Children’s Ministry and Culture

I was so excited when Ukraine achieved a unique identity through it’s “Orange” revolution a few years ago and today, when Kosovo declared itself independent I was equally thrilled. These are two countries where more than 10 years ago my team at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association held Children’s Evangelistic Rallies (CER’s) and distributed gifts brought over on huge Antonov 320 Cargo planes (the largest in the world) loaded by Samaritan’s Purse (over 500,000 gifts in Kosovo alone).

I pictured those young people as some of the recipients of those boxes and the messages they contained that Jesus could indeed be their forever friend. I can only hope.

Then I read today from Anne Applebaum (who wrote the brilliant pulitzer prize winning Gulag: A History) in The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com) about a fantastic new movie Katyn by Andrzej Wajda. It depicts in vivid detail the deaths of 20,000 officers in the Polish Army and Reserves (the best, brightest and future leadership of the country–imagine the emptying of all our Ivy league colleges!) in the Katyn woods. Andrzej said, he wanted to tell the story again for young people—but not just any young people. Wajda said he wanted to reach “those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society, and not just an accidental crowd.”

Christians are not “just an accidental crowd” but part of a society that is defined by Jesus Christ and animated by him. We are a peculiar people and in a sense our patriotism lies beyond what we experience right now. Anne says that patriotism can also lead to the ill effects of identity that excludes even as it includes. Our Christian faith does both. Keep those inside connected in a thing we’ve been asked to call the “church” while at the same time keeping our “borders porous” and open! Messy isn’t it!

There is a though provoking article in today’s issue of the New York Times that may seem like the usual rant about the intellectual decline of Americans. But this is a new take and one with two somewhat differt slants:

Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters. How does this relate to scripture and the knowledge contained in it and the understanding of it that we seek so deeply?

Check out the full article here (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) and see what you think?

Judith Warner blogs about the increasing trend (estimated to be $450 Million Dollars in India alone) of international surrogacy. (http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/)

What I found fascinating was that unlike in France, where commercial surrogacy is banned, or in Italy, where almost every form of assisted reproduction is now illegal, laws in the United States are highly ambivalent on this most drastic use of reproductive technology.

It seems like an issue of economics, where surrogacy costs upwards of $80,000 whereas in India it is less than $10,000!

Well I’m back from a holiday hibernation, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading (Tolstoy, Henry James, etc.) and I came across many articles on Adoption that I thought you might think were interesting.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2005;293:2501-2515) had an article “Behavior Problems and Mental Health REferrals of International Adoptees: A Metanalysis” that highlighted an interesting conclusion. “Children adopted from other countries were LESS likely than domestic (US) adoptees to experience behavioral problems or to be referred for mental-health treatment.”

Then there’s the following in a Chicago newspaper (http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=105391&src=4) that highlights just the opposite in what is a well researched article in that it highlights the rare pitfalls.

What is much more appropriate, however, is not the anecdotes but the facts and the positive approaches to making international adoptions work. Our own International Adoption Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota (www.med.umn.edu/peds/iac/ is a great example of positive and proactive approaches to creating a positive outcome.

In the US 1% of children show signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, but the 2% of children in Italy and 8% in South Africa while high are ignored by their cultures. In South Africa, workers are paid often in wine and in Italy wine and mothers-milk are consumed by children interchangably. This cognitive disorder is examined in good detail, including the diagnostic criteria, in the following Minnesota NPR segment (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/11/28/fasdscience/)

There is a very interesting article today in the New York Times highlighting a rich area of outsourcing: homework!

Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India. (www.tutor.com)

Read the whole article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/business/worldbusiness/31butler.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin)

Now I know where to get help on next Sunday’s Lesson!!!

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

See www.laptop.org where the group One Laptop Per Child…to give the more than 2 billion children a chance at a computer. Well, for two weeks in November O.L.P.C. slightly changed its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Get 1, Give 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

Check out the complete article in today’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin)

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF here http://www.unicef.org/media/media_40855.html) is reporting that new figures show solid progress on child survival, including a decline in the annual number of under-five deaths. Global child deaths have reached a record low, falling below 10 million per year to 9.7 million, down from almost 13 million in 1990.

“This is an historic moment,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “More children are surviving today than ever before. Now we must build on this public health success to push for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.”

Linguists have long understood that the most powerful motivator to learn a language is fear of social isolation. Any other reward or bribe is inadequate. So put some Kindergarten students in a school where only Mandarin is spoken and quicker than you can say “recess” they will be bi-lingual. My eldest son left yesterday for France to study language and I heard this yesterday on our own Minnesota Public Radio.

More Minnesota students are taking Chinese this year. The number of schools offering Chinese language classes has grown to about two dozen, in response to rising demand from parents. This year, two suburban school districts began offering a more intensive Chinese language instruction, with immersion programs in elementary schools.

Listen or read about it here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/09/10/immersion/

Professor Brooks from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs has an excellent essay in today’s Wall Street Journal where he notes the glaring divide between an American’s interest in a candidates religion and Europe’s total neglect of that same interest. While the fact of that divide is not in question, Professor Brooks states that Europe is destined for irrelevance because this belief in religion belies a much more subtle statistic.

“in all likelihood religion will grow as a social force in American culture and politics over the coming decades. The reason: A secular nation needs secular citizens. And nonreligious Americans are outstandingly weak when it comes to the most efficacious way to achieve this: by having kids.

If you picked 100 adults out of the population who attended their house of worship nearly every week or more often, they would have 223 children among them, on average, according to the 2006 General Social Survey. Among 100 people who attended less than once per year or never, you would find just 158 kids. This 41% fertility gap between religious and secular people is especially meaningful because people tend to worship more or less like their parents. According to data collected in 1999 by Gallup, 60% of adults who were taken to church at least once per month as children grew up to attend at least this often; only 15% stopped attending as adults.”

great read at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118757440909802546.html?mod=todays_us_opinion for a fee or after August 28 for free here (http://aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.26674/pub_detail.asp)