While I occasionally enjoy writing about pop culture, I decided long ago not give undue attention to cultural angles in attempting to communicate the Gospel. The vision of The Forerunner is to exalt the Lordship of Jesus Christ and apply a biblical worldview to all areas of life.

Every so often, however, a cultural phenomenon grabs my attention by demanding that it be seen and heard.

The star of Two and a Half Men, Angus Jones, who plays the “half-man” Jake, is the subject of a YouTube video gone viral in which he pleads with his fans not to watch the show any longer.

“Please stop watching it. I’m on the show and I don’t want to be on it,” Jones says. “Please stop filling your head with filth.”

Nineteen-year-old Jones has been on the show since he was 10, but says he doesn’t want to be on it anymore. In the two part-video, he talks about his conversion to Christ and rants on about the “filth” of Two and a Half Men. The sitcom, which used to feature bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen until he was fired two years ago, remains heavy with sexual innuendo.

I discovered this video once I saw that my traffic had spiked in the last few days. Forerunner.com customarily gets between 1000 to 3000 visitors per day (depending on which statistics log I look at). In the past two days, our traffic has more than quadrupled. The reason is that people have been confusing forerunnerchronicles.com with our website as they have searched for the video. We also have a popular YouTube channel that recently passed the 3 million view mark.

Since The Forerunner newspaper was first published in 1981, numerous other publications and media ministries have arisen with that name. I was fortunate enough to have obtained the URL in 1996 just prior to the explosion in web site publishing.

Now I have begun to get frequent messages assuming that The Forerunner is the ministry that produced Angus Jones’ video. The main difference between our two groups is that I am not a Seventh Day Adventist and have some serious misgivings about the theology of the Adventist Church. But that is no matter. I wish Angus Jones well and I commend him for standing up for his Christian faith.

I have to admit I have never watched Two and a Half Men, although I have seen two of producer Chuck Lorre’s other hit programs, Dharma and Greg and The Big Bang Theory. I find the latter to be interesting in that no other sitcom uses such intellectual concepts as the Anthropic Principle as the preface for comedy. Yet Lorre is also compelled to include some of the crudest, most tasteless remarks on television to ruin what it otherwise some smart humor.