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Metaphor for Youth Ministry - Batman

Have you seen the move Batman? No, not the new one, the 1989 Tim Burton creation? Where Michel Keaton plays Batman and Jack Nicholson plays the joker? It’s a great film. I think Jack Nicholson is one of the best actors alive and Keaton played a fine batman. That movie got fine reviews , so why make a new one? What were Christopher and Jonathan Nolan thinking? Critics abounded until the film’s release made$300 million faster than any film in history.
People compared Heath Ledger to Nicholson until the release and then all comparisons ended. People stopped talking about Nicholson’s role or even any of the Batman movies that came before 2005. That’s because Jack Nicholson played the joker perfectly well for 1989, but the world today demands a greater complexity.  The ‘he-got-dropped-in-acid’ explanation doesn’t work anymore. We want complicated characters. The Nolan’s don’t even try to explain the Joker’s wounds. His multiple explanations are more a sign of the depth of his disturbance than the cause of it.
In the same way, the way we did church in the 1980s was brilliant, but the world is ready to embrace a much deeper and more complicated approach to church. We should welcome this movement and let it challenge us to communicate deeper and broader than we ever have before. As you watch the innocence of Nicholson’s trickster Batman fade into the serial killing sociopath played by Ledger, you might think the world is going downhill. Yet I see a world that is now open to discuss things that it used to be afraid to discuss and the church should be a forefront in the discussion. I believe the Spirit has lead many people to look for a complicated gritty faith and some people may feel disenfranchised from the easy answers of 20 years ago. The disenfranchisement is not a comment on the answers. Those answers were correct and they still are correct.  Yet to help people understand them we need to embrace the gritty (sometime dark) nuances of life and ethics.