Is Halo 3 Good Soulbait For Youths?

In what has become a minor sunburst of an issue, some church youth groups have decided to use the new X-Box 360 game, Halo 3, as an evangelistic tool. The game is rated M, which is comparable to an R rating in movies, for blood and gore, mild language, and violence 17+. Needless to say, teens (and adults) are playing the game a lot. But because the game is rated this way and because it is a first-person shooter game that teaches force and violence as the solution to mankind’s alien problem, others are very concerned that you can’t build a Christian youth group on such a sandy foundation, even if you attract higher numbers with the game.

Post-show thoughts: There are a lot of things to say about this, but the essence of it all is this: a youth group is a particular sort of church. And the purpose of church is to give people the experience of Christ and Christian living. If a youth group is regularly giving kids the experience of Christ and Christian activity, it will find itself growing in both numbers and maturity. If it does not, then every effort to apply make-up to that endeavor with things like video games will produce very little worth producing. The issue should not be whether to entice kids with Halo 3 or not. The issue should be whether the experience of youth group itself is worthy enough for kids to desire it. We need to stop assuming that a sermon and some music is the best way for kids to have their lives transformed. I know this is easy for me, a non-youth pastor, to say, but the key is to create an experience so full of Christ that Halo 3 pales by comparison. The church should be a place of such unique experience that we don't feel the need to give kids more of the familiar in order to get them there. After all, that's really why they come. They want what we aren't giving them.