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On October 20, 2018 By In Family and Children, Men

The Father-Leader

The Faith of our Children

I sat across the table from a father holding his beautiful five-month-old daughter. On my lap, I have my own infant son and another of mine, a toddler, underfoot. Somewhere in between the prattling about of these tiny humans, we were actually able to get a few complete thoughts out. Through the years, one particular thought has come up in our conversations over and over again, “what can we do to ensure our children stay in the faith?” Neither of us was raised by what we would call Christian fathers. We both came to Christ in high school in the context of a public school Bible club and youth group. Back then, we would lament the milquetoast Christianity of those raised in the church. Perhaps it was “old hat” to them or they had just spent years going through the motions – and now they felt no sense of urgency. Or they didn’t share our sense of urgency.

Now both of us went on to marry virtuous women raised in the church – both of the Reformed tradition. And the Lord has blessed us with Children to lead and guide in the way. I explained to my fellow father, how my wife and I had our son in a Christian School. I shouted to our five-year-old at the other end of the dining table, asking him to recite the scriptures he had been memorizing the week before. As if somehow this answered the question weighing on our hearts. The Christian School will certainly help my children learn scripture, discipline their habits, and train them in a variety of academic disciplines, but it will never replace the single greatest influence on my child’s future trajectory: their father.

A Father’s Lasting Influence

Christian Father Fatherhood Leadership DadIt’s not hard to see how much influence a father has on his child’s future. From a worldly perspective, this is often referred to as the “birth lottery.” Writing for Business Insider, Alison Griswold writes, “the amount of money people make is strongly predicted by what their parents earn…” Even in an age of unprecedented social mobility, a father can significantly determine one’s potential opportunities for education, friends, a spouse, and jobs. What college you end up at or who your wife might be, is nearly predetermined by the circumstances created by your father.

Just as fathers play a significant role in determining the worldly circumstances by which children leave the household and enter society, so to do fathers determine the spiritual circumstances by which children enter the faith. The Book of Proverbs takes this a step further to say that the crown of a father is not his children, but his grandchildren. “Children’s children are the crown of old men,” (Proverbs 17:6). A father’s impact is then not merely on his immediate children, but multigenerational. To be a father is to represent the trajectory of an entire lineage. Certainly, the reader can see that the father is an important role which can either bring forth a series of covenantal blessings or a generational disaster. It is for this reason that every father that calls himself a Christian must be wholly committed to the success of his wife, his children, and his grandchildren.

Christian Father Fatherhood Leadership Dad

The Father’s Commitment

This commitment to the success of your family is a discipline and habit. It requires the grace of God and a spirit of humility. God’s grace isn’t infused on passive men but requires men to submit and obey the Lord. Grace is free, but not painless. As Flannery O’Connor rightly quipped, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” This is why St. Paul encourages you to, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12) As a father, I have often failed to meet what I understood to be my fatherly obligations. I am often impatient with my wife and children, imprudent with my time, and selfish with my resources. Do not despair. The conviction here is God’s means of renewing his call for you to lead your family. Acknowledge to God and to your family that you have not been the father and leader that our Lord expected you to be. Explain that you truly desire their success. Wives and children need to know that you love and need them.

The Father-Leader Explained

Christian Father Fatherhood Leadership DadA father-leader must recognize that his family is an essential part of his own salvation. He needs the prayers of his wife and children. He needs their gifts and even their weaknesses. The wife and children the Lord has given you are part of God’s plan of forming you into the image of his Son, therefore the father-leader must recognize where his family is going and be patient. I often remark that my sins are most evident in the sins of my children. Fathers should then look at our sins as a clue to where our children will also struggle. This is why it is so important that Fathers are working out their own issues, so as to avoid their owns sins being, “visited unto the third and fourth generation.” To avoid passing on their sins as their children’s inheritance.

Father-leaders reject that they are fathers by the mere happenstance of biological functions, but see their role as ordained by the sovereign God. Yet this does not mean that he should demand or expect immediate results. A relationship of influence is a privilege that a father must earn, guard, and protect by investing in life-long relationships with each member of his family. This requires time, sacrifice, patience, and humility as you continue to demonstrate your commitment to your family. Your family wants to see in you a certain consistency that they can count on. Commitments must be evident, your wife and children know what it means to be “on your calendar.” They can see how you treat those whom you respect and honor. If raising faithful children is important to you, then you must strive to be more than a sperm-donor and more than a financier of food, lodging, and clothing – you must be a leader demonstrating his commitment to his children by fulfilling his God-given responsibility to lead his family.

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On September 29, 2018 By In Culture, Men, Politics, Theology, Wisdom

Principalities and Powers, Part I

The Principalities and Powers, Part 1
guest post by Richard Bledsoe 

Paul contends that with the death of Christ on the Cross, there was an overcoming of the Principalities and the Powers (Col. 2:15).  A great deal has been written on this subject over the last 60 years.1 What was for a long time either ignored, or regarded by liberal scholars as a mythological element in his thought, recaptured scholarly imagination after World War II when it seemed brutally and baldly clear that such entities as Paul describes had been let loose on the earth once more in civilization-destroying World Wars. Principalities and Powers are not themselves personal demonic figures, but are rather elements of the creation that in and of themselves bring order, authority, symmetry, and method to the world. Examples of Principalities and Powers would be the state, the family, the clan and tribe, and the nation. In the modern world, new examples of Principalities could be industry and the media. Each of these entities in a fallen creation cease to be subordinate to God as the creator, and attempt to establish their own hegemony and absoluteness. And, in each of these cases, the Principalities are linked to, and become subject to, personal demonic figures. Paul makes clear that in the ancient world, the Principalities were tutors and keepers of the world, and functioned often in a relatively benign way. With the coming of Christ, and with His death and resurrection, the Principalities and Powers are “disarmed and…triumphed over”, and again are called to take their rightful ruling place under the power of the now triumphant King.  While the war has been decisively won, this also initiated new phases of radical rebellion on the part of the Powers, and the church now lives by constant warfare and battle against these Powers through history (Ephesians 6:10-20). There are at least three phases of the conquest of the Principalities and the Powers through history that interest me here. There are many more, but one must necessarily simplify in order to say anything.

(more…)

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On August 18, 2018 By In Books, Culture, Family and Children, Interviews, Men, Podcast, Politics, Scribblings

The Importance of Earnest Being

A guest post by G. Shane Morris

The digital ink spilled over Canadian clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson by now could fill a metaphorical ocean, but I want to venture what I think may be an unexplored cause of his popularity: his lack of guile or pretense.

Anyone who has spent any time in comment box debates or hasn’t been living in an undersea cave since the 2016 presidential election knows the tone of news commentary, opinion writing, and even journalism has taken a nasty turn. Of course, if you had asked someone following the 2012 election whether the partisan rancor in America could get any worse, he might have shrugged and said, “I don’t see how.” That person is probably hiding in a dark place right now, embarrassed by his lack of imagination.

Image result for jordan peterson beard

It’s not enough to disagree with someone, anymore. If a person favors a different policy, has come to a different quotient after dividing the benefits of his or her political party by its drawbacks, or even fails to subscribe to an ascendant gender theory of more recent provenance than my five-year-old daughter, such a person is not merely wrong. He or she is too stupid to be classified as a vertebrate (in which case we mock), or else irredeemably wicked (in which case we call him or her a Nazi or a Cultural Marxist). These mutually exclusive attacks are alternated from day to day, often against the same people.

But what if not just merely wrong, but pitiably wrong–even deceived–were still serviceable categories? What if instead of automatically sorting ourselves into warring ideological or partisan factions hurling insults and abuse at one another, we called a ceasefire, met on neutral ground, and admitted, “Hey, I am just playing the part I thought I was supposed to play, but I don’t really think you are a venomous arthropod. Let’s calm down and figure this out.”?

That’s where Jordan Peterson seems to be coming from. (more…)

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On May 21, 2018 By In Culture, Men, Theology, Wisdom

Suffering Doesn’t Make You Stronger

There is an idea out there that goes something like this: “Hard times produce great men, great men produce good times, good times produce weak men, and weak men produce bad times. Repeat.” While this cycle seems to have some truth in it, this idea is based on a subtle lie.

The lie originates in the pervasive idea that suffering and hardship produces strength. The clichéd phrase that is thrown around is “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and this line has appeared in various movies (e.g. The Dark Knight and Avengers) and songs (e.g. Kelly Clarkson and Kanye West). A cliché is a culture’s catechism and our culture knows this catechism by heart. This idea is also behind much of the #Metoo movement.

The idea that suffering makes you stronger comes from Nietzsche. And just saying that should already cause us to be concerned with the idea. The specific phrase appears in his work Twilight of the Idols, but he talks about the idea in other places, like in his work Beyond Good and Evil. In that work, he says: “Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong.”[1] This statement is a foundational idea for Nietzsche: true freedom is only for the strong. The natural question that follows then is how does one become strong? Nietzsche cautions his readers that they might not be ready for this: “Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.”[2] Can you really handle this, he is asking. If you think you can handle this then you need to realize that the true test of one’s spirit is how much of the truth you can endure. The thinking here is that truth is verified by experiencing some great trial or struggle. Nietzsche warns his readers: “You should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous game one could play…”[3] Through your greatest struggles and tests, you become strong.

This is a central idea for Nietzsche. And he is plain wrong.

Now it can seem like he is right. Last time I went through something hard I learned a lot. A key example could be an exam. I sweated my eyeballs out and I learned a lot. See Nietzsche is right, right? Nope, he’s still wrong.

The reality is that suffering and tests are not in themselves good or bad. It really depends on the person. As a teacher, I see this in my students all the time. One student takes an exam and he works really hard and he learns a lot. Good job. Another student takes the same exam and doesn’t work hard. He struggles terribly through the exam and he didn’t learn a thing. Is he stronger? Not really.  (more…)

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On May 11, 2018 By In Culture, Men, Theology, Worship

A Call for Masculine Grace

I was visiting an out of town church recently and the minister was preaching on Paul’s description of how we are called to freedom by God’s grace. While the sermon proclaimed the centrality of grace in the Christian life and how it makes us free, it was missing a key component. I would describe this component as masculine grace.

I will come back to what I mean by this term but first it is important to say that we are saved by grace; it is the gift of God. We don’t bring anything to the table. The only thing required for salvation is that you are a sinner. In this sense, the bar for entering salvation is as low as it can get.

But the temptation is to think that we will stay at this low entry point: every Christian will always be the same weakling sinner he was when he started and he will never move beyond this starting point. Now it is true that we never leave the foot of the cross until we are done with this life but it is important to understand that salvation has an impact on us here and now. Another way to say this is that if a person does not really change after the point of salvation then it would be legitimate to ask if the person has really experienced salvation. Which is to say, the gospel changes people. It really does. So how does grace change people?

The only way we can answer that question is by looking to the standard of God’s character and law. This is what I mean by masculine grace. Being the good Father that He is, God doesn’t leave us where He found us, dead in our sins, but He raises us up and matures us. A key way that He works this out in our lives is by showing us more and more what He is like. As challenging as it sounds, He is the standard of righteousness and holiness that we are shooting for in our own lives. This is God’s plan. He won’t settle for anything less and neither should we.

The danger then in speaking of grace is that we can make it sound like the bar is so low that we will always stay the messy creatures that we are. But we need to be careful with this kind of teaching on grace because it can actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We start out as wretched sinners and that is where we will always be. But that’s just not true. God’s work is efficacious and He really has brought us out of the darkness of sin. We really are the righteousness of God. (more…)

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On March 20, 2018 By In Culture, Men

Getting & Keeping Masculine Men in Church

Pen and ink drawing by C. R. Wiley

I recall, years ago, sitting in a class at Harvard Divinity School, and across from me sat an Indian woman–you know, from India–and she, in her words, was the pastor of a congregational church, (United Church of Christ,Christ, naturally).

She was a graduate of HDS and she had come back to school to take a few classes from her favorite professor. Her favorite was mine as well, Ralph Potter, a man who didn’t follow the fads, but instead taught classes that drew upon the riches of the Western tradition in a way that was welcoming and anything but strident. We read Montaigne, and Aristotle, and Gracian, even Augustine.

Her remark in class that day was one that made a real impression on me. It was something like this: “My education prepared me to confront patriarchy. I wish I had some patriarchs in my church. The most controlling people in my church are old women.”

I confess, my thought at that moment (which I didn’t vocalize) was, “Good luck with that, sister.”

One of the things I’m grateful for over my 30 plus years of ministry is I’ve had a lot of good men in my churches. Getting them into church and keeping them there hasn’t been a big problem for me. I’d say my congregations have been roughly split, 50/50 between men and women.

From all I’ve seen and heard, that’s unusual. And it isn’t just the result of belonging to a particular denomination, or holding to a particular theology. In two of the churches I formerly served my successors managed to drive the men out and return the ratios to something more like the norm–70/30 favoring women.

So, what’s my secret?

What follows are some bits of advice rooted mostly in common sense. Nothing terribly profound, although a few of them will likely trigger the feminists among my readers (if there are any of those among my readers).

Upcoming Touchstone Conference in Oct. C. R. Wiley will be one of the featured speakers.

First, if you want to reach men, it helps to be a man.

Now, I’m talking about reaching men who self-identify as men. This may be a shrinking demographic. If males of this sort do entirely die out I suppose this advice will be worthless. But I doubt that this will ever happen, utopian dreams of a gender-fluid world notwithstanding.

Let me add this caveat. You don’t need to be the most masculine man around. I’m of average height and build. I don’t talk incessantly about sports, or hunting, or even conservative politics. I have been a home improvement contractor and that does help, especially when it comes to relating to blue collar guys. But I don’t think that sort of thing is required.

You can’t be effeminate, though. That’s a real turn off to masculine men. Effeminate guys give masculine guys the creeps. If you have a feminine voice, or an effeminate manner, sorry, Jack, but you are unlikely to get masculine men into church.

Don’t get goofy about it.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but you shouldn’t make reaching men the focus of your church. The focus should be the truth of the gospel and living in obedience to it.

I’ve seen some guys who unintentionally make a caricature of masculinity by focusing on superficial markers of it. You know, sports, hunting, guns, that stuff. All those things are great, and I enjoy them. But men can also enjoy fine art, wine, even dancing.

Masculinity is more about stepping up to certain responsibilities as men, responsibilities often shared by women. But men do those things in ways that are in accord with manliness. But I think that comes somewhat naturally, without a lot of fanfare. Manliness isn’t a preening thing. It may even be characterized as a sort of disregard for appearances.

Reach out.

Over the years I’ve made a point of reaching out to men. That may seem like I’m contradicting my first point. But I don’t think so. I try to reach out to everyone. But being a man myself, there is a basis for contact that just doesn’t exist with other people.

Here’s what I mean. I usually make a point of getting together with a new guy to the church for lunch. Usually I wait for the guy to come to church a few times before I make that offer. Obviously, something like that doesn’t work with women or children. Furthermore, I do believe men have gifts and responsibilities that are unique to our sex. So being a man myself, I have a basis for speaking about those things with other men. I may not jump right to those things in this “getting to know you” lunch. But once the connection has been made and a measure of trust and openness is evident, I can do that.

Now for a few things that may seem superficial but I think send signals that men tend to read.

Have a firm, dry handshake, and look a guy in the eye.

This communicates frankness, but also reliability. I suspect that physical strength is being communicated subtlety in this way, too. (By the way, ladies, this won’t work for you. If you’re trying to reach men, better to be feminine. A woman who tries to match a man when it comes to strength, or frankness, is also creepy. Don’t like that? See my earlier point about utopian dreams.)

Ditch the emotional manipulation.

I’m thinking mostly about mawkish music and teary-eyed stories, and the like. I think those are like candy. They may get an emotional rise out of everyone, men included. But over time the law of diminishing returns seems to set in. And for men that comes quick.

Please, no hand holding, or any of that. And generally speaking the word “love” should be reserved for when you really mean it.

Refrain from touching another man’s wife or kids.

Touching doesn’t just communicate affection, it communicates ownership. There is something primal at work here, and it is politically incorrect to think in these terms, I know. Nevertheless reality is not politically correct. And you can be politically correct and turn your church into a women’s club, or you can submit to the facts and stop touching the members of another man’s family.

When you refrain from touching another man’s stuff, you subtlety communicate your respect for him. Now here’s how I do it. After service (or before) when I’m greeting people, I always reach out to shake the man’s hand first. If this is not practical, I don’t make an issue about it. But if the wife comes first, I wait for her to extend her hand to me. Then I respectfully shake her hand, taking something off the the grip. I never, ever move to hug her. If she leans in towards me to embrace, I will. But I do so briefly, and respectfully, but always–and I can’t stress this enough–always, with my eye turned toward the husband.

When the kids come by, I do the same thing. I always pay my respect to their father as I touch them.

This is not difficult. And it is all quite natural. I’ve never had anyone even remark about how I conduct myself. I just know that other men are at ease around me because I show proper regard for them.

That’s enough for now. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

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This essay was originally published at Patheos.

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