Pastor B Culture, Students, Uncategorized

The Hunger Games, God, and Teenagers

Guest post: The Hunger Games, God, and Teenagers

Editor’s note: We asked several of our regular Resource Book writers to share their thoughts on this weekend’s release of “The Hunger Games.” This post is by Joshua R. Ziefle at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington

This weekend marks the long-awaited premiere of The Hunger Games, the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling young adult novel of the same name. The book, its sequels, and forthcoming movie adaptation(s) have followed in the footsteps of both Harry Potter and Twilight as literary juggernauts and likely box-office blockbusters.

Having painfully struggled through the Twilight series (books and movies), I can honestly say that The Hunger Games is a superior piece of young adult fiction and, based on the movie trailer, looks to be a much more engaging film. Gone are the days of watching Bella Swan stared longingly at a wall. In the place of the turgid Twilight films the drama—and yes, violence—of The Hunger Games has the potential to draw in both males and females by the droves.

The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian North American continent at some unknown point in the future. The world as we know it is gone, replaced by the land of Panem and consisting of 12 “districts” that labor mostly in poverty in order to serve the needs of the central “Capitol.” These sending districts rebelled at some point in the past, but were brutally repressed by their overlords. In an effort to remind them of their subjugated state and keep them in line, the Capitol (a decadent, media-obsessed city) decrees that each year two teenagers (male and female) be chosen at random from each of the districts and forced to fight to the death while the whole of Panem watches on television. The lone survivor is declared the winner and gets to retire in comfort. The rest of the districts mourn their losses and move on.

The hero of The Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, a teenage girl who volunteers for the games after her 12 year old sister is chosen in the lottery. Her emotional journey through the novel–and the Hunger Games themselves–make for compelling reading and offer some clear points of identification for our students.

Katniss and each of the teenagers selected as “Tributes” reveal the adolescent sense of insecurity in all its immediacy. For many teenagers high school really can feel like a battle to the death. Yet in the face of this struggle many adults—just like Katniss’s upbeat and empty handler Effie Trinket—simply pat them on the head and send them on their way. The adult population of The Hunger Games is also sadly suggestive of today’s reality, for nearly all of the book’s grownups are absent, inaccessible, or failed human beings. Katniss’s father is dead, and appears only in flashback. Her mother is a shell of a woman that has little impact on her life. Effie, her advisor from the Capitol, is profoundly superficial and oblivious to the world around her. Her coach, Haymitch Abernathy, is an alcoholic veteran of the Games who very often treats her poorly. In the wake of these retrograde examples of adulthood, Katniss the adolescent is often forced to make her own way and create a world divorced from the adults around her…much like many of our youth.

Concerning adults and adolescents, what does it mean that the solution to the adult problems of Panem involves forcing their children to fight? Just as adolescents today are often (sadly) pawns in the machinations of adults, so too Katniss is in many ways not her own. Her fight in the arena, as much as it is to survive, is also to “stick it to the man” who has been trying to co-opt her agency as a human being.

The Hunger Games is therefore a coming-of-age story that simultaneously inverts the whole idea. As a teenage girl whose father died in a coal mining accident and whose mother slipped into a debilitating depression not long after, Katniss was forced to grow up on her own years before the Games. This is similar to the plight many teens face today. By the time their societally-sanctioned rites of passage arrive, they have already grown up much more than we know.

Though Suzanne Collin’s books operate in a relative religious vacuum (God is never mentioned), the themes and ideas contained within are deeply theological and worthy of probing with our students. Take, for instance, the situation of the degenerate leaders of this failed society. Time and again, Collins describes the Capitol as an image-obsessed and vapid society whose desire for artifice, style, and image knows no bounds. There is a persistent sense in the midst of this decadent city that citizens are even beginning to deface even the image of God in their persons…perhaps a final sign of how truly lost they are.

More immediate is the present of death. The Games are violent. They are graphic. People die. They die not because they have to, but because they are forced to. From the Capitol’s point of view, they die in order to keep the population in bondage. They die, then, as a symptom and result of this society of sin. They die not to erase the results of this sin, but to cover it over for a time and patch things together. But just as Cain’s murder of Abel caused the very ground to cry out at the injustice of it all (Gen. 4), so too this adolescent blood points towards a reckoning. There are many opportunities here for enterprising youth workers to use the film as entree to deep conversations about God’s call on our lives in the midst of a world of war, peace, violence, and a society that cares very little for “the least of these” (Matt. 25).

There are plenty of additional opportunities for theological reflection and youth ministry application in The Hunger Games. Indeed, I strongly encourage youth ministers to take advantage of this “low hanging fruit” (as a friend calls it) that our culture has made available. Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not use the lingua franca already available to the teens under our care? One youth pastor I know has adapted their group’s 30 Hour Famine this year with a strong Hunger Games theme. I made the book assigned reading for my “Foundations of Youth Ministry” course this past Fall. Another ministry colleague has reminded me that the main theme of The Hunger Games—being forced to maintain yourself and your vales in the midst of heavy societal pressure to do otherwise—has deep ties to the ideas in the book of Daniel. This sounds like the beginning of a wonderful teaching series to me! Like the ancient prophet, Katniss Everdeen presents a helpful model of “third-way” resistance in the face of oppression: neither 1) violent resistance nor 2) capitulation but rather 3) a different and more measured stand that silently and slowly subverted the whole system.

Whether you are a Hunger Games fan or not (and I think you should be), you owe it to your students to understand the culture in which they are located. By all indications, it is the Hunger Games’ world now; we’re just living in it. More immediate than Harry Potter and more broadly engaging the Twilight, The Hunger Games has the potential to be a cultural touchstone for students who feel disenfranchised, powerless, fragmented, abandoned, and alone. In the midst of that world, we who are called to share good news have been given yet another way to speak a message of life and love to those students under our care.

Pastor B Culture, Uncategorized

Are You 21st Century Servant Leadership Literate? | Developing 21st Century Glocal Servant Leadership

Are You 21st Century Servant Leadership Literate? | Developing 21st Century Glocal Servant Leadership.

Are You 21st Century Servant Leadership Literate?

Posted on February 23, 2011 by LaMar Herndon

Bruce Nixon, in a 2004 article entitled “Creating a Cultural Revolution in Your Workplace to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century” defined the situation we are at the beginning of the 21st century by saying:

We are in the midst of a transformation than can only compare with the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. We call it globalization. It affects every aspect of our lives – social, political, cultural, spiritual, and ecological. It is transforming institutions of every kind including community, family, and our individual lifestyles. It is the century we are going to need “servant leaders”, more than ever before (p.1).

Ronald Claiborne in a 2010 article “Benefits of practicing servant leadership” quotes Karakas (2007) as saying”

“Leadership in the 21st century must deal with problems of global uncertainty, chaos, innovation, change, dynamism, flux, speed, interconnectedness, and complexity therefore, the benefits of practicing servant leadership becomes a critical success factor in any business.”

Karakas goes on to state in Claiborne’s article that “All leaders in the 21st century need to be social artists, spiritual visionaries, and cultural innovators” (p.1).

It is insightful that Jeff Iorg, in his book “The Character of Leadership, states in describing servant leadership, “Servant leadership is, in its essence, an attitude. Servant leadership is defined more by who you are than by what you do” (p.117), and yet our talk must match walk in order to be a true servant leader. How is this essence and attitude lived out for the world to see.

Who hasn’t been watching the nation of Egypt in the world news over the past weeks/months as we have seen the resignation of President Mubarak, and the call for a more democratic nation? In an article by Saba Mahmood, in the Jadaliyya, entitled “The Architects of the Egyptian Uprising and the Challenges Ahead”, one of the leading architects of change is listed as Hossam Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger and consummate ethnographer of the Egyptian street” (p.2). The other leader to gain worldwide attention during Egypt’s pro-democracy uprising, as reported in IslamiCity, The woman behind Egypt’s revolution” is twenty-six year old Asmaa Mahfouz, who graduated in 2008 from the business school of the American University of Cairo (p.1).

Servant leadership takes many forms, some outside corporate boardroom and office. Whether it is being a servant leader attempting to usher in change in a nation, or whether it is being a servant leader in our particular vocation, as a fellow human being, becoming a servant leader is a process that happens over a lifetime. It involves for many of us becoming a work in process as we continue to read, study, and slowly implement change into our lives, developing that servant leadership perspective.

Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, makes this thought provoking statement:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” (Starke, Christ-Based Leadership, 2005, p.11)

Dr. Bruce Winston, Dean of the School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship  program at Regent University, has noted in his book (Be A Leader for God’s Sake , 2002), the following observations relative to servant leadership:

Employees and followers want leaders who are honest, open, and who keep the   organization moving in a positive direction during both calm and stormy seas.       Employees and followers want leaders who are “others-centered.” Employees and followers want leaders who can bring out the best qualities in them. Beyond   this, leaders must also love all the organization’s stakeholders from customers, vendors, regulators, shareholders, members, as well as contributors (p.9).

In his book, Dr. Winston refers to Max DePree’s book Leadership Jazz, and shares an excerpt from his book, providing a wonderful and colorful description of the employer/employee exchanges that happen in servant leadership:

A Jazz band is an expression of servant leadership. The leader of a jazz band has the beautiful opportunity to draw the best out of the other musicians. We have much to learn from jazz-band leaders. For jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictability of the future with the gifts of individuals (p.10).

Kouzes and Posner (The Truth About Leadership, 2010), in their chapter Leadership is an Affair of the Heart, state, “Exemplary leaders interact in ways that make others feel more confident and capable, elevating people to a higher plane,” which is what servant leadership is all about. They quote Gary Strack, former CEO of a regional health care system in Florida, who states that the purpose of leadership is to create a legacy and not a legend, going on to say:

I constantly remind myself that my name is not on the organization. I think all          leaders, including myself, need to be reminded of that and that we are just in our       positions as stewards of our people and organizations which have been entrusted to us (p.139).

So how can we evaluate our leadership style and determine if we are servant leaders putting others needs ahead of ours, being good stewards of our followers and our resources? Calvin Miller (The Empowered Leader: 10 Keys to Servant Leadership, 1995) provides Five Evidences of Power Abuse:

  • Giving up those disciplines, we still demand of underlings.
  • Believing that others owe us whatever use we can make of them.
  • Trying to fix things up rather than make things right.
  • Closing our minds to every suggestion that we ourselves could be out of line.
  • Believing that people in our way are expendable.

In The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and Communities, R. Scott Rodin (2010) quotes leadership expert Max DePree’s saying, “The first responsibility of the leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the leader is a servant.” In his book, he relates the story told by Robert Greenleaf about a king who asked Confucius what to do about the large number of thieves in his country. Confucius replied, “If you, sir, were not covetous, although you should reward them to do it, they would not steal.” Greenleaf goes on to say:

This advice places an enormous burden on those who are favored by the rules, and it established how old in the notion that the servant views any problem in the world as in here, inside himself, and not out there. And, if a flaw in the world is to be remedied, to the servant the process of change starts in here, in the servant, and not out there (pp. 17-18).

Perhaps we would be wise to remember this quote from Robert Greenleaf found in The International Journal of Servant-Leadership:

The true test of a servant leader is this: Do those around the servant-leader become wiser, freer, more autonomous, healthier, and better able themselves to become servants? Will the least privileged of society be benefited or at least not further deprived? (2007, opening page in book).

Dr. Corné Bekker, associate professor for the School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship, Regent University, in his paper Prophet and Servant: Locating Robert K. Greenleaf’s Counter-Spirituality of Servant Leadership, (2010), states that for Greenleaf, servant leaders are characterized by:

  • Being visionaries
  • Having high ethical standards
  • Doing things with excellence
  • Being persuasive
  • Rational thinking
  • Being prophetic [futuristic] imaginative
  • Ordinariness
  • Comfortable with paradox
  • Being a good listener
  • Accomplishing transformative actions

Dr. Bekker, noting that Greenleaf himself was a religious man, and described servant leaders leading as prophets by (a) healing, (b) persuading, (c) creating systems of thinking, (d) opening alternative avenues for work, (e) serving, (f) inspiring, (g) facilitating individual and societal transformation, (h) empowering followers, (i) uniting leaders and followers, (j) building bridges between organizations and communities, and (k) by ushering in a new era of servant leadership. The intended outcome of these prophetic servant leaders is to re-imagine and reshape the social domain of leaders and organizations (p.10).

I would refer you to pages 11-12; table two in Dr. Bekker’s paper, for additional descriptions of the nature and functions of a servant leader as prophet by Greenleaf.

Dr. Bekker’s paper and concluding thoughts are extremely appropriate here at the close of this paper. Referring to Greenleaf, he states that Greenleaf’s servant leader is a person who “Seeks to bridge the two opposing worlds of self-interested commerce and the altruistic philosophies of public service and social transformation. Greenleaf proposed that the leader is a prophet that facilitates the formation of a new vision that unites and transforms (both individually and societal). He imagined a world marked by service, equality, unity, and new possibilities of radical altruism (p.12).

Blackaby and Blackaby (2006), remind us servant leaders:

  • Delegate
  • Give people freedom to fail
  • Recognize the success of others
  • Give encouragement and support (Spiritual Leadership, pp.110-111).

Lee Strobel, a former award-winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune, noted in a section in his book What Would Jesus Say: to Mother Teresa, an observation by Warren Wiersbe from his book On Being a Servant of God, the distinction between servants who are manufacturers, and those who are distributors, noting:

Some people manufacture there compassion for the needy out of whatever is         motivating them. For instance, maybe they’re feeling guilty over their own influence. Perhaps they pity the poor or altruistically sense they should give something back to the world. Maybe they have a neurotic drive to put the needs of others before their own in order to make themselves feel worthwhile. Whatever the source, they have to create their compassion and, sooner or later, it’s probably going to run out.

However, Mother Teresa isn’t primarily a manufacturer but a distributor, as she      empties herself serving others (1994, pp.64-65).

Jeff Iorg, in his book The Characteristic of Leadership: Nine Qualities that Define Great Leaders, says, “Leaders should sacrifice themselves, care for people, and be personally involved with their followers” (p.116). He addresses the issues of motives, a good way to self examine ourselves to see if we indeed are leading from a servant leaders heart by providing some choices we can make to make sure we are on track:

  • Choose to do a dirty job – like cleaning toilets, changing diapers, and do it without any fanfare or expectation of appreciation.
  • Choose to serve anonymously – doing this without recognition or reward helps to purify motives.
  • Choose to serve secretly – do something for someone else, but do not reveal your personal involvement, let it remain anonymous.
  • Choose to serve an enemy – help them personally and quietly in their time of need.
  • Choose to make someone else successful – remember “it is not all about you” and assisting someone else with their accomplishments, helping them succeed is a great way to purify your motives (pp.131-136).

Whether you believe Jesus at best was just a good man who lived and died on planet earth some 2000 years ago, read the story found in the Bible’s Gospel of John 13.1-17. It is the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. This is what being a servant leader is about. Would any of us as an organizational leader be humble enough to wash someone’s feet if that is what it would take to make him or her committed followers? Who among us is the next Mother Teresa?

References

Bekker, C. J. (2010). Prophet and Servant: Locating Robert K. Greenleaf’s Counter-        Spirituality of Servant Leadership. Retrieved February 19, 2011 from             http:www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/jvl/Vol1/Bekker_Corne_Final.pdf

Blackaby, H. T., & Blackaby, R. (2006). Spiritual Leadership. Nashville, TN: B & H.

Claiborne, R. (2010). Benefits of practicing servant leadership. Helium, Inc. Retrieved      February 11, 2011, from http://www.helium.com/items/1879687-benefits-of-            practicing-servant-…

Iorg, J. (2007). The Character of Leadership: Nine Qualities that Define Great Leaders. Nashville, TN: B & H.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2010). The Truth About Leadership. San Francisco, CA:   JOSSEY-BASS.

Mahmood, S. (2011). The Architects of the Egyptian Uprising and the Challenges             Ahead. Jadaliyya. Retrieved February 21, 2011, from     http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/645/the-architects-of-the-egypti…

Miller, C. (1995). The Empowered Leader: 10 Keys to Servant Leadership. Nashville,       TN: B & H.

Rodin, R. S. (2010). The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and

Communities. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.

Spears, L. (ed.). (2007). The International Journal of Servant-Leadership. Vol. 3.    Gonzaga University.

Stark, D. (2005). Christ-Based Leadership. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House.

Strobel, L. (1994). What Would Jesus Say. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The woman behind Egypt’s revolution. (2011). IslamiCity Articles. Retrieved February      21, 2011, from http://www.islamiccity.com/articles/printarticles.asp?ref=CC1102-      450…

Winston, B. (2002). Be A Leader for God’s Sake. Virginia Beach, VA: School of     Leadership Studies. Regent University.

This entry was posted in Video’s Relative to Our Personal Philosophy of Ministry/Church. Bookmark the permalink.
Pastor B My Life

JOY!

God is amazing!  I cannot deny His power and timing in every situation.  As a Father of two little ones, I know that I have a huge responsibility to present Christ to the family and clearly share what it means to follow Jesus.  I also must say that Kids Kare on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Wednesday nights, and Sundays (usually all day for us Pastor types and the kids) does an amazing job clearly explaining Jesus on a child level as well.  In saying that, Laura and I have been praying for Kaitlyn, who is now five and Noah, who is now three to hear the gospel clearly and respond correctly.  My prayers for a while over the kids and our household were based out of the truth in the book of Joshua.

Joshua 24:14-15

14 “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.15 But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

Our family is choosing to serve THE LORD and as for me and my house we will SERVE THE LORD!  With this in mind, we have been in discussion with Kaitlyn about what Jesus did and why He died for us.  She even had times where she brought up topics about the cross and sin to both of us separately.  The soil had been cultivated by many.  From intentionality in the family to the love at Oakwood, Kaitlyn was ready for the asking.  After many discussions, prayers, tears, and thoughts, Laura decided to tell Kaitlyn to think about asking Jesus in to her heart during the day at school.  Laura’s desire was for Kaitlyn to know and sense the still small voice of God drawing her.

Thursday, March 8, marks the evening Kaitlyn talked to both of us about wanting to ask Jesus in her heart.  We let her voice a prayer in her own words and also guided her to pray.  The night filled me with JOY!  With so much of life and the hectic movement of it, my life paused and we celebrated the JOY of little Kaitlyn giving her heart to Jesus!