Discerning the news

I’ve written before of the work of our news coach, a position we created to help parents disciple their students through the news. Our goal is to ­better serve the families in our audience by enabling parents to help their kids understand the news and make sense of it, as well as help parents use the news to teach Biblical principles.

Parents have told us that there’s so much news, and it’s coming at us so fast. And if we think it’s coming at us fast, I have more news for you: It’s coming at our kids much faster.

One temptation is to avoid engaging with the news, or with students regarding the news. Another temptation is to become “news junkies,” absorbing as much of the rushing river of content as we can, and dwelling with it mentally for most of our waking hours. Both extremes are bad, and if we’re parents, the negative effects trickle down to our children.

One goal of our news coach—and, actually, a goal of the entire WORLD organization—is to keep the news in a proper perspective. It’s not just that we want to view each news story from a Biblical viewpoint. It’s that we want to view the entire news enterprise Biblically. We shouldn’t ignore news, but it shouldn’t be the most important thing in our lives.

With all that in mind, our God’s World News team has launched Concurrently, a weekly podcast designed to help parents disciple their kids through the news by “establishing a non-anxious learning environment, developing news literacy, and cultivating Biblical discernment” (from the program description).

Concurrently is targeted at parents of school-aged students. However, I suspect those of us who are no longer in that demographic (or not in it yet) will find it helpful as well. There’s nothing wrong with creating for ourselves a non-anxious approach to news, building our own news literacy, and cultivating our own Biblical discernment, regardless of whether we’re passing that along to someone younger.