So, our neighbors across the street from us do a HUGE halloween 'thing.' (aka haunted house). They've been putting it up for about a month. Styrofoam skulls, bbq'd hands, mechanized dudes who pull their heads off and rip their chests open. Gruesome to say the least. It even made front page of our local paper and you can see a video of it.
J and I were trying to figure out what to do.
As believers we don't like the focus on death and horror and fear. Obviously. However, these neighbors are also the nicest neighbors around. They care about the community, they clean up the townhouse complex, and they do this halloween stuff to create opportunity to meet neighbors.
Hmmm. What should our response be?
As Christians, this is a highly controversial subject. Our response is often (from Tim Keller's talk below)
1. Hide from the culture. It's bad. Stay away. Ignore halloween, turn off the lights, have our own Christian harvest parties [We should back out of culture, we can't transform society so let's have our own little Christian culture]
2. Love and embrace the culture. Send the kids out anyways. [Let's be relevant as Christians, which can be dangerous]
3. Hate the culture- and respond by sending out tracts etc. [Being defensive against culture]
We weren't sure that we liked any of those options.
We obviously don't like the reason for this holiday and most of the decorations around it, however, it's the first time people surface from their homes and get out in the neighborhood.
Hmmm.
Enter: prayer. And option 4:
4. Be in culture and serve within it.
We're still not sure what our response should be but we wanted to: not burn bridges with our neighbors, enter into the conversation around this cultural event, offer an alternative to 'death and gruesomeness' by highlighting harvest, light, and family-friendly fun.
SO, we hosted our lifegroup who helped us carve a bunch of pumpkins. We wanted to have an alternative option to look at for young kiddies and families. We were out and about, talked to neighbors, created relationship opportunities (so didn't hide away) but tried to work on transforming the culture.
yikes. We need to plan a bit better next year and keep praying to figure out what to do, but we love what Tim Keller has to say about allowing Christ, through us, to transform culture instead of embracing it, rejecting it, or using it. (If you want, start at 10 min into the talk, he talks about our responses to culture- really good).
This whole conversation had us think a lot though. WE should be serving and loving our neighbors MORE than anyone. Are we doing that? Not just in response to halloween, but on a regular basis?
End of deep discussion.
Pictures from our carving party:
and
Chocolate/Peanut Butter fudge Rice Krispies from Joy the Baker
yum.
Jeana- teaching us how to carve.
Jason hard at work.
Jeana's a pro-star carver.
Other members of our bible study- Heidi, and the Macphails.
Pumpkin remains.
Here are our happy pumpkins! Blues clues, veggie tales, flowers, etc.
Mickey!
Enter into the discussion. How should Christians respond or how DID you respond to halloween this year?
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