If you are signed into wordpress while looking at a wordpress blog, then you’ll see a blue tool bar at the top of your page with a series of drop-down menus that allow you to access your dashboards among other things. The far right tool bar, as I just accidentally discovered, is labeled “blog info” and the last option on the drop-down menu is “report as mature.”
And that word struck me. “Mature.” Of course, the meaning in the context of the drop down menu is that someone has posted x-rated content on their blog, something wordpress.com tries to discourage. But instead of, say, reporting as “lewd” or “inappropriate” we have to report this material as “mature.”
The fundamental implication would be, then, that those who do not wish to view this material are immature.
Of course, none of us strives to be immature. We even have ideas in Scripture that we want seeds (lives) to mature (Luke 8:14), and is equated with having reached fullness in Christ in Ephesians: “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (4:13). (See also 1 Cor. 2:6; Phil. 3:15; Col 4:12; Heb. 5:14; James 1:4 NIV).
So we are told to strive for maturity in Christ, and yet one of the things I would think of as being a marker along that pathway to maturity in Christ would be refusing to view “mature” websites…
Where am I going with this? The clash between the kingdom and culture stood out to me as I reflected on this, and it shouted to me how we as the church, and especially we who work with youth need to help our students through meaningful rites of passage in teaching them what it means to be mature in in Christ and in practical ways in life as adults.
So here’s to being immature mature people!
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