Do para-church urban youth ministries need to be dissolved and collapsed into neighborhood churches? Do we need urban ministry-minded Christians placing more efforts into teaching in inner-city public schools in order to truly serve the city? I think this may be the way forward. For those Christians with a calling to serve the needs of inner-city youth, teaching in the public schools may be the best place to have the greatest impact outside of the direct work of local churches. The para-church model is out of a 1950s playbook and may not be best use of human and financial capital to meet emerging needs.

For example, nearly 23 percent of all young American black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution, according to a new report titled “Consequences of Dropping Out of High School” from the Center for Labor Markets at Northeastern University. There is no urban youth ministry that has the capacity to put much of dent in this alarming trend. These students need academic discipleship in addition to spiritual formation.

The para-church model for helping black and Latino males has expired and does not have the full scope of influence that missionally minded teachers could have being in a school setting working directly with local churches. Teachers have the advantage of being with students most of the day for about nine months out of the year. No urban youth worker could come close to that many “contact” hours.  If the minds of urban youth are not being cultivated, we aren’t really helping them become makers of culture here and now.

As public school teachers, administrators, and coaches, urban-minded missional Christians wouldn’t have to raise support either. Moreover, until America begins to re-think our public school system disaster for black and Latino males we will have to work with the current system. As such, the public schools need a cadre of missional Christian teachers, thousands of them, who understand that forming human dignity is spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional.

We must remember two things about the black male graduation crisis: (1) it is not reduced to the nation’s largest cities—South Carolina, Wyoming, Michigan, Louisiana, and Georgia have among the lowest rates of black male graduates in country; and (2) this has much to do with the break down of the family, which is the unique reparative work of the church. Urban para-church ministry is neither designed nor equipped to meet the holistic needs of families.

Having said that, I know many people can offer countless lists of exceptions and personal stories about urban ministry “X” that helped kid and/or family “Y.” Those are great. I’m not saying that current ministries do not help a few. We should celebrate and honor that good work. However, in 2007, 16 percent of persons between 16 and 24 years of age (nearly 6.2 million people) were high school dropouts. Among these dropouts, 60.1 percent were men, 18.8 percent were black, and 30.1 percent were Hispanic. Only churches and teachers have access to this many students and their families.

The body of a 75-year-old man lay on a balcony at an apartment complex for about four days before neighbors alerted authorities – apparently they thought it was part of a Halloween display.

A newsman on the scene said,

“The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex [and] they all didn’t do anything. It’s very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest.”

Besides the sad fact that no one noticed the man had died for days – no family checking on him? – this seems to showcase American individualism. We don’t want to get involved in our neighbors’ lives, even if we see what may look like a dead body.

I was not aware that conservatives didn’t like public transportation until someone told me that they believe in a God-given right to an SUV. God may have given a right to an SUV—I won’t dispute it—but a new organization and book are working to convince conservatives that public transportation is pretty good, too.

The newly formed Center for Public Transportation (CPT) has impeccable conservative cred—established by the Free Congress Foundation, which was chaired by the late Paul Weyrich, who founded The Heritage Foundation and was a passionate advocate for public transportation. Weyrich, along with William Lind, who has been named CPT’s director, authored Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation. They argue that Americans should be able to travel from any point in the country to any other point without using a car—something we were able to do as late as the 1950s—which would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and foster growth.

Perhaps their most initially strange argument is that public transportation fosters community. “The automobile reinforces isolation and inhibits interaction between people,” said CPT executive director Glen Bottoms. When he goes to the grocery store in his suburban town, he has to crank up his car and drive there: “I don’t walk much, don’t see much of my neighbors either.”

I assigned my freshman class at The King’s College, all new New Yorkers, an essay in which they took a subway ride and wrote about their observations. All of them came back complaining about the profound isolation—how no one talks to each other or interacts, but sits in their own isolated world plugging their ears with headphones and shutting their neighbors out.

But maybe Bottoms is right, and a closer look reveals that public transportation at least makes community possible to build, for those who want to build it. You are, after all, pressed up against a stranger’s leg for an hour at a time. You’re being thrown into each other’s arms every time the subway jolts. You sit side by side with conversation starters—books and music—everywhere. The New Yorker has a choice of interaction that the suburbanite, chugging along in his car, does not.

Speaking of books, perhaps the conservative could also argue that public transportation fosters literacy. My friends and I are tackling the goal of reading 52 books next year, one each week, and the subway will make it possible. As someone who (as a child) read in the back seat to the point of carsickness and who (as an adult) really must double-task to fit it all in but is not good at double-tasking, I love that I can read and travel at the same time. In fact, public transportation doesn’t just make reading and traveling possible; it almost commands it, once you realize that it cuts the tedium of the travel by half. My reading increased five-fold when I moved to an outer borough.

I’m just enamored with the beautiful efficiency of it all. New York subways took exactly 1,623,881,369 people through 468 stations last year. Not, of course, without hassle and anger and the stations you need “closed for maintenance” and not without “delays because of train traffic ahead of us.” But still, I’m awed at the massive efficiency of this system that unclogs our streets and carries 5,225,675 people underground every day. Just imagining all of us in our own cars, seething in stalled traffic every Monday or drunk driving every Friday night, would make me want to move out of New York.

Does this have any relevance for non-urban people? Of course. This community, literacy, and efficiency can be yours, no matter where you live. The CPT advocates building up public transportation in more rural areas, since in many cases that’s the only way rural people can get to the doctor or go where they need to go.

I’m all for it.

Talk about indicators of cultural decline! Amp, an energy drink made by Pepsi, has an application (app, for short) for the iPhone called “Before You Score.” It’s billed as a “roadmap to success with your favorite kinds of women—24, in all.” Choose your type and get suggestions on how to “score.”

Here’s a boast from the online commercial for it: “If you’re anticipating a successful night, the Before You Score app gives you up-to-the minute information, feeds, lines, and much more to help you amp up and talk to 24 different types of ladies.” By “lines” they mean pick-up lines. As for “types,” you can choose from “businesswoman,” “foreign exchange student,” “sorority girl,” “rebound girl,” “nerd,” “treehugger,” “cougar,” “twins,” even “married.” Charming.

Each “type” has its own cartoon illustration, just in case the lecherous buffoons trying to use it are having trouble reading, I guess.

The information it provides for each “type” is apparently intended to make her think the guy hitting on her actually shares her interests: Quick! Learn about carbon footprints before approaching that “treehugger.”

And if that isn’t degrading and disgusting enough, Amp’s app comes complete with a “brag list,” a chance to keep score of one’s scores, as it were, by filling in the woman’s name, the date, and “whatever details you remember.”

Pepsi received some much-deserved flack from critics calling it “offensive,” “pathetic,” and “sexist.”

In response, Pepsi issued an apology via Twitter that said, in part: “We apologize if it’s in bad taste.” First of all, there’s no question that it’s in bad taste. And second, any apology that includes the word “if” doesn’t really qualify as one.

Pepsi should be ashamed for taking the hook-up culture high-tech.

The internet was abuzz today with the posthumous release of a new single from Michael Jackson: “This Is It.”

The New York Times’ music critics point out that the song is recycled from an earlier song Jackson wrote, then tabled. It resurfaced via Puerto Rican singer Safire. In her version, she sings,

“In the light of the world, love is grand.”

In Jackson’s newly released version, he sings,

“I’m the light of the world, I feel grand.”

The Lower East Side, New York, has gone from aristocracy and sophistication to squalor and debauchery and back to aristocracy—but with one constant Christian presence for the past 130 years: the Bowery Mission, which has pulled the homeless from squalor, fed and sheltered them, and helped them mend their lives with God’s help.

According to historian Eric Ferrara, speaking at a Bowery Mission anniversary event, before the Mission moved in, the wealthy lived and amused themselves in the Lower East Side. It was once New York’s theater district, where America’s first ballet performance took place and where its first gaslit theater lit up.

But then waves of immigrants crashed on Manhattan—the Irish, the German—and as the immigrants moved in, the wealthy moved out. The Lower East Side became one of the most densely populated few square miles in the world, with people stacked in flophouses and crowding tenements. The theaters and ballets soon disappeared, and dance halls and saloons took their places. Men brawled, women sold their bodies, and the Lower East Side became “America’s greatest or worst vice district,” said Ferrara, “depending on who you ask.”

But as debauchery moved in, so did the religious institutions and social service groups. The Bowery Mission opened its chapel doors on November 6, 1909, and has hosted the preaching of more than 1 million sermons since. Men with shattered lives have sat in the wooden pews, fenced in on all sides by Scripture verses decorating the painted cinder block walls, hearing sermons from evangelists like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.

President William Howard Taft appeared on its stage. When Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the mission as a candidate, he preached hope, saying, “I think things are going up, not down.” The Bowery Mission helped people cope with Prohibition by offering banquets, and hired motivational speakers during the Depression.

The Mission has seen the neighborhood change: Puerto Rican immigrants moved in, then the beat poets and the artists turned abandoned studios into artist’s lofts, and Jack Kerouac would write, “The Bowery Blues.” In the 1970s, the neighborhood slid further as the city went bankrupt and people began to flee to the suburbs. Buildings were boarded up and left empty.

The place has come full circle, with rising rents making the neighborhood too expensive for the vibrant artist’s culture—or for the social service organizations—that used to live there. Today, the Lower East Side is where you still go for music—the Living Room, Googies, Pianos, the Bowery Ballroom, the Mercury Lounge—but rising rent and celebrities have chased the artists to other neighborhoods. Another homeless shelter now shares a wall with a four-star hotel.

Ferrara, the historian who charted this arc, was once homeless himself. Few understand what it means “to feel invisible, suspect, avoided, and always on guard,” he said. But for 130 years now, through upheaval and change, the mission proves that “a man can shed his skin and start a new life.”

Dr. Al Mohler posted an article today in which he writes about the racial underpinning of the abortion discussion in the 1970’s. Nixon’s words are chilling:

Tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library reveal that President Richard M. Nixon, who had been considered generally opposed to abortion, told aides on January 23, 1973 (the day after the decision was handed down) that abortion was justified in certain cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” said Nixon. President Nixon’s words, chilling as they are, are also a general reflection of the moral logic shared by millions of Americans in that day.

As a matter of fact, one of the dirty secrets of the abortion rights movement is that its earliest momentum was driven by a concern that was deeply racial. Leaders such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued quite openly that abortion and other means of birth control were necessary in order to limit the number of undesirable children. As she made clear, the least desirable children were those born to certain ethnically and racially defined families. Sanger, along with so many other “progressive” figures of the day, promoted the agenda of the eugenics movement — more children from the “fit” and less from the “unfit.”

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13 ESV)

By now everyone has heard of David Letterman’s opening monologue wherein he revealed a purported extortion attempt, and his frank admission of the truthfulness behind the blackmail. He admitted, “Yes, I have. I have had sex with women who work on this show.” Audience laughter and applause followed.

Here are two pieces to read in thinking through this sordid affair.

First, in “Letterman’s TV admission called adept PR” (Washington Times), we have a piece that finds PR genius in the Letterman confession:

“It was as awkward a television experience as you could imagine. It was totally riveting,” Fraser Seitel, author of the textbook “The Practice of Public Relations” said of the segment. “Letterman, who is the consummate show business entertainer, milked it to perfection.” Mr. Seitel, a senior partner of Andrew Edson & Associates, said he agrees with Mr. Bragman that Mr. Letterman’s monologue was savvy as well as strange. “In terms of a public relations response, what he did was exactly the right thing. As others have learned, including many of Letterman’s guests, if you live in public, you cannot a hide a thing like this. The axiom in public relations is, you get the bad news out as quickly as possible, and you try to do it on your own terms.”

Finding Letterman’s confession “riveting” and “savvy” might be a justified response in the world of public relations, but oh what a cynical world that must be.

However, a second voice from marketing offers a pause of concern:

Tamika Morrison, director of communications at Atlanta firm TWS Marketing Communications, said the segment was “classic Letterman style. He was able to do it so smoothly that everybody is thinking as an afterthought, ‘Wait, isn’t that wrong?’”

Apparently, women find Letterman’s behavior particularly repugnant, as Morrison continues:

If I could have a wise, it would be that advertisers were to understand their power and where to utilize it. It’s sending a message to women. Hopefully, women advertisers that are in a position of owning advertising dollars can take a stand against that in their company.

Alas, the news piece did not end on that note. Instead, we read this cynical quote from Howard Bragman, a “longtime crisis counselor in Los Angeles”:

He [Bragman] also said that while this is the story everyone is talking about right now, it won’t be for long. “How many crises have there been this week? We had Mackenzie Phillips, we had Jon Gosselin, we had the tsunamis, we had earthquakes,” he said. “We had Roman Polanski. They just keep coming so fast and furious. Their half-life is about the same as the tuna salad in my refrigerator.”

Yeah, that’s the kind of “crisis counselor” I want at my side in a time of trouble — “You committed adultery? Don’t worry, Switzerland just arrested a pedophile-rapist, and walls of water just crushed hundreds to death in Asia. This too shall pass.”

By way of sharp contrast, Dr. Russell Moore writes, “What David Letterman Can Teach Us About the Gospel.”

What’s interesting to me is that the blackmail scared Letterman, and the reasons why.

Letterman said the extortion note was disturbing, first of all, because he feared the mysterious correspondent was watching him. Someone who knew this much about his life, would this figure be tapping him on the shoulder from the shadows? Pulling him into the back of the car?

Letterman also, though, was upset by the note because it was true.

Letterman acknowledged to this viewers that he had, in fact, had sex with women on the “Late Show” staff. He also said that seeing his “terrible things” there in print, with evidence for it all, in front of him, made him feel “creepy.” Even in his deadpan comedic, “aw shucks this ain’t so bad” wink-and-grin performance, we can hear a terror, a terror that is common to humanity.

Moore says the reason Letterman was upset by the blackmail was because the allegation was true. Moore then goes on to compare Letterman’s blackmail with our own menacing accusers and the “black box” of evidence against us.

You and I once felt a deeper, more primal blackmail, and it scared us to the core. In fact, we often still do. Now, for most of us, it’s not the same kind of transgression or the same type of discovery. But we’re blackmailed just as surely, in fact even more so.

The Scripture says that Satan’s reign over this present order is by holding us captive through the slavery of the “fear of death” (Heb 2:15). And why are all humans afraid of death? Because, like Letterman’s letter in the back of the car, our conscience is pointing us to judgment, with a “black box” of evidence of our guilt (Rom 2:15-16).

That’s why the gospel is such good news for blackmailed creepy people like us.

Jesus says of Satan, in one of the most remarkable passages to me of all of Holy Scripture: “The ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me” (John 14:30). Jesus’ calm is the same as if I were asked to take a DNA test to prove that I’m not the father of one of Michael Jackson’s children. I know there’s just nothing there.

This is a good word — a gospel word to help us in thinking through the Letterman affair, and in giving to anyone who asks, a reason for the hope within us.

If you have been tracking the Roman Polanski story this week, then don’t miss Terry Teachout’s column in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal.

In “Hollywood Justice,” Teachout blasts Hollywood elites who would have Polanski continue to avoid justice for his 1977 rape of a thirteen-year old girl.

If I were Roman Polanski, I wouldn’t care to see Woody Allen’s name at the head of a petition calling for my release from jail on statutory-rape charges. On the other hand, I doubt that any of the other Hollywood celebrities who rushed to defend Mr. Polanski will carry much more weight with the public officials who may soon decide whether the director of “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby” must do time for having had “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a teenage girl in 1977. No matter who his friends are, Mr. Polanski is in deep trouble—and it’s getting deeper by the day.

There is a growing backlash against not only Polanski, but also his friends in the entertainment business. One such supporter is movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

On Thursday he gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times that will live long in the annals of arrogance. Not only does Mr. Weinstein believe that Mr. Polanski should be set free at once, but he claims that “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion. We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” That’s the voice of a man who spends his days listening to toadies—and who knows nothing of the deeply felt beliefs of the ordinary people who pay their hard-earned money to see his pictures. I wonder how many of them will henceforth be inclined to steer by the compass of anyone who thinks that rape is a “so-called crime.” Mr. Weinstein is, of course, a moral idiot.

Teachout concludes with this:

The ability to make art—good, bad or indifferent—relieves no artist of his fundamental duties as a human being, the first and foremost of which is to treat his fellow humans decently, and allow himself to be held accountable if he does not. By his own admission, Mr. Polanski flunked both parts of that test three decades ago. Since then, he’s been on an exceedingly cushy lam, living in a Paris penthouse and thumbing his nose at the rule of law. It’s time for him to come home to Hollywood—voluntarily or not—and pay the price for what he did.

“Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it completely.” (Proverbs 28:5 ESV)

The subway car next to mine emptied and a car of shaken people poured into mine. A thug in the next subway car, they said, was beating a man for stepping on his foot.

The subway pulled into the station and a distinguished man in a navy blazer ran away, his bald head streaming blood—the first victim. The second was a man who had tried to stop the first beating. He was lying in a corner of the subway platform, too badly beaten to walk away and ringed so closely with people that I couldn’t see what he looked like or how badly he was hurt.

The thug—the height of a basketball player—started bellowing in the subway car next to mine and we emptied the subway to wait on the platform. We ran back into the subway when he ran to the platform and watched through the subway windows when he dropped his backpack and made straight for the man he’d already bloodied to beat him again. Then he loped back down the platform, screaming.

The police showed up 20 minutes later. Word trickled back to us that a little old man with a cane had hurried after the thug and pointed him out. They found him sitting in the subway car and waiting for the train to leave, deranged enough to insist, despite a car full of witnesses and a bloody victim half his size, that he was acting in self-defense.

It’s one of those moments, when you’re craning your head out of the subway car to catch a glimpse of a man lying on a subway platform, when you realize you’re a smaller person than you’d hoped. The thug was big, but not big enough to stand up to a full subway car of people had they stood up to him instead of running. But I’m not conceited enough to insist I would do differently. After all, standing up to him might mean being crushed like the Good Samaritan lying crushed on a subway platform in front of us.

I can guess how I would have acted because Jesus’ Good Samaritan only suffered a pecuniary loss, but it’s a loss I’m not always willing to suffer when I walk past beggars every day. Some of the good Christian advocates I’ve interviewed say to give a little money because Jesus said to give, but don’t just give money to ease your conscience: Direct them to people who can offer more permanent hope. I know that giving money can do more harm than good, so I don’t give money; but I also don’t give help.

That’s why I have a feeling I would have run into the next subway car, too. Becoming the kind of person who can suffer physical harm for a stranger starts with giving time and providing safety for defenseless strangers.