GYC 2013: Before Men and Angels

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2013 Seminar: Media On the Brain

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

Scott Ritsema

01-TV and Your Brain: The Good News

This message was presented at the GYC 2013 conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

I teach Bible at Great Lakes Adventist Academy and I am very happy to be joined for this seminar with my good friend Chad Cruiser.

We grew up together, both of us came into the church later in life, and Chad's lovely wife, Fadia Cruiser, who's also going to be sharing for the Media on the Brain seminar.

And I'm going to let Chad give you just a brief introduction, and then we'll pray and get started.

I'm originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

We go around to archaeologists, theologians, and scholars and we make documentaries that look similar to Discovery Channel or History Channel.

And instead of being skeptical like you would see on there, instead they share, give reasons to believe in the Bible, to believe in Jesus and the Adventist message.

So our ministry is called Anchor Point Films and we also do seminars on overcoming habits.

We do seminars on creation and evolution.

If you have an empty seat by you, can you raise your hand?

Okay, where you see the raised hands, those of you who would like a seat, they may kick you out if you don't have a seat.

So you see a hand raised, you're welcome to go squeeze next to 1 of those people.

So they have their hands raised and you can go sit there.

All right, well let's begin with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father we thank you for the opportunity to come together.

We thank you that media is something that can be used to your glory.

We pray that you would bless abundantly, that you would give wisdom, that you would give us your Holy Spirit and that you would give us open hearts to receive what you have for us.

May our lives be touched and transformed and may they be renewed into your image in the name of Jesus, amen.

Well we definitely see it all around us in the 21st century.

Everywhere you look, there is media 24-7.

Entertainment is the new reality as we all know.

And what we're going to be exploring over the next few sessions, we have 6 sessions total, and we're going to look at everything under this broad umbrella of media from the video gaming to the Hollywood industry, the music industry, advertisers, even our Facebook and texting and spectator sports.

We want to see what are the effects of these things.

Let's evaluate them critically and objectively.

That's gonna be hard to evaluate it objectively because if you're like me in here you're gonna raise your hand along with George Barna who has said that Media exposure is the most serious and widespread, what does that say?

Now anybody in here want to admit that they may have had at some point in their life an addiction to some form of media?

Now we throw this word addiction around a little carelessly sometimes but George Barna was very careful with how he used this word.

I actually got a chance to meet George Barna and I asked him.

He's a researcher and pollster I don't know if you know that name George Barna but he's probably the top name in Christianity and collecting of data.

Barna, how did you conclude that it's an actual addiction and not just that but the most serious 1 in America?

He said, well what we did was we took the 7 questions survey that the American Psychiatric Association uses to diagnose an addiction.

So if somebody may be struggling with alcoholism or whatever it is, they have a survey, and then however many answers you say yes to on that, you actually would be diagnosed with an addiction.

They just took that same survey and asked people those very same questions about their favorite media.

And he found actually that the majority of Americans have what would qualify as an addiction to media.

Now you might say well is that a diagnosable thing?

In the American psychiatry bible as it's known, the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, the method that psychiatrists use for diagnosing an addiction now lists gaming, video gaming, as an actual, qualifiable, diagnosable addiction.

So we are dealing with something new in the 21st century that we've never dealt with before and so we need to look at that as a people and here are the statistics.

I don't know if you know how big this is.

This is definitely not like it was when I was a kid growing up in the 1980s but kids today ages 2 to 5 are viewing over 32 hours of television per week.

Ages 8 to 18 are viewing 5 hours per day.

And on top of that, when we look at the worldly music, 2 and a half hours of music in addition to the television viewing, although some studies say up to 6 hours when you account for multitasking.

Moving along, the average young person racks up 10, 000 hours of video gaming by the age of 21.

Then when you isolate out the 5000000 gamers that are playing the most amount of video games, we're looking at 40 hours per week of video games that not just a few people but 5 million Americans are playing 40 hours of video gaming a week.

We're looking at some serious imbalances here.

The average college-aged boy, I was interested in how much are we watching of spectator sports just as a little anecdotal 0.8 hours per week for the average college-aged boy is spent viewing the actual games, this doesn't count sports news and all of the other things, but 8 hours a week and if half of them are watching it then that would be 16 hours per week for the average spectator sports viewing college male.

1 more statistic on that the total screen time for the average American child is over 53 hours per week.

The average child will actually spend more time watching TV by the age of 50.

Spending in conversation with his father in his entire lifetime.

If that's not a sad anecdote, I don't know what is.

But this is the reason why we do the Media on the Brain seminar.

All of you sitting in here, maybe you're struggling with it personally or maybe your heart just aches for the people that you see so immersed in this stuff that they're missing out on reality.

Now I was curious, what are the statistics about Adventist youth?

I don't know of any data out there, so I did a little informal survey myself.

I got a hold of about 50 Adventist Academy-age students and I asked them to report to me anonymously how much TV and movies and video games they had watched or played over the previous week.

4 hours per day of TV and movies and video gaming, and then only 10 minutes per day of spiritual exercises, Bible study, prayer, the disciplines that we have to bring us closer to Jesus Christ.

That number would, 4 hours to 10 minutes, would look like this on a graph.

That was a sobering statistic for me to see where we stand as youth in America today as Seventh-day Adventist youth.

But I was also curious just to compare it.

Do you know the standard American diet kind of looks like that, right?

And I actually looked into the number of calories we are consuming from healthy plant-based sources versus the number of calories we're consuming from everything else.

25 to 1 unhealthy calories to healthy calories.

Now we know that this diet is killing us physically.

But my question is, do we know how this media diet is affecting us spiritually?

If we don't come to grips with this, this could be our downfall, not just as an individual, but as a people.

So the Media on the Brain seminar came into existence as I deal on a daily basis with these youth that I love.

I became a father just 2 years ago and I have little ones that I'm curious, how does this media affect us?

And the research is in and it's it's pretty pretty a Sobering reality that we're going to explore over the next couple of days If you're wondering what is the relationship by the way between what you see here over the next 5 6 sessions 6 sessions including this 1 What's the relationship between this material and the material on the DVDs that you'll see at our booth, Belt of Truth Ministries has a booth where we're sharing this media on the brain material.

And what we're gonna do here live is I'm bringing some different information, some new information, and also some that is also on the DVDs.

Chad and Fadi Akruzer are sharing this material also with you today, this afternoon, and tomorrow and Sabbath, but they are not on the DVDs.

So if you're curious about how those relate, that's about the explanation that I would give.

And also I would want to mention that a lot of the material that's on the DVDs we are not covering just for the sake of time here today.

So we're going to be moving quickly, see how much of this we can cover.

I want to begin with a Bible text, Romans 12 2.

This is probably very familiar to most of you, I hope, and it says, do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your what?

02-By Beholding We Become Slaves

This message was presented at the DYC 2013 conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.dycweb.org.

How many of you are here for the first time and we're not at the first session?

Wow, okay, we've got a lot of new people in here.

It looks like some people lost their seats.

Hey, this is how it works in a small room, but praise the Lord we are all here together.

And I wanna give you a little bit of a clue as to what you just walked into so that you can understand what we have done so far.

And we're not gonna repeat everything we have done, but praise the Lord, what I can say is almost everything that we are covering here today and tomorrow and Sabbath in this room is on the DVDs that we have available at our booth.

Chad has a ministry, I have a ministry, we both have booths down in the exhibit hall.

So if you're gonna miss 1 of the sessions or you miss part 1 or you want to share this information and also frankly we're not getting to everything that's on the DVDs as well so I would insist that you get them for the people that you love who are struggling with media addiction And our booth is called Belt of Truth Ministries.

You'll see the media on the brain material there.

So that's the relationship between this seminar and the DVDs is we're covering some of the stuff in the DVDs, but we don't have time to get to it all.

By the way, while we're talking about Booth, I want to submit to you an awesome replacement for our bad media.

And Chad and Fadia Cruiser have produced a documentary series called Scripture Mysteries and they do other films as well.

I'm always talking about Scripture Mysteries because it's such a great evangelistic outreach method.

You hand somebody a DVD who may not read a book and they will come into contact with present truth.

So get down to Anchor Point Films booth as well and be sure to pick up that even though we're not covering their material today.

But I'm just blessed to have Chad join me for the Media on the Brain Seminar which I've been sharing for about the past year and a half.

Now what is coming over the next few days?

First of all, we covered part 1, TV in your brain, the good news.

And Chad gave you some good news about how the Bible can bring a positive effect to your mind.

We also talked about what TV is doing to our brains.

It's mostly not good when it comes to this theatrical entertainment, but right now we're going to meet the high priests of a new religion.

We're going to look at how media control and manipulation is taking place in our society today.

This afternoon, after lunch, for session 3, we're going to be looking at the topic of music.

This is a hard 1 to talk about for me personally.

You'll hear my personal testimony on music, a very brief, just 2 minute blip on some of my background in that personally and some stories about Chad and I growing up together outside of the church.

We both came into the church later in life and we're going to talk about this very very important issue of music this afternoon.

Immediately after that, addicted and immersed.

We're going to be talking about the brain and addictions and how addictions work in the brain and specifically we're going to take on 1 important media addiction out there and that's video gaming.

If you missed the first session we pointed out how video gaming is an official addiction now in the psychiatry community.

And so come for the afternoon session to gain a little bit more of an understanding about why you can't help but do that thing you do, whatever it is.

We're gonna talk more about the brain, the pleasure receptors of the brain, how we have gotten an imbalance in our brains in regards to the pleasures of this world.

It's a small room, but we'll see if you can get there early for that 1.

Preparing the brain for the final controversy.

We're in a conference right now where we're looking at the topic of the great controversy and a lot of it takes place right here.

The issues in my own soul, in my own life, the frontal lobe which we talked about last session, that pesky limbic system which we talked about last session about how it just it brings us into more temptation more sin and how can we overcome and Chad's gonna bring some powerful information from that and we're doing it sort of a tag team thing all the way through.

Chad did I leave anything out as matters of business there?

Oh, by the way, the DVD set for the Media on the Brain and we can hit the recorder at this point because we're going to get started.

The media on the Brain DVD set, of course, is available.

If you're listening to this on the audio, you'll want to go to beltoftruthministries.com and you can access it there.

For the folks here at GYC, we do have a booth, again, if you just walked in, and you can pick up the DVDs there to get the rest of the material that we are not covering here today.

And I wanted to show this to you last time.

But this still very much relates to the topic of TV and your brain.

Before I hit play, I want to begin us with a word of prayer as we have our session.

Father in heaven, we thank you again for this privilege of being together to hear from you.

Lord, I pray that you would set aside all of our own preferences and opinions about things and set your speakers aside that we might not be a stumbling block.

We just pray that people would be able to hear you and make decisions in these last days.

Dmitri Christakis, a research scientist at Seattle Children's Hospital, will share with you some things.

I am a pediatrician, a researcher, and a parent, and I became those things in that order.

The reason the sequencing is important is because even though I was a doctor who took care of children for a while, and I was a researcher who studied ways to keep them healthy, It wasn't until I became a parent that I got interested in, some might even say obsessed with, early learning.

Now why do these early experiences matter?

And in the first 2 years of life it actually triples in size.

It's an extraordinary period of brain growth unparalleled over the life course and you can see that here.

Here is both brain growth over the lifespan and you can see how steep the rise is early on and it continues to grow until about age 20 and I'll let you guys in the audience find yourselves over on the right there and see why you had such a hard time finding your car keys this morning.

Now we know from decades of research that too little stimulation early on is bad for brain development.

Now PET scans are measures of brain function.

The brighter colors show more brain activity.

And on the left is a PET scan of a normal kindergartner.

And on the right is a PET scan of a child who was raised in a horribly neglected environment.

This is actually a PET scan from a child who was raised in a Romanian orphanage and was profoundly neglected early in life.

And you'll notice that there are areas of his brain that show no activity at all.

It didn't develop as a result of too little stimulation.

Now this is a horrific example of too little stimulation and the untoward consequences of it.

But the question we've had in our lab for some time is, what about too much?

Is it actually possible to overstimulate the developing brain or, more appropriately, to inappropriately stimulate the developing brain in ways that are actually not beneficial, but harmful.

And this is important because we're technologizing childhood today in a way that's unprecedented.

In 1970, the average age at which children began to watch television regularly was 4 years, like this cute little girl here.

And today, based on research that we've done, it's 4 months.

It's not just how orally they watch, but how much they watch.

The typical child before the age of 5 is watching about 4 and a half hours of TV a day.

That represents as much as 40% of their waking hours.

Many of you probably have not seen Baby Einstein, but I will show you a random 20 second clip from Baby Einstein Day on the Farm and here it is.

In that 20 second clip there were 7 scene changes, about 1 every 3 seconds.

It's about the most exhausting day on the farm since John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

And of course, it's nothing like being on a real farm, right?

Adults watching this find it discombobulating because your mind is trying to make a coherent narrative out of this.

03-Music and the Last-days Deception

Our Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the truths you have given to us.

Lord, I pray that you would humble us to receive your message and hear your words clearly to our heart, right where we need to hear it.

Father, if we need to be convicted as a people, as individuals, we pray for that.

Even if it hurts, Lord, we want to hear what you have to say to us.

Music is everywhere in our culture today.

From the ball game, to the worship service, the birthday party, the wedding celebration, the job site, the shopping mall, the restaurant, and the office.

So is this an important topic to talk about or what?

Now I've got to say of all 6 parts that we are going through at GYC, this is the 1 that's most difficult for me to talk about, personally.

My name is Scott Ritzema, by the way, those of you who are new to the room.

I teach Bible at Great Lakes Adventist Academy, And I've only been in the church for 5 years.

Prior to being in the church, I had a rather sordid youth, and you can see on the screen an unfortunate image of yours truly in the band that I played in in high school.

Now the most interesting thing about these images, and I'm going to spare you the sound of the music, but the most interesting thing about these images, to me, I'm the 1 in the center with the black on, you see the grotesque-looking makeup, and if I were to play the image of the band playing, it's obviously, it's worldly, but this was at a church.

This was actually at a, it was a Halloween party at a church and this is the barn off-site and the church and so I come to you not as somebody who has always had a disdain and distaste for worldly music and I've always loved the pure sacred and holy and simple music of God.

God has had to do a work in me on this issue of music in a major major way.

From playing bass guitar in the band to being a Napster addict in college when you could download all the music you wanted for free on Napster to today where God has recreated me in this area.

Our text that we've been working with today is Romans 12 verse 2.

Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

We need God to transform us in this area as well as or maybe more importantly even than some other areas.

But when it came to my musical taste, it was all about my own style, my own way of doing it, my own preferences, and I'll be honest with you, music was an idol to me.

I'm gonna hand the floor over to Chad and Fadia Kruiser who've been presenting on this session with us as well.

Now notice, are you turning my microphone on?

Gospel workers, once again, as Scott and I grew up together, actually I was in that picture with him, I was in the crowd as they were playing their music there, but it says this, but it is sometimes difficult to discipline the singers.

Many want to do things after their own what?

They object to consultation and are impatient under leadership.

Well-mature plans are needed in the service of God.

Common sense is an excellent thing in the worship of the Lord." It's interesting that she says that you need common sense in the worship of the Lord, because we're at a point with music and styles that actually there is no common sense anymore to a degree, but she says somehow we need common sense in that.

But then notice what it says in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Idol which many profess Sabbath-keeping Christians worship.

Now, Scott said it, I can say the same thing.

I almost didn't like being around anything if the music wasn't playing.

And I wasn't a professed Sabbath keeper, I didn't even hardly know that there were Sabbath keepers on the planet, literally.

But the point being, can it be that we make an idol out of our music?

And I think the answer is absolutely yes.

Sacred music is not congenial to their what?

Sacred music, holy music, is not congenial.

It doesn't fit with the tastes of many people.

That there was certain music that I did not like.

And maybe some of you can say, oh I feel the very same way.

You don't like certain music, and the fact is, is because there's certain things that we have tasted that we liked, and so as a result, generally when we like certain things, it causes us not to like certain other things, right?

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Series

GYC 2013 Seminar: Media On the Brain

01-TV and Your Brain: The Good News

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

01-TV and Your Brain: The Good News

1h

02-By Beholding We Become Slaves

1h

03-Music and the Last-days Deception

1h

04-Addicted and Immersed

1h

05-The End of Boredom

1h 12m

06-Preparing the Brain for the Final Controversy

1h 23m

Sound Doctrine