This reminds me of growing up in the heavy metal era of the 80′s when we were having album bonfires. The mindset was that these bands were causing kids to take drugs or rebel against their parents. Take away the bad influence of rock n roll and everything would be okey-dokey. It didn’t work.

I remember having parents come to me as a youth pastor and asking me to convince their child to quit listening to Guns-N-Roses or some other band. My response was simply that God wants our hearts and taking music away isn’t going change your child’s heart, it might only harden it. However, when Jesus gets ahold of someone’s heart, their whole life begins to transform. I don’t think we can blame Guns-N-Roses for our kids rebellion, but Jimmy Eat World…maybe.

Question #7 was: How are people protected from false teaching, unhealthy influences, societal pressures, etc.?

I just stared at the question for a long time. How in the heck would I do that? (Which was something similar to my final answer) I can’t even do that for my kids, much less an entire community of believers. But that seems to be a mindset that people bring into church (leading=protection) and yes, John, I think it comes out of fear. We’ve seen people make really bad choices (and that is one of the most difficult realities of being a pastor); therefore, we want to shelter them from “things” that will cause the bad choices. Problem is…that is bad theology. Look no farther than our own hearts for the cause of our bad choices.

The goal of our teaching should be to help people to see the reality of their hearts condition, and teaching them to interact with our culture while following Jesus.