Children’s Ministry and Culture

Back in the 90s when I was pastoring in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michael Milken was doing time in Pleasanton at a Minimum Security Prison for the Junk Bond scandal that he seemed to have invented. Micheal is an unbelievable force of nature. Sleeping only 3 hours a night he just turned 60 as with most of the Baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964). He has an excellent commentary in today’s Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115862648061466997.html?mod=todays_us_opinion) discussing the fact that the Baby Boomers will in fact NOT retire early.

That’s interesting, because my son just got an application to the University of Southern California where it stated, “get ready to work till your 80 and hold 5 different Career’s!”

Michael Milken’s point number 2 as to why Boomers will indeed NOT grow up! is this:

2. The “BRIC” nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — will continue to grow faster than the U.S. and, with the U.S. and Japan, will become the world’s major economic powers by mid-century. There are 600 million children in China and India whose future buying power will grow at least as fast as their rapidly improving educations. As the BRICs accumulate wealth, they will want to diversify their holdings globally. America stands to benefit as richly from that diversification as it did from European investment in the 19th century.

China and India combined to produce nearly half the world’s economic output in 1820 compared to just 1.8% for the U.S. Our remarkable growth since 1820 has benefited from democratic institutions, a belief in capitalism, private property rights, an entrepreneurial culture, abundant resources, openness to foreign investment, the best universities, immigration and relatively transparent markets.”

Great stuff and check out this graphic: