Blogpost-Week 3

A controversial Sunday New York Times article that hit close to home...

Thou Shall Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
By Matt Richtel
Published: October 7, 2007

First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.
The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.
Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.
The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.
Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

(The article spans two pages, so I just gave the lead and a little background information. If you want to read the whole article, it is in my "shared" news in the top right corner.)

The topic of this article may seem a little weird. If you're unfamilar with this new strategy by churches, you may wonder how and why many Protestant churches are encouraging an extremely violent video game as a way of getting more young people to attend church.

And while it's odd, I've actually witnessesed this phenomenon. There was a boy at my high school--the son of a minister--who, instead of asking friends to come to service with him Wednesday night, would ask them to come to a Halo tournament; conveniently held in the Sunday school room of his church.

The Halo method, as twisted as it is, worked. Large groups of boys would go play Halo, and even girls would follow, unsuccessfully attempting to get attention from the massive population of teenage boys. But suddenly everyone was Christian and attending church at least two days per week.

And the hypoChristians began to dominate my school, throwing their judgements left and right. The short Bible lessons they were taught in between Halo games made them intollerant of all other students who did not attend church. It did not matter that they were attending their church for the wrong reasons.

I'm not religious, but I can still see that this situation is corrupt. Churches bribing kids to come with violence? What do you think?

The kicker to the story:

Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.
In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”
“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”