like a fire

You gotta love a guy who has gathered statistics for the church for so many years that he starts writing articles about himself on his own website promoting an agenda based on no statistics with a book to solve all the problems arising from that agenda. Barna’s latest exploit is a Wake Up Call To Parents. He quotes many vague statistics about how much media teens consume and jumps right into how that makes kids into rampaging campus killers. According to this article, there ought to be more acts of violence similar to VT than we are seeing. By the way, Barna has a way to prevent this. Just get all parents to buy his book and follow his practices for parenting. Also, BTW, Barna’s parenting method seems to be to lock up your children and put their heads in the sand.

This kind of knee jerk reaction to the events of Virginia Tech boil my blood. To imply in any way that the parents are to blame for this tragedy is insensitive and infantile. Barna goes further though. He boils all of this down to exposure to too much violence in the media. I’m not saying that media has no impact, but saying this is the cause of the tragedy at Virginia Tech is the worst kind of fear based Christian response, and it makes me cringe. Unfortunately, this is the type of over simplification I have come to expect from Barna.

I say fear based Christian response because, after these life upsets, all people try to make sense of it in some way to make themselves feel better or safe. To make things worse, popular Christian site Think Christian picked up to article and seemed to endorse it. This reminds me of the Ozzy Osborne trial where the parents of some suicidal teens tried to blame him for his lyrics making their kids commit suicide. I know people want someone to blame when life doesn’t make sense, but this is wrong. The real tell on this is the Mel Gibson movie The Passion. It was one of the most violent movies I have ever seen and I don’t know of a single Christian organization that didn’t endorse it. You can’t blame the media for the violence we see and then endorse a movie that portrays that violence so vividly. Something is wrong with that type of reasoning.

Wouldn’t it be great if this actually worked though? What if art actually had the power to change our behavior in drastic ways like this? All we would have to do to fix our problems in violence would be to play CCM through out the day in the prison system, or even better yet the schools. Then all our problems would be solved. UGH!

I can’t imagine relying on the media to tell my kids what to do and expecting that. I would much rather raise my children so that they know how to respond to what they see, rather than trying to limit what they see.

So today, after setting up many websites and helping many people and churches with branding, I have started organizing how that happens. I finished my first client under the Like A Fire Media brand. The client is an awesome photographer here in the Birmingham area named Jason Wallis. He really has a gift when it comes to telling a story one snapshot at a time. Anyway, he has a great site set up by the guys from Matchstic, but he wanted something more for blogging than blogger could offer. So I set him up with a new blog with lots of SEO and a much friendlier UI. I recommend killing several hours looking at his site. There are galleries and slideshows and even some great music.

I have had a lot of help starting what I do. Many of the churches I have worked for have helped me develop the skills I am using (don’t worry they had plenty of benefit from those skills), but most of all I can credit a guy named Erik Hersman aka “the White African.” He single handedly challenged and taught me so much about what was possible with the web. Thanks buddy.