Youth Culture Today with Walt Mueller

Parents, today I want to encourage you to step back and take stock of the preaching ministry at your church. You see, we are living in a day and age when the cultural agenda is shaping the content of many sermons, when it should be the Word of God faithfully interpreted and preached that should be shaping our response to the culture. In his excellent book, “Faithful Leaders and the Things That Mat...

Today, I want to mention a youth culture trend that is not only shaping the lives of children and teens, but adults as well. Specifically, I’ve seen this trend take root and grow among many who lead and guide kids, and who should know better. I’m talking about youth pastors. Just as our kids are pushed to promote themselves and pursue fame and a following through social media, the same pressure pu...

If you’ve got kids who play youth sports, and that’s true for the majority of parents these days, I want to share with you some words from Linda Flanagan in her excellent book, “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports, and Why It Matters.” Flanagan writes, “Travis Dorsch heads a team at Utah State University that looks at how spending on sports affects families. His resear...

In recent months, we are hearing more and more stories of detransitioners who are renouncing and speaking out about their prior self-identification of being transgender. Research in the journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior, reports on interviews with seventy-eight individuals from the United States, ages eighteen to thirty-three who had stopped identifying as transgender at least six months prior...

David Adamovich is regarded as the worlds greatest knife thrower. He’s known as the “Great Throwdini,” and in his performances, he works with a “target girl’ who gets strapped to a spinning wheel. Adamovich then works to carefully throw his sharp and sparkling knives close to her head and body without hitting her. As I watched Adamovich do his thing, I wondered what was going through the head of h...

When Jesus told his followers the parable of the Good Samaritan, he wanted his listeners to know that if they had embraced their purpose in life to follow him, they would then view anyone in need as a neighbor. They would follow in the footsteps of the Samaritan who gave everything in response to the wounded man’s need. Those who are followers of Christ are called to self-sacrificing lives of comp...

When I was in elementary school, I remember pulling a stool up to the medicine cabinet in my grandparent’s bathroom in order to grab my grandfather’s old spice decanter, from which I would splash on a healthy dose of the cologne. Of course, I never got away with it due to everyone smelling the evidence of what I had done. In today’s world, Old Spice and other cheaper cologne brands like it are now...

It’s no secret that the arrival of the internet, the smartphone, and social media have made pornography easily accessible to all kids. Perhaps you’ve already seen and heard the evidence about the addictive nature of visual pornography, among both our boys and our girls. The folks at defendyoungminds.com are now sounding the warning about the proliferation of pornographic literature among our teena...

Recently, my wife and I were having a conversation with a couple of single young women who were lamenting the fact that they were not yet married. We certainly didn’t want to discourage them, but we also didn’t want to encourage the cultural notion that in order to be happy and fulfilled, one must be married. We also didn’t want to encourage any false ideas that suggest that once you are married,...

Parents, as you help your kids learn how to steward their God-given bodies to His glory by maintaining their health, you need to keep in mind some new research findings from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia regarding our kids and high blood pressure. Hypertension is a health issue here in the U.S., and you might surprised to learn that it’s not just a problem for adults. One in seven kids ages...

Today we conclude this week’s look at strategies for engaging the soul of today’s youth culture. The strategy we need to address is one that is difficult, simply because it’s employed in times of deep family pain and hurt. It’s our need to respond redemptively to our kids’ sin, failures, and mistakes. All teens – like us – face temptation. And all teens – like us – will make dangerous and sinful c...

This week we’re looking at strategies for engaging the soul of today’s youth culture. One important strategy is to respond preventively to the negative cultural forces your kids face. As the parent of four children, I knew enough about young kids to know that they might wander into the street, talk to strangers, or reach for hot objects. As a result, I did my best to help them learn not to. Likewi...

This week we’re looking at strategies for engaging the soul of today’s youth culture. Make an intentional effort to look for and seize opportunities to speak biblical truth into their lives in response to the realities that exist. In effect, you are preaching the truths of the Gospel to your kids. Looking in the soup of youth culture will reveal the realities that exist. Spending time with Jesus i...

This week we’re looking at strategies for engaging the soul of today’s youth culture. To begin, we must continually work to know how the culture is changing. One theologian once said that “every Christian should start their day with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” This is great advice. Look at the changing soup of youth culture by listening to what they listen to, reading what...

Culture is what we believe, what we do and how we live our lives from day to day. It binds us to those who think and live in similar manner. It’s the values, attitudes and behaviors that drive how we live our lives. I’ve always found it helpful to view youth culture as the soup our kids swim in everyday. Consequently, if we want to engage students for the sake of the gospel, we’d better take the t...

Today, I want to take a minute to offer some encouragement to parents who are enduring difficult times with their kids. If you’re currently struggling as a parent, you are not alone. All of us are broken people raising broken kids. But there’s another way in which you are not alone. The Psalmist reminds us in Psalm fifty-five of God’s never-ending presence and faithfulness, even when it seems like...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the demands made by those who embrace the transgender ideology are everywhere.  Front and center over the last couple of years is the controversy surrounding whether or not biological men should be allowed to participate in girls and women’s sports if they choose to identify as transgender. What the conversation needs from parents is a clear commitment to te...

One of the questions I’ve been asked by parents most often over the last few years is this: How old should my child be before I get them a smartphone? Of course, most kids are pressuring their parents, playing into the guilt of raising kids who they fear will be left out of what everyone else is doing. But we need to push that pressure aside in order to make wise and Godly decisions that are not b...

Many of the new words that have entered into our English vocabulary in recent years are words that have come into existence thanks to the advent and growth of social media and technology. One of those words that has been sparked by a new trend, is sadfishing. Sadfishing is a growing trend among teenagers that offers insights into some of the pressures and mental health issues facing our kids. Sadf...

In his book “Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age”, Samuel D. James describes how our liturgies, or the repeated habits we have developed in the way use technology, have served to deform us in five specific ways. First, our time online in digital environments fosters a kind of inauthenticity as we center on ourselves. Second, our growing amount of online time fuels ou...

One starting point in the process of leading our teenagers to faith and spiritual maturity is to face the truth about who teenagers are and the uniqueness of their life stage. We must constantly seek answers to these questions: What is their world like? What makes them tick? What changes are they experiencing? What questions are they asking? Why do they think and act the way they do? And while we...

As I’ve gotten older, it’s become more and more clear to me that my grandkids are growing up in a world that’s markedly different than the one I grew up in. Recently, I was looking back at some YouTube videos of talk shows and news broadcasts from the 1960s. I had forgotten just how common smoking cigarettes while on camera actually was. Then as the health risks became known, a Surgeon General’s w...

Have you heard about Abigail Shrier’s new book, “Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up”? In the book, Shrier helps us to understand parenting approaches and habits we’ve adopted in recent years which are believed to produce happy, healthy and well-adjusted kids. As Christian parents, we should desire first and foremost to raise kids who launch into adulthood with the overarching goal of livi...

A few years ago, we began to take notice of all the ads for Botox that were running on television. Botox promised to remedy our dissatisfaction with the wrinkles and creases we were increasingly seeing as we looked in the mirror. Stopping the aging process has become a cultural obsession, which reveals the deeper theological reality that none of us like the march we’re on through aging and to deat...

There’s an old familiar song from composer George Gershwin that might serve to motivate you to take some action related to social media and smartphones if you’re heading out with your family for vacation in the coming weeks. The song is called “Summertime” and it was written ninety years ago for the opera “Porgy and Bess.” There’s one line from “Summertime” that starts echoing in my head every yea...