Entertain us!!

Nearly twenty years ago, the unknown singer of an unknown band suddenly propelled both into massive overnight fame when he shouted, "Here we are now, Entertain us."  The song, the singer, and the band quickly became synonymous with the dissatisfied youth of that day, and the emptiness and dissatisfaction of the singer culminated in his apparent suicide only three years later.  Even if it wasn't a suicide, as some theorize, his life was still an empty one of self-absorbed pity that no amount of fame or wealth was able to change.

What has transpired since that time, combined with a new generation of youth, is technology that entertains us like none that could have been imagined nearly twenty years ago.  Yet that entertainment seems to have produced an even less satisfied generation of youth.  It is now to the point where these youth - and their parents of the previous generation - cannot be entertained enough.  Gone are the days when a movie had no sequel, or when one had to make an effort and spend time going to a store in order to buy music.

Today, an original, fresh blockbuster needs to be re-hashed over and over to attempt to squeeze every last ounce of warm, fuzzy feelings out of it until people get bored and no longer wish to spend a profitable amount of money on sequels.  And the entertainment needs to be here, now; waiting is no longer acceptable.  And people no longer want to read a paragraph that's longer than three or four sentences, so people like blog writers have to conform - despite their convictions otherwise - and dumb themselves down to the level of our fast-food, information-overloaded society.  Otherwise, they risk their impatient readers becoming "bored" and looking for that ever-elusive fulfillment with the next click of their mouse.

Entertainment has become like an addiction, a drug where each injection into our senses gives us the illusion of excitement, but it only lasts for a moment, quickly fading away and making us long for more.  But every time the entertainment industry strives to top what caused a sensation before, it seems that the new high is less intense and doesn't last as long.  Our technological society has basically been numbed by entertainment and information overload.  And its inhabitants wander mindlessly around, numb and bored, looking for their next fix and wondering why nothing satisfies any more.

The saddest part about this progression (or regression?) is how educators and the body of Christ are starting to succumb to the idea that they need to come up with some sort of song-and-dance in order to try to capture the attention of their audience.  It's as though they dread the thought of - gasp! - "boring" their audience and thus losing them for good.  Educational training institutions are trying to re-invent teaching so that students get up and move around more and aren't 'restricted' to one type of task for too long.  And you'd better use multi-media or else you might really bore your students! - as if modern educators don't already have enough additional burdens and pressures upon them.  Yet despite all these good intentions at pleasing rather than instructing, North American educators in particular are scratching their heads and wondering why academic standards and results have taken a nosedive in recent years.

As for the church, the body of Christ, I've come across reports the past couple of years about church youth groups trying to entice kids to show up through things like video game nights.  The problem with this approach is how, for example, one church in the U.S. was letting kids blast beings apart while playing Doom then afterward trying to teach them how to 'love their neighbor.'  In the desire to entertain, it seems as though the church can run the risk of sending contradictory messages.

Another risk the church faces is how trying to entertain forces it to take the low road of the lack of depth and substance that entertainment is all about.  The one true God and the Bible that writes of Him are intensely deep - too deep to ever fully fathom on this side of eternity - and therefore a great deal of energy and concentration are required to try to make sense of them.  Yet there is enormous reward in doing so because of the peace and fulfillment that come from knowing God in a personal way.  This peace and fulfillment are what our entertainment-seeking society is really searching for, yet they aren't finding it outside the Bible.  But then the church expects people to try to understand God through trying to put together the most entertaining music team or sermon at the expense of depth and substance and wonders why the depth of peoples' relationship with God is as shallow as the attempts to entertain them.

Please don't get me wrong:  multimedia and social networking sites need to be included in how Christians today send out the message of this amazing God of the Bible that will transform their lives in ways that absolutely nothing else can.  However, this needs to be done wisely.  We need to be wary that we aren't watering things down through entertainment just to try to win people.  Again, we can only expect watered-down faith and commitment on the part of believers if we water down the message of Christ, so we as a church need to hold fast to the things that have worked well to this point.

So what does this mean with our youth?  What things have worked well to disciple youth to this point in history?  I dare youth leaders to start doing verse-by-verse Bible studies with youth.  Sure, start out with one or two carefully-chosen activities or games to help them burn off some energy and/or set the context for the study time.  But then I dare a youth leader to tell their group that they have decided to start reading the Gospel of _____ or the Book of _____ verse-by-verse, starting now, then of course facilitating the understanding of the group as they read.  Maybe study only about 20-30 minutes per youth meeting, but keep at it until the entire book is read.

Why do we always resort to only a verse or two, completely out of context of the chapter or book, to form the basis of the message for a youth meeting?  To me, the more I think about it, this seems as absurd as trying to get a math student to understand algebra without them first understanding addition, subtraction, etc. and the order of operations, for example.  And how do we expect them to get excited about God when only a few verses not explained in context hardly give them any kind of understanding about who God really is and what He offers them through belief in Jesus Christ?  Most youth have never read the Bible on their own, so we need to start with milk before expecting them to understand the main course.  This is best achieved by tackling the concepts of a book of the Bible one verse at a time so that they remain in context to one another, since each concept will build upon another in order to create greater understanding.

The only risk that is run by such an approach is the reduction of a youth group from several mostly non-committed and indifferent believers and non-believers to maybe only two or three solid believers who sincerely want God to rock their world.  God is more concerned with quality, not quantity - refer to the account of Gideon's army as an example - because discipling a handful of solid, hard-core believers will transform a community far more than trying to keep a group of self-conscious youth entertained.

We need to stop fearing that we'll "bore" our youth and instead trust in the power of God and His Word to radically transform them.  I dare youth leaders to rise to this challenge and thereby begin to fear God more than man.