I grew up in church, people. I grew up non-denominational, foursquare, and Pentecostal Holiness. Oh God, Pentecostal Holiness was torture. We couldn’t wear makeup, wear jeans, watch the smurfs, we had to boycott Disney because they hired homosexuals, we boycotted Proctor and Gamble products at one time, if you went down the beer aisle in the metropolitan city you were going to hell, if you didn’t vote against the liquor by the drink you were going to hell, if you weren’t a Republican you were going to hell, etc etc etc. There were so many things I was programmed with as a child.
I get very confused with the topics we bring up. Like this one, we hear this topic come up every doubt night: alcohol. Obviously, alcohol is something that, if you were raised in a traditional church culture, you were told to avoid. But why? Is alcohol, in and of itself, bad? No. Is marijuana, in and of itself, sin? No. it is what we do with these things that make it sin. So, the question we tend to focus on from there is “Can I have a beer with my meal and still be a Christ follower?” or “Can I drink and still go to heaven?” Honestly, I think we have this fixation as college aged adults, that we want to drink, we want to do these things like alcohol and late night romance because it’s almost like a rite of passage for some of us or something we can do now because we are of age.
I was talking to Pastor Rick (my boss) about this topic and he cracked me up. He said this: “This is not a new struggle! My generation dealt with this and the relative issues, too!” Ya know, when I think about it, Rick grew up in the sixties during the sexual revolution. Premarital sex and homosexual preferences were the normal for college (most, anyway) conversations. Now, granted, Janet Jackson’s boob didn’t fall out on network TV back in the sixties, but Lennon and Yoko did pose nude on their album…the Beatle extraordinaire himself. These thoughts of “what’s accepted” aren’t something that only we have to deal with…most folks who have lived through their twenties have had to deal with this.
Which makes me ask the question: what is the motivation for our questions? I think we get caught up in the “what can I do” and “what can I not do” that we end up forming theories and philosophies that end up no where. I mean, honestly, if the consumption of alcohol was a good thing for everyone, they would allow children to but it, right?
I love what Allen Griffen said a couple weeks ago. I heard him the FACS chapel during the week and he was talking about being trusted. He was mainly talking about romantic relationships and how no one should be trusted with a romantic relationship until they turned 18. It was so funny. He was like: “Our government doesn’t even trust you to get behind the wheel of a car until you’re 16…and then we don’t trust you to drive at night until you’ve driven for so long in the daytime! We don’t trust you to vote until you become 18! We don’t trust you to purchase tobacco, which most adults have now understood to be extremely harmful to your health, until you’re 18! And even then, we tell you this will kill you. We don’t trust you to work and make money until you are 16, and we don’t trust you to spend that money on alcohol until you are 21!”
See, these questions we ask “what can I do…”; these are very immature questions! It’s funny to me, sometimes. I see someone turn 21, and I did it, I wanted to go buy a beer, a drink at a restaurant. Because NOW I FINALLY CAN. That was my motivation.
I can’t answer what your motivation is behind these questions, but the UNDO button comes in to play when you start maturing. When you start exploring your faith for yourself, you have to re-do the UNDO.
Like the UNDO button on the computer, I have found myself hearing things from church culture and implementing them, and then coming around and “undoing” it because I find Christ’s actual teachings are, according to my mood, better or worse.
