Notable Christians

Review: The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers

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I’m so convinced that the space between the television set and the viewer is holy ground, and that what we put on the television can, by the Holy Spirit, be translated into what this person needs to hear and see.
—Fred Rogers

It was not originally my intent to blog about Mister Rogers twice in ten days, but when I saw the new book The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers by Amy Hollingsworth, I had to bite. As a child I had watched Rogers’s show without fail. As an adult, I actually lived down the street from Fred Rogers when I attended Carnegie Mellon University in the early ’80s. As the Pittsburgh PBS station where he filmed his show was right next to my dorm, Rogers would religiously walk by my window in the morning on his way to work. I ran into him a few times and he was always gracious and granted you his full attention. With Fred Rogers, you were always the most important person in the world for the time he gave you in conversation.

The Simple Faith of Mister RogersAs author Hollingsworth so duly notes, my experience was the norm. After having interviewed Rogers in 1994, she began a correspondance and friendship with him that lasted until his death in 2003. What passed in many of those exchanged letters comprises much of the book, Hollingsworth letting us see the faith of the man behind the TV show, behind the ministry it was to him, and behind the simple way in which he treated the stranger as his neighbor.

Part biography, part devotional, and part a memoir of the author, this book’s core shows how Fred Rogers lived out the Gospel by caring for others in the gentle way that often made him the butt of jokes from people who could not understand what he was doing. That this should be a reflection of the Savior is no coincidence, for Rogers was an ordained minister in the United Presbyterian Church. Confounding his seminary profs, Rogers sought that ordination despite having no intention of pastoring a local congregation. But when he made the case that every child, every adult who tuned into his show was his church, the seminary granted him ordination.

Rogers’s vision for reaching people through the medium of television fill this book. In one case—a real hankie moistener—a boy who was horribly abused by his parents tells the author that his one respite was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The boy never lost hope that there were good people in the world because he saw how much everyone cared for and respected each other on the show. Lauren Tewes, cruise director “Julie” of The Love Boat fame, relates that the Rogers’ show actually helped her heal from an addiction to cocaine. No chapter goes by without some person telling how Rogers transformed life through his show.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ran for 900 episodes and Fred was the the creative spark behind every one. A trained pianist, he provided the background piano music for the show, and wrote over two hundred songs. His earlier experience with puppets in a show that ran before Neighborhood allowed him to communicate in a language children could relate to. It was his willingness to be vulnerable and to discuss difficult issues—my son and I watched the “Death of a Fish” episode recently—that made him like Jesus to everyone who tuned in.

Like the Lord, Rogers was a man of prayer who rose every morning at 5 a.m. to pray and read the Scriptures. Like the Lord, Rogers understood that silence is a critical part of a deep life, and he was unafraid to model silence and quiet for children. Like the Lord, Rogers saw potential in even the most scarred person, unfraid to reach out to the hurting, no matter what anyone else thought. Like the Lord, he wanted the little children to come to him and be loved, in spite of their circumstances. His greatest hope was that viewers would grow up to be all that God imagined they could be.

What you bring to this book will determine what you can hope to receive in reading it. Because of her close personal relationship with Rogers, the author writes with a tear in her eye that shows on every page. The book is so personal in countless ways that it is virtually impervious to critique. Fred Rogers comes off as a mythic person, saintly in a way that the vast sea of Mankind is not—Superman in a zippered cardigan and Keds. I suspect readers of this book who were impacted by Rogers’ show will see it as true to its subject, but naysayers will find all the treacle they know is inevitable in a book written about someone who was almost too good to be true.

Even if you don’t know which category you are in, give this swiftly-read book a try. Somewhere in its 165 pages it’s guaranteed to soften even the most hardened curmudgeon.

Razing Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

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This is a very long post, but the Lord has impressed on me that it is vitally important. My prayer and hope is that you will read all of it and consider what your next step will be to make it a reality within your local community of believers.

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When I tell people I used to live in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood, I am sometimes met with a pinched brow and a quick look for the exits. But, truthfully, Fred Rogers was a neighbor of mine when I attended Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s. We attended the same church and my dorm was right next to WQED, where Rogers taped his children’s show. I routinely ran into him as he walked to work and sometimes even encountered him playing tennis on the college courts. (He was no pushover, either, as many an unsuspecting challenger found out.)

I was very sad a couple years ago when he passed away at what seemed like the young age of 74. To me, Rogers modeled the perfect way with children. He engaged their curiosity, imagination, and innocence all while operating at a speed that the supposedly more enlightened saw as a throwback. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is to Sesame Street as a gentle afternoon spent swaying in a hammock is to a crystal meth high.

Oddly, I got an additional PBS station when I recently downsized my satellite TV to just the local stations. This new station carries Rogers’ show and for the first time I was able to watch it with my son. What a breath of fresh air! Your sense of safety and peace is reinforced in only a half hour. Childhood in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is still filled with wonder, respect, joy, hope, love, sharing, patience, and most of all, innocence.

Looking around, it is hard not to see the assault on Mister Rogers’ ideals. Everything in our culture is now geared to razing his neighborhood.

Childhood innocence, the very backbone of the neighborhood, is sustaining the worst of the demolition. Children know far too much of the adult world at far too early an age. Once exclusive to “adults,” porn use is rampant among young boys—and now even pre-teen girls. Jollyblogger recently posted on the extreme casualness with which most kids treat sex today. Startlingly, sexual activity among children still in elementary school is on the rise. “Hooking-up,” wherein teens engage in casual sex with no sense of relational connection, is proliferating outside of the college campuses where it started, rendering dating archaic even among junior high school students. Abstinence programs do not seem to be working, either, as the rates of STDs among children who took abstinence pledges are no better than their non-pledging counterparts. Part of this is that children are compartmentalizing sexual activity, too, substituting every known form of sexual behavior possible while avoiding strict vaginal sex in an attempt to stay a “virgin”—a misguided technicality that is useless to preserving innocence.

Governmental controls have failed as well. The Lawrence vs. Texas decision opened the floodgates of deviancy, with many organized groups seeking a lowering of consent laws across the country, hoping to have them branded unconstitutional. And while we Christians understand that governmental mandates cannot substitute for the guidance of the Holy Spirit illuminating our understanding of right and wrong, Christian young people are only a couple percentage points lower than their unbelieving counterparts in having sex outside of marriage.

Beyond sexual mores, we know that drug use is once again picking up, and that our public schools are unable to teach because they are spending most of their time either combating delinquency or contributing to it by succumbing to pressure groups seeking to introduce all manner of deviancy into the lives of unwitting children. It is hard to fault Christians who are abandoning public education.

The assault is coming on multiple fronts. The neighborhood is slowly being razed.

As I look at this, I have come to learn that the mantra that parents are responsible for their own children is too simplistic. We are ignorant if we hold this as our sole line of defense. The problem extends beyond the individual family home.

We Christians must come to understand that we have bought the lie of the safety of the family home. Too many Christian sources are holding the home as the vanguard, but Fred Rogers’ show was NOT called Mister Rogers’ Home for a reason. It is the neighborhood that matters, the community that surrounds the individual home that makes of the intricate web of support and protection we need.

This is not a call to enact Hillary Clinton’s secular village, but it is a wake-up call for us to see that even good parents who do everything right are watching their kids and household taken down because they have become to isolated from a truly caring community that can undergird them. We need to revise the saying “No man is an island,” to be “No family is an island.” The Enemy will take down one island at a time—and is very successfully doing so—because we are forgetting the strength of the neighborhood.

We Christians are a neighborhood, the Community of Faith. Within any church we have a responsibility to look out not only for our own family, but the rest of the families around us.

Christian men, do you understand that it is your responsibility to see that no young woman in your church goes astray? What are you doing to place a hedge of protection around not only your daughter, but the daughters of other people in your church? There are few things more precious than a young woman coming into her womanhood. What are you doing to ensure she makes it to her marriage bed undefiled? When young men in the church see how zealously the older men in the church guard the innocence of the young women in the church, will that not inform their ideas of what it means to be a man, and how they should treat all women? What young man would dare try anything with a young woman so protected?

One father cannot stand against the tide of wickedness, but a whole host of fathers can. Likewise, the women in the church should stand together to ensure that no young man lacks the tender love a mother can provide. Older women fail to understand what they can teach young men about themselves and about women as a whole. Their responsibility to young women is like that of the men, too. No woman should let any young woman fall into sexual sin, not only by training up their sons to respect the purity of their sisters in Christ, but by keeping watch over all the young women in the church, just as the men should.

This extends far beyond sexual purity, too. We as a community of believers need to do a better job of instructing our young people in the ways of the Lord AS A COMMUNITY. Foisting them off on Sunday School teachers and youth pastors is wrong. We need to be teaching our children within our own homes, but also teaching them as a unified community. The men must consider standing united to reach the young men in the church and the women must do the same with the young women. I strongly advocate sex-specific rites of passage within every church tied in with youth assuming adult responsibilities within the church. In my day, this was called catechism. We need to go even further than catechism, though, by addressing not simply the spiritual needs of the young men as a community of men (and young women as a community of women), but ALL aspects of life, working with young people to have a coherent Christian worldview that bridges the supernatural and natural worlds.

Failure is not an option. If we Christians persist in our island thinking, the Enemy will continue to plunder us one household at a time. It is not enough to ensure the success of our own household; we must break out of that selfish thinking to incorporate ensuring the success of every household within our immediate church. Community still means something, and we MUST come to grips with our fractured view of community (and our responsibilities within that community) if we are to surmount these vitally significant issues and raise the neighborhood instead of watching it razed.

Our children—and their innocence—are depending on us.

The 25 Who Should Be Most Influential on Modern Evangelicalism

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I was thinking after my post on who is truly influencing modern-day American Evangelicals, perhaps I should post on who I believe SHOULD be the most influential. All the men listed here (sorry ladies, there were a few I thought of, but I had only twenty-five spots and felt these twenty-five were essential—they just happened to all be men) lived since the founding of our country because I felt they best informed American Christianity. Not all are Americans, but all should be influences on us, no matter the countries of origin.

The Pastors

A.W. Tozer—Tozer is “my C.S. Lewis,” the one I go to whenever I need to be uplifted, provoked, or stirred in any way. I believe him to be the greatest of 20th century preachers and teachers, but always with a pastor’s heart. He loved the Church like few others and his habit of spending the first five hours of his day in prayer is an example few can match. Everything he wrote is a gem—each prophetic, challenging, and Spirit-filled.

Andrew Murray—Few writers of the 19th century had the beautiful loving heart that Murray did. His ability to gently lay out truth is unmatched. Every book of his is a classic.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones—The bastion of England during the WWII years and beyond, Lloyd-Jones’s words cut to the soul with their wisdom and insight. His bridges the Reformed tradition and charismatic, penning one of the only good books on the discerning of spirits that exists today.

Jonathan Edwards—Still a powerhouse force and a voice to complacent Evangelicalism. We need s serious dose of Edwards in the American Church today.

Jack Hayford—I have a lot of respect for Hayford and it is sad that he does not get more credit for his no-nonsense approach to Christian living. He may be the only sane voice for the charismatic branch of Evangelicalism that exists today (with the possible exception of Wayne Grudem.)

The Revivalists

Leonard Ravenhill—I think that no man in the 20th century did more to stir up Christians to deeper faith and more compelling service than did Ravenhill. “When are we going to get serious about getting serious?” and “One of these days someone’s going open the Bible, believe it, and then we are all going to be ashamed.” Ravenhill’s fiery wisdom is essential reading and listening for today’s complacent Evangelicals.

C.H. Spurgeon—The “Prince of Preachers,” Spurgeon wrote extensively on revival and oversaw some great ones. His no-nonsense approach to fanning the flames in the hearts of sleepy believers is desperately needed in the American Church

George Whitefield—I believe it was Jonathan Edwards that said of Whitefield, “They go not to see a preacher, but a man aflame.” Whitefield’s preaching almost singlehandedly undergirded faith in early America, even though the great revivalist himself was not from here.

The Intelligentsia

Francis Schaeffer—Francis Schaeffer was not only a man of great wisdom, but his prophetic words about postmodern man are startling as we see the fruit of that worldview come to ripen. Schaeffer addressed the whole man, body, soul, spirit and mind. In an age when Evangelicals are eschewing things of the mind, Schaeffer is needed more than ever.

Alistair McGrath—An apologist and Bible teacher of the highest order, McGrath is sadly overlooked by most Evangelicals, though he certainly will carry the mantle of J.I. Packer some day.

J.I. Packer—The grand old man of modern Evangelical thought. He was on Time’s list and belongs here, too.

Ravi Zacharias—An apologist supreme and with a Third World perspective, too, Zacharias is a powerful speaker every Evangelical should know and follow.

C.S. Lewis—No list would be complete without Lewis. His writings inform more Evangelicals in America than possibly any other figure.

The Examples

E.M. Bounds—Prayer, prayer, and more prayer. Evangelicals would be wise to follow his admonitions that it all starts with prayer.

John Hyde—”Praying Hyde” of India. If a case is made for modern apostleship, Hyde would be at the top of the list. A life wholly surrendered—and powerful as a result.

George Mueller—Another great man of prayer who lived only by what God gave him through prayer. Also saw great needs and met them—again through prayer.

Hudson Taylor—The great missionary to China. Tragedy never overcame triumph in Taylor’s life and the modern Chinese church owes everything to this man who heard the call of Jesus and surrendered all.

Jim Elliot—Cut down before thirty, but his journals should be required reading for all young Evangelicals. The fruit of his work in South America continues to prosper and grow. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

David Brainerd—Again, cut down young, but what a life! Wholly given to the Lord; every thought taken captive. Saw the need to preach to the native peoples of America and met that need, pouring his life out so that they might know Christ.

Richard Wurmbrand—A modern day martyr who spent years locked away in Communist prisons. No one this century did more (with possibly the exception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn) to promote the plight of the persecuted church worldwide. He has much to teach Evangelicals today about the plight of our brethren worldwide.

The Challengers

Watchman Nee—Brings a uniquely Asian worldview to the Church. His mysticism is needed in an Evangelicalism too rooted in the practical and mundane.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer—Hard-hitting and uncompromising. His book The Cost of Discipleship is the antidote to the crossless preaching of modern Evangelical megachurchianity.

Keith Green—Who has taken up the gantlet that this fiery young prophet threw down to Christians via songs that convict and yet bring joy? It’s been almost twenty-five years since his death, and still we wait for a successor to Green. One song by Green carries more punch than an entire day’s listening on most Christian radio stations today.

George Barna—He holds the mirror up to the face of modern Christianity better than anyone. We truly need to see how we are and Barna is the only one doing it religiously.

Folks, these people are the ones we should be listening to and modeling. I encourage you to find out more about all of them. Seek out their books and teachings. Some links are to the right. Please think about what these men say and let them be influential your life, too.