A New Discovery: GodTube

I was skeptical. I am still.

This week I glimpsed the title of an article on The Christian Post which had the words "GodTube" in it. Since I currently have The Christian Post as my homepage, I saw the article's title several times this week on my way going to other sites. One evening I finally stopped long enough to click on the title, and by doing so learned that GodTube which came into existence last year is the Christian answer to YouTube.

I admit that I love YouTube because it offers much to me who loves history, culture, art, music, and other cute curiosities such as videos of babies' reactions to eating their first lemon. Like I have said in an earlier post, I define myself as a "primitive" Christian, one who believes that the church in America needs to go back to its' roots and follow Christ's teaching of love, sacrifice, and pacifism. Elements in American Christianity need to see God as One who not only loves but Who also reserves the sole right to judge and to punish.

Too much of American Christianity is ruled by greed and ignorance of God and His Word The Bible. There are some preachers who meddle and dabble too much in politics. This has particularly been the case with the Bush administration where preachers like John Hagee has espoused pre-emptive strikes against Iran even though the country is mired in two wars. Many preachers, especially many African-American preachers have poor theological training and just preach God's Word according to how black preachers have traditionally gotten into their pulpits and spoken or shouted for generations. Others are slick con men and women. The problems in the end are not an issue of color because misinformation and deception are flowing from preachers of varying colors and of both genders. Church has become a business in America.

So often I do not find in American Christianity what I know The Bible and God is about. We do not have the humbleness or knowledge of the early church. It is very disturbing to see so much mediocrity and ignorance.

So what about GodTube? I cannot say very much right now. You watch and decide. The little that I have watched proves that Chris Wyatt, the CEO of GodTube and its' creator has offered nothing really creatively unique. Wyatt has admitted that he wanted to create a family friendly or sanitized version of YouTube. The idea in portions of the Christian community in America is that in order to draw more people to Christianity, the church should get ideas from popular culture and mold what it gets into a Christian copy. Often what popular culture itself offers is low in standard, so what the church ends up with is nothing to really inspire or bring a kind of passionate truth to the world.

The church in America is not growing. For all the effort and good intensions of those who create sites and items like GodTube or MyChurch.org, the Christian answer to MySpace.com, the end results are not profound and artistic. Where are the spices to jazz up the bland fare we get? Where are the Christian scholars, especially in the Protestant evangelical church here?

It may be too early to come to final negative critique of GodTube since it is young and hopefully evolving. For those who feel like me, lets hope it evolves into something as beautiful and innovative as pre-Renaissance and Renaissance Christian art. I own some Greek icons which I purchased when I visited the Greek island of Rhodes in 2003, so lets hope they can arrive at the level of primitive beauty and creativity of an icon at least.

Where are the artists and Christian intellectuals in America? We truly need them.

Here is GodTube's answer to Desperate Housewives called Desperate Housewives of The Bible. I did find it quite funny, but in the end still rather bland fare.

Unchurched Americans

On Tuesday I discovered The Christian Post newspaper online. I was totally unfamiliar with it until then. Then yesterday I ran across the article "How Do Unchurched Americans View Christianity?. The article immediately got me thinking about my dad who is unchurched and Biblically illiterate. He spends hours and hours watching TV preachers who preach prosperity in many cases. Dad is anti-social, and believes that you don't have to go to church or read the Bible to be a Christian. He can relate to a Christianity that is pseudo-psychology, but he cannot deal with a faith which speaks about loving God, the importance of the Cross, loving people, sacrifice, and suffering. So I do not know about my dad... Mom and I have prayed and prayed, but he has chosen to stagnant in his walk towards Christianity. Ignorance, like many things, is a choice.

The article mentioned I above begins:

In a portrait of the "unchurched" in America, a new study found that most are willing to hear what people have to say about Christianity but a majority also sees the church as a place full of hypocrites.

"A full 72 percent of the people interviewed said they think the church ‘is full of hypocrites,’" said LifeWay Research director Ed Stetzer. "At the... Read the rest here.

Not only is there the crisis of the unchurched in America, but there is the Biblically illiterate. They are not only those who do not set foot in the church, but many who enter the church doors regularly, including some of the ministers, who are also not fully versed in The Bible. This is a crisis that all knowing Christians need to be aware of and try to remedy.