Purpose Statement

I have been involved in youth ministry in the great states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio (In case you are wondering, i am a Buckeyes fan! Born and raised in O-HI-O!). I have had a lot of extraordinary experiences that have tempted me to walk away from the church altogether and give up on the whole God thing. But I continue to try and work out my faith "with fear and trembling" understanding that God hasn't given up on me just yet. I have been working with teenagers for 17 years now and I am on the verge of my home being taken over by my soon-to-be teens! I have had a lot of experiences at college (Lorain County Community College, University of Toledo, Liberty University and Grand Rapids Theological Seminary http://grts.cornerstone.edu/). Those years were interesting but I don't know if I would ever want to go back to them. And I am not sure I would recommend any of those schools to anyone accept GRTS (especially now with the more "updated" staff that they have. Don't get me wrong, I loved the dinosaurs I had for teachers but I would have loved to learn from those they have added to the staff since then too! Sorry Dr. Houch! R.I.P.). Anyhow, my college experiences should be another blog for another time. I wanted to kind of formulate a general purpose of what it is that I am attempting to do with this blog. As I ease into my mid-life years and I have put in several years in the church, I have been doing a lot of thinking, critiquing and analyzing of myself, the experiences of my past, the modern day church and our great American pop-culture. My purpose here with this blog is to put those thoughts into words. What I am not: anti-American, anti-culture, anti-Christ, anti-church. What i am is a post-conservative Christian, an American who is critical of the nature of where we find ourselves as a country in the 21st century, one who gets very excited to find beauty in culture, and one who hopes to be a part of a major shift in how the church defines itself in the new century. So there it is. I hope to hear from those of you out there whether you agree or disagree with me.