Change is good ???!?!?!?!?

Well, that's it. I'm old! I don't mean chronologically (though 30 is only a few weeks away), I mean that I have finally reached that point where I want things to stop changing. Specifically the folks at Warner Brothers need to leave the Looney Toons alone! If you want edgy, fine. Do another Batman cartoon, don't go messing around with Bugs Bunny. The Looney Tunes crew should never be crime-fighters for more then one laugh laden short (um, forgot you don't know what a short is, it's a cartoon that lasts about five minutes instead of half an hour...trust me, it is good stuff!). Daffy Duck as an incompetent Superman wannabe, it was so funny thinking about it makes me laugh out loud! Mostly, though, it is the change that I fear. Yes fear. What if the new cartoon is better then the old? What if they never play the classics again? After all you can no longer watch them on ABC on Saturdays, you have to go to the Cartoon Network. Or worse, what if it is so bad that all anyone ever remembers of my beloved cartoons is what they were forced to be in 2005 just to accommodate some executive's idea of the future and no one even wants to hear about the glory of the past! No, I just won't risk it.

Change is scary, in our favorite entertainment and in our youth ministry. Do we avoid inviting friends, unsaved lost friends, because we are afraid of the reaction they will have to us? That the church will have to them? Do we hide behind our comfort levels in the Youth Room content in our place while we watch in fear others who may join. Hoping that they do not enter our special place? What can we do to reachout to those around us? Do we have to lose what is good about us to bring in a sense of the new?

Only time will tell us if Warner Brothers has made the right choice (in the mean time the DVD boxed set of originally Looney Tunes makes a great birthday gift to new thirty year olds...trust me ;D ). Their risk will either flop or be the next big money maker for the network. What would happen if our Youth Ministry took a risk like the WB? Could you lead it? Would we dare?

But it's on network TV!

Last week I was watching one of the seemingly unending stream of Law and Order spin-offs when the plot suddenly hit me. The main characters of Law and Order SVU were lamenting the violence in a video game that a bad guy was using as the basis for his crimes (the game was clearly intended to look like Grand Theft Auto). Now if the shock there did not hit you it may be because you are not a fan of the show, but the graphic violence portrayed on the TV show often is more, well, graphic then the game's violence (the one in the show) that they were speaking against. In that moment I saw myself, and probably millions of others, thinking that violent games are bad while receiving that message from a violent show. So all of this got me thinking. When I was a child the worst show on TV was The Dukes of Hazzard (they disobeyed the law and disrespected authority) and the worst game was Pac-Man (he ate PILLS, someone might try to copy that). The world has become less innocent today as network TV involves graphic violence and near nudity and video games offer the same thing. So all of this leads me to some questions.

Does the media (TV, Games, and such) affect us? Can we have those images poured into our heads without there being an effect? How much time do you spend in TV and games like this? What do you think the Bible says about this? How about your friends?