back in the saddle?

Yesterday (Sunday) was my second attempt at leading church-school for the high schoolers. I'm leading with another guy who is getting his Ph.D. in math and philosophy here. I know, I know.... You're thinking: what high schooler would want to come to a group being led by two eggheads with nothing better to do with their lives than read about obscure topics of interest to only about a dozen people on planet Earth? It's a fair question. I'm not sure I would have come to my group when I was 15. To address this potential problem, Chris (the other guy) and I are trying to make this church-school thing really fun. Our series is called "False Advertising" and we're looking at movies, TV shows, commercials, magazines, and listening to music for the hour of church-school and then doing our best to critique them biblically. We're attempting not to just look at the sex and drugs part of rock 'n' roll, but to address deeper issues that often times are not only acceptable to Christians but encouraged (e.g., self-sufficiency)--yet stand quite counter to the gospel. Yesterday we actually attacked Billy Joel's 1978 classic "My Life" (as in "Go ahead with your own life but leave me alone") and the kids didn't immediately throw us out of the room. Chris and I feel like we have a huge advantage going into the whole thing--we both were forced to watch Bob Larson's Hell's Bells (or some variant) back in middle/high school. We know what one of the potential responses kids can get from Christians about pop culture. So we want to make a point to the students that our intent is not to have them chuck their CDs or DVDs out the window (unless we don't like them for purely aesthetic reasons). We really just want to explore what it means to be in the world but not of the world. And on a personal note, it feels really good to be working with students in a non-academic setting again. I left that whole Vineyard thing hoping that the problem wasn't wholly with me. I feared that I couldn't work inside of the weird politics of a church again. Having my wife as the director makes it much easier, of course, but I think the big difference is that we're in a place where digging into tough questions--some that simply don't have clear answers--is encouraged. So Chris and I are just trying to adapt the "digging" to teenagers. Hopefully we won't hit a gas line.