I’m slowly working through my friend Scott’s “Questions to pose to a candidate being asked to serve as an elder in a local church.” Here is his second question:
Tell me about five websites that you regularly visit in an average week. Why do you visit these sites?
Here are the sites that I follow and read with regularity:
The Atlantic
Of the major news publications that I follow, the Atlantic is probably my favorite. And it isn’t just because the senior editor David Frum is a fellow Canadian expat. I find them to be less reactionary than other publications, and they do some really thorough research pieces. If you had a conversation with me for more than 5 minutes between last December and March, I probably brought up this piece from the Atlantic on the “sex recession” among young people. I commend it to anyone who didn’t hear me rant about it before.
Christianity Today
I often joke that half of the people who attend All Souls do so because it is an evangelical church, and the other half attend All Souls precisely because it isn’t an evangelical church. Whatever one means when they use the word “Evangelical”, Christianity Today still has whatever parts of evangelicalism that are worth salvaging. They recruit a wide range of contributors, and think deeply about contemporary issues that Christians face.
Wired
Wired is in many ways a typical a tech blog, with much of its content addressing whatever is new and flashy, but every so often they’ll have articles that help readers consider implications of modern advancements. For me, in an age where our lives and society are increasingly being affected by the technology we have wholesale adopted into our lives without question, a starting point for every tech blog should be asking the question that Ian Malcolm gave us 26 years ago.
Teen Vogue
This is my obligatory youth pastor “keep up with teenage culture” site, but probably not for the reasons you think. Teen Vogue isn’t a way for me to keep up with whatever bands or celebrities are so hot right now. It’s my way to understand what issues are current moral issues for contemporary teenagers. The warnings I heard 15 years ago that our culture is moving towards permissive moral relativity were completely wrong. As I write this, one of the trending storeis on Teen Vogue’s site is about sneakers, but the other two are about Trump’s anti-transgender policies and the history of Black Wall Street and racism. All pastors, but especially youth pastors, have to understand that people are passionate about social justice, and we have to understand which causes people are passionate about and why. Not to embrace them all wholesale (I’d hope that Christians have a unique moral vision to offer society beyond whatever is currently in vogue). But it is important to get that right now the biggest critique of Christianity isn’t that we are too moral. It is that we are both wrongly moral, and not moral enough.
Fuller Youth Institute
The people at Fuller have been doing some of the best research when it comes to faith formation and adolescence. The people there wrote Sticky Faith, dealing with practices that help disciple kids and teenagers. They wrote Growing Young, which was all about how to help churches make space for 15-30 year olds. They wrote another resource, Growing With, (which I have yet to read) which deals with how parents can be involved in the lives of their kids after high school graduation. They wrote one of my favorite youth ministry curricula, Can I Ask That. As far as I am concerned, they are one of the best resources for youth pastors and parents that we have.
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