Whatever Happened to a Job Well Done?
April 29, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 11 comments
I know it’s Friday. In the past I said I wanted to post lighter Friday fare. But the topic today is one that I wanted to blog about yesterday; I was so angry at the time, I had to step back and chill for a day before attempting this or I might have used uncharitable language. Argh.
What got me so fired up? Well, long before this blog, there was another back in 2001. The blog was called The Boiled Frog Blog and it dealt with society’s constant turning up of the heat on us unsuspecting frogs until we’re cooked. That blog was a melange of hot political topics, pop culture analysis, Christianity, and my calling out some of the stupid things that people do.
For one day—and one day only—I am resurrecting the tone and character of The Boiled Frog Blog to address an issue that has become absolutely maddening for me.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fact that I felt like many of us are becoming To-Do List Christians. We absolutely love the Lord, but our usefulness to Him is limited by the constant pressure we are under because of the million and a half things we have on our to-do lists.
I’ve been increasingly struggling with the fact that every day I’m buried under a host of things I have to do. What makes this infinitely more difficult is when I have to rely on other professional people to help, but those other people only make things worse for my clearing of my to-do list.
I blogged about Life’s Little Annoyances, but I’m through being charitable or circumspect like I was in that post. I simply want to know why it seems that people cannot do their jobs right anymore. Folks have a supposed skill they perform for other people, but why is it that so many are incapable of actually following through on that skill?
My wife’s birthday is now a bust. I’d secured a professional service to create a wonderful gift for her. But when I went to pick it up, the owner started off by saying, “Now I know you’re going to be upset….” When I saw the result of what I was paying for, I was more than upset, I was totally boggled at what she was laying out for me to see. The gift was totally ruined.
My parents used that company for many years and the results were always excellent. In recent years, there had a barely perceptible quality slide, but they still did a reasonable job. Not any more—at least not for me. I’d love to name the company’s name here, but that would ruin the gift—should I get a decent version of it after talking to the company’s regional director today.
When my wife got home, she lamented that the car had been made almost undriveable by the Toyota dealership we took it to for service that morning. Seems in the midst of a routine tune-up, they were unable to balance our tires correctly. The odyssey of the unbalanced tires has now stretched through two sets of tires we’ve owned in the three year life of that car. We are now at five times that some company or other messed with the tires and could not balance them afterwards. I’ve had to fix this each time by taking it to Bob Sumerel Tires here in my area, who easily corrected the problem every time. But my question is, when did it become so hard for a car or tire dealership to balance tires? Two Toyota dealerships, a Tire Discounters, and a Costco were baffled by this newfangled tire balancin’ thing they do to tires today. The cost to me is a lot of wasted gas and a day’s worth of time lost on tires no one except Bob Sumerel seems capable of balancing.
It took more than thirty-six hours on hold with my satellite Internet provider to correct the bungled antenna repoint by the guy who repointed the antenna at my provider’s request. Me? I didn’t want anyone to touch my system lest it crumble to dust. The mere fact that someone was coming out to make changes had me anticipating disaster. And I got it in spades. The repointer also blew up the satellite modem in the process. I had to use my most livid voice to prevent my ISP charging me for a new modem that Joe Spaceshot killed in the process of “helping me out.”
When we needed some routine exhaust work on my wife’s car done, it took five trips back to yet another different mechanic shop to get the car-shaking rattle out they added in the process of replacing the catalytic converter. Five times. Finally the owner of the shop stepped in and did it himself. Since then, no more earthquake when we drive.
The Carrier heat pump we purchased to replace an old Trane that had failed has been serviced about fifteen times since we bought it less than three years ago—and still Carrier cannot seem to eliminate the unearthly moaning the unit makes when it switches modes. They keep telling me that my unit and one other one in the area are real headscratchers. Frankly, I’m tired of being the guy who gets the oddball unit, the one-in-a-thousand product infected by service-resistant gremlins from Uranus.
Just yesterday, I stood in the seafood section of my local Kroger yelling for several minutes for someone, anyone to come get my fish for me, all the while my impatient four-year old son is heading for one far-flung corner of the store after another. And though I hate looking like an imbecile standing there yelling for help, lately it has become my tactic in every JC Penney, Kohl’s, Sears or Target I visit. These stores have become utterly devoid of employees save for one or two cashiers. Truth is—and is management listening?—I’m going to stop shopping at all of them if I can’t get help after reasonably searching for someone who actually works there.
Adelphia took over the cable and high-speed Internet service for my little town. In the last year I have called them six times to come out to my house to do an assessment for hookup. Three times I had an appointment for someone to come out and three times no one ever showed up. No one even called to say, “Sorry about missing the appointment.” If they are not interested in adding a customer, how interested would they be if you were their customer and you had a problem? My assessment? Not interested in the least. In fact, I suspect that Adelphia wishes all their customers would just leave them alone. I hope they get their wish, but not in the way they expected.
And the list goes on and on.
Honestly, every single time I’ve had to use a professional service this year, there has been an issue. Every single time. I just assume it will be the norm anymore. And it means that I will once again have to drive out of my way, spend endless hours on hold, or argue for the righteousness of my cause with some customer service person who is dreaming of a long getaway to Cancun under a lazy Caribbean sun right as they are speaking with me. Every service call requires an autopsy be performed. And my to-do list never gets any smaller, simply stacking up with all the things that should have been done right the first time, but seem to be beyond the people who made, serviced, or provided the help I thought I would be getting from them one time and one time only.
And this is not just a problem with people “in the world.” It used to be that you could count on Christians to follow-through, but I gave up on using the little Christian Yellow Pages that circulates in my area because the service was as bad or worse than what I got from folks who made no claims about being buddies with the Lord. That Ichthus on the back of the exterminator’s or painter’s van or cleverly placed for maximum effect in their ad? Merely for show. Does not reflect any reality that I’m familiar with.
All I want to know is whatever happened to a job well done? When did our pride in our work vanish? I know that when I used to work in roles like these, I did my absolute best every single time. And I took it personally when there were problems, even if something went wrong that was out of my control. I never made customers feel like idiots or treated them like Neanderthals. If it meant that I lost money in order to make everything right the first time, then that was business.
I don’t remember my parents having to get the plumber to come back three and four times to fix a problem. The electrician did their rewiring right the first time around. There were no leaks after a new roof was installed. The carpeting my folks added in their basement remodel didn’t bubble up or get loose in spots. The replacement window company put the new windows in and my Mom never had to call them back once, even for a simple question.
Does anyone do this anymore?
I will say this; one company has never let me down. In fact, they usually go one better than I expect. That’s Amazon.com. Not only do I get great prices from them, but they always deliver on time (and usually several days before they promised), plus they give added perks. Just a few weeks ago I got a special edition DVD of Disney’s restored Bambi. It was a free gift from Amazon for my many reviews I have written on their site. That was a nice touch. They and Bob Sumerel Tires have me as a customer forever.
But what about everyone else? Why has every service call become a pain? Sure, the car dealership may give you a free rental while they are working on your car, but the point is lost if your car has to go back repeatedly to fix the problem the mechanics actually created during what was a routine tune-up. When my car is worse off than when I brought it in, then something’s wrong.
So today, if you have a company that has given you fits, write a comment and name them here. This blog keeps showing up higher and higher in Google’s rankings, so maybe enough complaints will get someone’s attention. On the other hand, if you have a company that has routinely given you stellar service, please give them a round of applause here. Companies that do it right the first time need to get our business.
Thank you. And may all your business interactions be gremlin-free.
PS—Don’t even get me going on what’s happened to Blogger lately….
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The Gospel’s Only Choice: For Him or Against Him?
April 27, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 9 comments
Conrad Gempf over at Not Quite Art, Not Quite Living makes a very strong case that the blunt truth of the Gospel isn’t meant to be massaged and done up with daisies so that it is palatable. It’s not a politically correct message and never will be. Moreover, the Holy Spirit fills the Gospel messengers not only when they are received, but when they are rejected!
Here’s an excerpt:
The early Christians’ idea of being missional wasn’t about shaping the gospel in a way that made sense to everyone and conformed to their culture and expectations. The early Christians’ gospel conformed to Jesus. And Jesus was about provoking a decision: are you for him or against him?
As always, read the whole thing!
We’ve been talking quite a bit about issues confronting men this last week. I noted that David Morrow over at www.churchformen.com is looking for ways to masculinize the Church. I think what 
Conrad points out nails it: you don’t “pansy up” the Gospel. It’s an in-your-face, take it or leave it message. If our churches were less concerned about keeping every last wishy-washy, never-will-get-there slacker who darkens the sanctuary, maybe we’d get back to preaching messages that appeal to men, messages that ask something of the hearers, messages like, “Choose this day whom you shall serve.” We may lose even some of the people we thought we had, but at least we would know that the dross had fled and the gold remained. Then maybe we could actually get something done for God.
A half-hearted message is no message at all in the Kingdom of God.
Update: Conrad hits another homer with his follow-up post asking for whom the Church exists. Great, great stuff and definitely needed to be read by everyone.
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Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality
April 26, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Apologetics, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Grace, Love, Maturity Feedback : 14 comments
If you are single, this message is for you. If you’re married, this message is for you. I believe that we all need to confront the state of single life today in Christian people, both as marrieds and as singles. We must examine the messages we’re sending and what we can do as a Church to make life more fulfilling for young people confronting singleness.
What I want to say to you singles is hard to hear, but it needs to be said up front. The truth is that we’ve let you down. Worse still, the solutions to the problems you face won’t be resolved in your generation. The hope, though, is that you’ll be the ones who help the Church do a better job managing this issue in the generations that come after you.
Everyone is single at some point. I was single till I was 33. In a sex-soaked culture that perpetually whispers lies about the true nature of sex, that’s almost an eternity to be single. My body may have made it to my wedding night in one piece, but what our pornographic culture did to my mind is shameful. I think most Christian men know what I mean.
I understand how hard it is to block out the siren call of a pornographic culture like ours. Singles are sent an unending stream of lustful thoughts by the American entertainment culture, the mainstream media, and even our schools and universities. Where we Christians have let singles down in the Church is that we send a purity message that is almost impossible to bear in a society hellbent on countering every word of it. We’ve laid upon the shoulders of today’s singles a very heavy cross.
As I mentioned in several of my posts, including the recent “The Problem of Porn,” if Christians are to be all God desires us to be we’ve got to start thinking counter-culturally. Many of the problems we face today are ingrained in the very fiber of our culture and we Christians have bought into that culture without understanding the consequences of our actions. If we’re to lighten the heavy cross we’ve put on the backs of single Christians, we’ve got to start radically thinking outside the box.
Many of the most intractable issues in addressing singleness are bound up in several other problems that are in themselves difficult to unwind. But Christ is Victor and I believe that if we’re honest and carefully unpack these problems, start talking about them, and most of all praying to see God’s way, perhaps the next generation will be spared what today’s singles must bear. That way of preparation is highly involved, so please bear with me in what may seem like the completely off-subject reasoning that follows.
One of the principle lies we’ve bought into is the way we think about a young person’s life after high school. Our society has made college mandatory, but I believe that a day is soon coming when college costs will be beyond what Christian parents can reasonably handle (especially if those parents acknowledge that they need to slow down their hectic lives and consider work that keeps them near home, even if it makes less money.) It’s not unreasonable to think that a college education at a good school will soon run a quarter million dollars for four years. With our culture now claiming that graduate school is a virtual necessity in the global economy, education costs become even more prohibitive.
I mentioned in my post on pornography that six-year olds have become burnouts due to parents filling their schedules to ensure the kids will get into the best schools by having a “schooling résumé” loaded with one expensive, esoteric learning or sports experience after another. Pollster George Barna has even found that Christian parents care more about their children’s educational futures than they do that their children know Jesus deeply and intimately. This simply cannot continue.
We Christians need to start talking about alternatives to college and grad school. We need to consider setting up trade schools and intensive apprenticeship programs (like those in some European nations) that will teach our children highly desirable skills, especially for jobs that cannot easily be taken outside the United States. We also must find a way to keep our children from assuming the survival of the fittest mentality that permeates today’s work environment.
We must own up to the reality that colleges today, even Christian ones, have become little more than a means to cheap, commitment-less sex with a degree on top. If high school is hard to get through in one piece, then college is impossible. I went to a Christian college; parents, it is no safety net.
There was a tiny chapel on my campus where I would pray. It wasn’t particularly popular, so I was usually alone at the time of day I would frequent it. On the altar of that chapel was a student prayer journal. I used to pray for the students who left requests. The primary request was for God to forgive a student who had sinned sexually while enrolled at the college. (The second most requested prayer played into that: young women who were ashamed of torturing themselves through various eating disorders in order to supposedly stay desirable to the men on campus.)
At secular universities, the situation is even more dire. Hookups—commitment-less sexual encounters with acquaintances and virtual strangers—are now the norm for most collegians. Anymore, almost no one makes it out of college a virgin, even the Christian kids who take abstinence pledges.
One reason for this failure is we parents from the day our kids are born have done a terrible job instilling in them a complete Christian worldview. Not just a moral code, but an ability to rationally think like real Christians. In our culture, Darwinian worldviews dominate, even among Christians. We’re living every day in survival of the fittest mode. And because we are repeatedly told that we’re little more than accidents of nature, especially by college professors, we begin to think that our morality is based on fairy tales. Given that we already believe that education is more important than faith in Christ, as Barna noted, it’s a short trip to this kind of pitiful reasoning.
And so the solution begins:
- We need to train our children in a comprehensive Christian worldview.
- We need to start developing alternative means of post-secondary education.
But these two are not enough. Truth is, people are simply waiting too long to marry. Part of this is because Christians are caught up in the materialism of our times; we look identical to the perishing world around us, especially in America. Finding alternative means of living, alternative Christian communities that reduce the need for every family to duplicate the goods of every other family, can provide us with ways to step off the treadmill and start living less as rugged individuals and more like the Body of Christ. Learning to live with less and to be more dependent on each other will help us weather the tough times that may be coming for those who claim the name of Christ. (For a more developed view on this, I’ve blogged extensively here.)
The expectation that a young person will wade through the sexual minefield of college, then spend several years as a single while building up a career, is an increasing difficult burden for unmarried Christians struggling in our pornographic culture. The apostle Paul said that it is better to marry than to burn, yet we expect young Christians to spend almost ten years (on average today) on fire before they finally settle down. Is it any wonder that they fail in this, or that sexually transmitted diseases afflict half the people in this country—and almost as many in the Christian community? Who would wish that on their child?
I believe that long before young people graduate from high school, we older Christians should work harder to bring couples together at an earlier age. If the expectation of being away at college is removed, this becomes possible. If we consider doing more to help young people pick suitable mates, they could be married even while they are working in the alternative trade schooling and apprenticeship programs we are developing. Yes, this flies in the face of how our culture tells people they must find a mate, but I believe that young people will see through the cultural lies if we build in them a proper world view. If we set an expectation that young teens get teaching in our churches on what it means to be married, setup “manhood” and “womanhood” classes and restore traditional rites of passage within the church, and start setting a foundation and expectation of maturity at a younger age, we can make this possible.
- We need to prepare our children to live with less.
- We need to teach our children what true community living is and build those communities.
- We need to train our children to conduct themselves in a mature, godly, marriageable manner at a younger age.
Key to this is the acknowledgment that our generation is responsible for the generation that comes after us. To my generation I say, It’s time to grow up and look beyond ourselves. If people in our churches look only after their own kids, none of this will work. I believe that each man and each woman in a church must not only ensure the spiritual growth and maturity of his or her own children, but the children of every other family in the church. (Even nature teaches us this truth; herd animals will gang together to encircle and protect the young against predators, even those young that are not physically their own.) I can’t ignore my church neighbor’s child. Nor can you. Sadly, we in the church have spent too much time living out our rugged individualism to care about this crucial truth. We look at the troublesome young people in our churches and say, “Someone else’s problem.” We couldn’t be more wrong.
I believe that if we start developing these five areas
- Training our children in a comprehensive Christian worldview.
- Developing alternative means of post-secondary education.
- Preparing our children to live with less.
- Teaching our children what true community living is and building those communities.
- Training our children to conduct themselves in a mature, godly, marriageable manner at a younger age.
we can make headway against the poisonous sexual lies of our culture and stem the relational heartache that afflicts too many of our kids. Even for the already married, these life changes would eventually cut our divorce rates, too.
If these sound like radical ideas, they are. But radical ideas are needed. The current solutions we’ve erected simply do not work; we’re literally handing our children unprepared into the hands of the Enemy.
To today’s singles I can only say hang in there. I walked the same, difficult path you’re now on because no one in my era was willing to face the truth. I know how rough it is out there. Singleness is a gift and most people don’t possess it in our culture, so it’s hard being single today. (If you want to write me, I will pray for you and read your stories.) It may sound simplistic, but stay true to the Lord. Find folks who are willing to make you a part of their family. Watch how they live and learn from them. Don’t let Christian singles groups be your only outlet for godly relationships. Maybe even stay away from them altogether if they only cause you more problems. Ask the Lord to make you a desirable marriage partner and be willing to listen to Him when he tells you things you may not want to hear about yourself, especially concerning what you may need to alter in your life. Keep yourself busy, for idle hands are the devil’s tools. Devote this time to the Lord while you have it; when you eventually have a family of your own, you won’t have the the kinds of opportunities to serve Him that you have now. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day; don’t worry about tomorrow. And if you’re spending all your time looking for a mate, stop; God has a way of surprising you with a mate when when you cease your earnest searching and let Him be in charge of this part of your life. Most of all, singles, lend us your time, your stories and your hard-learned lessons in the area of sexual purity so we can help the next generation avoid all the hell you and I have been needlessly put through.
I had hoped to develop more on this, but I’ve already gone too long. Thanks for staying with me. Let me know what you think and let’s see if we can make this a reality.
God bless you all.
Tags: Apologetics, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Grace, Love, Marriage, Maturity, Single, Singleness, Unmarried
The Problem of Porn
April 24, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Church Issues, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Grace, Holiness, Maturity, Men, Spiritual Warfare, Work Feedback : 35 comments
My recent post, Another Look at the Church's Missing Men, has struck a major chord among those who are trying to understand why the church is less appealing than ever to men. In that light, I want to talk about another issue that primarily afflicts men. With apologies to C.S. Lewis for mangling one of his book titles, it's The Problem of Porn.
I like George Barna's studies. I believe they hold the mirror up to the face of the American Church and help us to get a look at who we are, wrinkles and all. In the last few years, Barna has published disturbing info about the penetration of porn use into the ranks of born-again Christians. Barna's site is filled with poll statistics concerning this (Barna Site-keyword search "porn" and Barna Site-keyword search "explicit"), so you can check out the figures for yourself.
One of the figures that I could no longer locate on the site (having been pulled for use in a new study—for purchase only) had about a third of born-again Christian men responding that they had viewed sexually explicit images. In truth, this is a figure I seriously question. Given that we live in what can only be classified as a pornographic culture, two-thirds of the men claiming they had no exposure to porn lied. I don't believe I have ever met a man, Christian or not, who has not seen porn at some time in his life. It is virtually everywhere.
I talk with men who by all accounts others would consider to be pillars of their churches, yet the majority are struggling with staying away from porn. The Internet is largely responsible for this. No longer does one have to lurk around the racks of an adult bookstore or keep one's head down when entering the "Adults Only" section of the local video rental store. All that is needed is a computer and a man can have whatever flavor of perversion he so desires right there in the cloister of his own home or office.
While hundreds of Christian websites decry the issue, this post is all about the "why" of porn use. It is conventional wisdom to classify porn as a "spiritual issue." Anyone reading this now will agree that porn has a spiritual component that affects men negatively. Some will go so far as to equate porn with demonic forces. But for all the hew and cry about the rise of porn use by church-goers, very few people are asking why. And it is the why that is most important.
I believe this post will be controversial because it seeks cultural reasons behind porn use among men that are not being addressed by churches in this country. The sub-surface reasons are far more intractable than many are willing to admit and few will attempt to tackle them head-on. But I firmly believe if we are to put the porn genie back into its gaudy bottle, the Church must tackle these issues. They are not presented here in any order, primarily because they are hopelessly entangled—part of the issue of why so few are speaking to them.(For the purposes here, I only look at married men who use porn. I hope to address the problem from a single man's perspective in the future.)
One of the primary contributors to the problem of porn is this: Our culture is on scheduling overload. Simply trying to get four couples together for a night out is a scheduling dilemma that falls into the mathematical problem of how a traveling salesman can hit fifty towns in the order that makes for the least travel. Your standard supercomputer would overheat trying to handle all the schedules of those four couples. This is attributable to four key factors:
- Dual-income households—Dual-income households came into existence in large part due to the feminist movement of the 1960s. As women were told that they could have a life outside the home, they explored this option. Society ramped up to accept them into the workplace. Now forty years after the fact, our society is geared specifically for the dual-income family. Dual-income families are also better equipped to endure the chaos of the work world, better weathering downsizing, outsourcing and a number of other employment factors.
- Preparing our children educationally for a "survival of the fittest" future global society—Parents, realizing the vagaries of the current work world, are obsessed with ensuring that their kids can compete in a global society of the future that is the essence of the survival of the fittest. Due to this, toddlers now are expected to speak multiple languages, play an instrument, participate in sports, and have their college diploma by sixteen. Parenting magazines are now featuring articles on burned-out six-year olds who can't handle their schedules.
- Business travel—Travel is an enormous issue. The better-paying jobs in almost every company require extensive travel. Some moms and dads are away from the home for half a month or more. Consulting firms are famous for their "four days away, three days at home" work weeks.
- Church and schooling commitments—Churches are asking for more and more volunteerism or group commitments. It is not unusual for a Christian man or woman to be in three different church group meetings in a week. Likewise, parents are being asked to be more involved in their children's schooling. With homeschooling being pushed as the only acceptable option by some Evangelical groups, parents are now asked to create full, daily lesson plans and to research the best school materials for their children.
The upshot of all this is that married men and women have no time for each other. When there is time, sleep becomes the recourse. Newsweek had a feature last year about couples who rarely have sex, and the problem in most cases was no available time for it. As I talk with Christian men who struggle with porn, there is an indisputable direct connection between a lack of sexual intimacy in their marriages and porn use. If the wife is tired—or even the husband—it is far easier for the man to get his sexual desires met by turning on the computer and surfing for porn. In short, many married couples in our churches simply aren't having enough sex together.
I've seen much that bears this out. I worked for several years as a computer technician. In that role I handled hundreds of notebook computers owned by road warriors, the men most likely to be heavy business travelers. Without fail, the notebook computers of the most frequent business travelers were loaded with porn, even when company policy made it a fireable offense. It was a proportional finding, too—the more a man traveled, the more likely it was to find porn on his computer. Since the highest salaried positions within many companies require extensive travel, it should be no surprise that porn use is highest among those with the biggest paychecks. A study done about five years ago came to that exact conclusion.
Since heavy traveling makes it difficult for husbands and wives to have a normal sex life, porn intrudes. Most hotels that cater to business travelers know this and have provided a variety of options to get porn into the traveler's rooms. The porn industry itself would lose enormous amounts of money if the business traveler instead stayed at home.
But it is not simply business travel. The time-pressures that many couples endure beyond the issue of business travel are oppressive. When dual wage-earners must juggle their work schedules, the quality time they are supposed to have with their children, the children's hyped-up schedules, and all the commitments their churches tell them they must fulfill in order to be good Christians, is it any wonder that when it is time for a bedroom romp, the romp gets tossed in order to squeeze in five or six hours of sleep?
But single wage-earner families are not exempt. Evangelicals place much pressure on families to conform to a "Focus on the Family" ideal nuclear family with mom at home schooling the kids and dad serving as the perfect Christian man (I've blogged about the requirements for being such an idyllic man here, here, and here.) And the ramped-up education issue for kids is shockingly high on the list of essentials for such families. Barna recently reported that for born-again Christians, it was more important that the kids get that hyped-up education than that they know Jesus. So the pressures in those other three areas highlighted above remain (and could be worse) for families that conform to the new Christian ideal.
All of these factors combine to bring us to the point where a Christian man comes home to his Christian wife and kids only to find them as run ragged as he is. He might give his wife a peck on the cheek sometime before they both hit the sack, but that's as good as it gets. If the wife is burned out more than he is from driving kids all over the city to get their Chinese language and/or violin lessons in between soccer or baseball practice, then she hits the hay and he, wondering what happened to their newlywed sex life, hits the computer for the sexual outlet he's just not getting.
The apostle Paul speaks to this issue very clearly. Beyond the fact that Internet pornography obviously did not exist in Paul's day, sexual temptation has not changed all that much:
But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
—1 Corinthians 7:2-5 ESV {emphasis added}
Is the Church speaking to this issue? I hear a lot of talk in the churches in this country about the issue of porn, but almost no one is getting to the root. I do not want to diminish the other factors that contribute to porn use among married Christian men, but these bedrock problems mentioned here are being ignored by the Church in America. The reason these issues are not being discussed by church leaders is simple: fixing them would require a massive overhaul of how we Christians work and live in today's society. It would mean that we truly become counter-cultural in all aspects of our life, not just in our profession of faith in Jesus.
Christian couples who do have the time for each other, who are not pressured by frantic schedules, who are not trying to raise uber-children with IQs that hover near 200 (and the ability to throw a rising fastball 100 mph), who have possibly settled for a single wage or two part-time positions (all without travel—therefore potentially being lower paying), and who get eight hours of real sleep seem to be less prone to porn.
Now how are we in the Body of Christ going to make that a reality for every Christian man and his family?
Tags: Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Church Issues, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Grace, Holiness, Maturity, Men, Spiritual Warfare, Work
Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men
April 20, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Godly Character, Men, The Holy Spirit, Work Feedback : 17 comments
Last June, I blogged about the George Barna report that showed that the American Church's face was largely female, with many men skipping church altogether. Since that time, another male-centric book has appeared on the market, David Morrow's Why Men Hate Going to Church. This tome joins the mania created by John Eldredge's Wild at Heart in seeking to find out why men feel bored in the pews on Sunday. Morrow even has a website www.churchformen.com that delves deeper into the mystery of the church's missing men.
Like John Eldredge before him, Morrow's solution focuses on recovering lost masculinity. While Eldredge aims to recover a masculine "adventure," Morrow looks at masculinizing the Church:
We have to give men opportunities to use their strengths and their gifts in the service of God instead of trying to squeeze them into roles that they feel are feminine or emasculating. We need to start valuing masculine traits such as aggression, boldness, and competitiveness and figuring out ways that we can integrate that into every area of church life.
But are these assertions the real reason behind the church's missing men?
Having been a part of two churches with extensive ministries that were strongly male focused, I contend that Morrow's response does not play out in reality. One of those churches had a popular sports ministry and brought sports illustrations into nearly every sermon. The pastor of the church served as chaplain to a number of professional sports teams and was a well-known author. Still, that church was about 60% women. Again, in the second church, wacky humor, Eldredge's reliance on movies to pitch the Gospel, numerous men's groups, and plenty of ministries that called on uniquely male gifts did not budge the number of men. They were still only 40% of the attendees.
So what is the problem?
I alluded to this earlier in my post "Advertising Ashes." The main reason that men are not in church is that they simply are not seeing the Holy Spirit move in power. At the risk of alienating the many women who read Cerulean Sanctum, I want to make a bold point: even if the Holy Spirit were not present in a supernatural way in our churches, I still believe women would still show up on Sundays. The Church has no problem attracting women because women are naturally drawn to the community and relationships that a church provides. However, this attractor does not work for many men. Men need a profound experience of God in order to get them to sit up and take notice. If the Holy Spirit doesn't fall on them in power, then the positives a church can provide outside of the supernatural make little difference. A church can hypermasculinize itself to death and still not break that three women to every two men ratio if the Spirit is barely discernible on Sundays. Men have a better built-in B.S. detector than women do and function more out of the rationale of "prove it to me." Without the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit in our gatherings, we have little to combat a set of crossed arms and a raised eyebrow.
The second problem is also one I have mentioned in the past, the issue of a man's career. You almost never hear any sermons about jobs. Most churches have nothing in place to help the unemployed within their ranks. And the Church in America no longer speaks to the business world on issues of cut-throat downsizing, outsourcing, discrimination against older employees, and the relentless expectation that employees put in longer hours at work. In short, the Church in this country has almost nothing to say about the one thing men spend more hours doing than anything else in their lives. That silence speaks volumes to men.
In an e-mail I received from David Morrow in response to this, he wrote that as many women work today as men, yet despite their jobs and greater limitations on their time, women still make it to church. To this, I have a few counters:
- Our society still defines men by their jobs. Introduce a man to a group and the first question he's asked is, "So what do you do for a living?" This emphasis on work is taken to extremes because the gold standard espoused in Evangelicalism is that the husband is the sole breadwinner while the wife stays at home with the kids. A man without a job has no place in society's eyes, but a place is still available to women who do not work.
- A caste system still exists for men. Men are categorized by their work and valued accordingly. The doctor and the mechanic are not viewed as having the same worth, even within many churches. Again, this system does not plague women to the same extent. The man making minimum wage is perceived in a far worse light than the woman who works for the same pay. No one ridicules women in traditionally male jobs, but a man who performs what has traditionally been a female job is usually held up for scorn—particularly by other men.
- Women marry with an eye to financial security, but this is not the case for men. Therefore, the onus is always on the man to bring in money. To meet this need, the man is usually the one striving to succeed in his career. Our society continues to reinforce this for men, while placing less burden on women to reach the pinnacle of success in their field.
A woman's job and a man's job, therefore, are not the same. To treat them as such is to ignore cultural mandates that simmer beneath everything a man does in his life. If the Church in America cannot grasp this, then we should not wonder why men see the Church as having little to say about how they define themselves using the cultural constructs placed on them in our society. With this paucity of wisdom about the key role a man plays for eight to ten hours a day, why should men abide church at all?
I believe that the reason the message of Eldredge and Morrow resonates with many men is that those men can't put a finger on what they are truly missing. If you've never tasted champagne, why would you miss it? In this way, if our church gatherings are not filled with the Holy Spirit and our churches are not speaking to the one thing we still use to define a man, then the loss of both cannot be fully appreciated by the man who feels empty after the church service is over. All he knows is "Well, that wasn't it." So he goes off to hunt bear with a pointy stick or to climb mountains like Eldredge says. And while that might captivate him for a while, it does not fill the vacuum in his soul. His expectation then becomes that of simply muddling through the day. He can't even look forward to the gold watch at retirement because the company he works for now fires (or forces into an early retirement with subsequently diminished benefits) everyone over fifty before the watch can be attained. At sixty-five and with his funds cut short, the job as a greeter at WalMart never looked so good.
We as the Body of Christ have got to do better than this or we may someday look around our churches and see no men at all.
Tags: Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Godly Character, Men, The Holy Spirit, Work
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