some current societal "norms" worth questioning indeed...

here's some telling, stirring, chilling & exciting excerpts for you to chew on from a book i'm currently reading...
"The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time." by Tom Sine.
goodness friends, this is a book worth picking up, praying in to & acting on.


"here's the problem for a new generation, [esp. those in their 20s & 30s] in a nutshell:
the double whammy of (1.)massive college debt and (2.)significantly higher housing costs seriously limits life options for those who want to make a difference with their lives.
[the cost of private college education has increased forty-fold from $700/year in 1958 to around $30,000 today. BUT the average summer job has only doubled or tripled in value, from $4 to $8-$12/hr. as a result, very few of the baby boomer generation had any college debt because they could easily work their way through college; whereas fully 2/3rds of students in the US today graduate with debts of $17,600-$23,000...not to mention the issue of increasing difficulty to acquire a job even with a college degree...]
research proves that we work far more hours, have less time with our families, are able to save less & less, and are less happy than we were in the 1950's.
in other words, the age shift makes it much more challenging for a new generation to get started and even harder to free up time or money to invest in the work of God's mustard seed conspiracy as an everyday lifestyle. those of us who are older need to help those in four streams [emergent churches, missions, mosaic/creative arts & monastic] and recent grads find innovative ways to meet their essential needs without spending such a large share of their limited resources.

numbers of us in the West have come to see the single-family-detached lifestyle model as the "norm", even though most of our forebears before World War II lived in extended or shared housing arrangements like many of the urban poor still do today. as we race into the twenty-first century, we are facing two conflicting trends. on one hand our global consumer culture and our growing involvement in the cyber world are influencing us to become much more individualistic. on the other hand, the cost of our individualistic lifestyle models is becoming increasingly more expensive than many will be able to afford. as a consequence, growing numbers of us will be pressured to consider shared and cooperative lifestyle models for economic reasons.

frankly, i think it is time for middle-class Christians to reexamine our love affair with our individualistic lifestyles and explore community and cooperative based models. these could enable us to more authentically embody the values of our faith, provide a bit more economic security, and reduce our costs so that we have more time and money to invest in the work of God's new order"