbiblical responses. Come, let us search the Scriptures together on this.
A personal note of thanks: Namhui and I would like to thank you all for the tremendous love and support you have shown to us as we expect our first child. Thank you for your prayers and for your thoughtful and precious gifts. We feel beyond blessed. As we send out thank-you notes to numerous people, please forgive us if we miss someone unintentionally.
Youth Culture: It has been pointed out that we live in a “youth culture,” in which adults are the new “children.” They live, behave and even dress like children, occupied with their toys and games. With adults becoming children, children have become burdens. Decline of marriage and birth rates testify to it. It only follows that in this degenerative scheme there is no place for the unborn – they are non-persons. So that even the most basic legal protections for the unborn have been revoked.
This youth culture plays itself out in another opposite direction. Leslie Newbigin points out that when the Enlightenment eliminated the future hope of heaven, all hope was vested in an earthly utopian city guaranteed by the nation-state. “The young,” as heirs of this future, “become the symbols of hope, while the old can neither be objects or subjects of hope but only an increasingly burdensome embarrassment” (Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 28).
In other words, people at the two ends of the life-spectrum have been marginalized, if not dehumanized. It’s all about the young and vital adults who dominate the social and economic arenas. This kind of ageism is nothing short of the racism and sexism about which there is much outcry in our world and yet it goes completely unnoticed.
How then should the church live? For one, we get involved in ministries such as CareNet, VBS and Sonshine – ministering to those on the fringes. We recover and discover the great doctrine of Imago Dei – made in the image of God – that every single human being bears God’s imprint, even as a Roman coin bore Caesar’s. We press in to live that counter-cultural Christian ethic of love your neighbor, love your enemy, love the sojourner. “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40).
The Lord bless you!
Pastor Shiv