Counterculture

Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality

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SinglenessIf 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

  1. Training our children in a comprehensive Christian worldview.
  2. Developing alternative means of post-secondary education.
  3. Preparing our children to live with less.
  4. Teaching our children what true community living is and building those communities.
  5. 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.

Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men

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Dan is Missing!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.

Advertising Ashes

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Man on fire

You never have to advertise a fire. —Leonard Ravenhill

Are you growing increasingly distressed by the worldly attempts by many churches today to market their church? Does the latest church fad sweeping the nation leave you cold? Are you growing nostalgic for "the olden days" when a preacher would walk into the pulpit and by the unction of God set the place ablaze?

Now that everyone in the United States has a blog—it seems like it, doesn't it?—I read an increasing number of sites that are advertising that they have the solution to whatever the Church's problem is. We all know what the problems are. Just a glance at the Top 25 bestselling Christian books in your local Christian bookstore will tell you:

  • Your church needs better marketing.
  • Your church needs to understand community demographics better.
  • Your church needs to have purpose/mission.
  • Your church needs to be relevant.
  • Your church needs to be authentic.
  • Your church needs to reach out to whatever group of people it's failed to reach in the past.
  • Your church needs to be concerned with end-times prophecy.
  • Your church needs to have a better men's/women's/youth/children's ministry.
  • Your church needs __________.

In a charismatic age, when even the crustiest Presbyterians are raising their hands in worship, how is it that we have forgotten the only thing the Church needs? Why have we forgotten the Holy Spirit?

You never have to advertise a fire. That's the answer to all these books clamoring for attention, trying to get you to buy to find out the "Super Secret Christian Formula" that will suddenly take you, your family, and your church to the absolute pinnacle of Christian experience.

Yet nothing draws people like a fire. You see a fire, you immediately start wanting to linger, to see what is burning, to watch what happens next. Fire evoke memories of stories told while camping, the community around bathed in the amber glow of timelessness and wonder. Fire heals, cleanses, and illumines. It spreads and envelops.

If there is any one characteristic of the Church in America in 2005 it is that for all our bluster, our bestselling fixes, and our introspection over the failure of believers to rise above the secular mire, no other answer can come but that we need the fire of God poured out on us.

John Eldredge, bestselling author of Wild at Heart, claims that men find church boring. David Morrow recently wrote Why Men Hate Going to Church. I have the simple answer for that: they are not encountering the Holy Spirit in the churches they attend. Someone who regularly attends a church that is filled with people overflowing with the Holy Spirit and who experiences the Holy Spirit in power in those meetings will NEVER be bored and will NEVER hate gathering.

But this is not most churches.

Ever heard of the aviator cults? These were primitive people who lived in remote areas untouched by modernity. As aviation grew, these tribal people started seeing huge, unusual birds in the sky. They were a sign. And some of those tribesmen were startled when a metal bird descended from the clouds and tall, white people emerged from their bellies. These people were like the gods themselves. So when the gods got back into their metal birds and flew away, the tribesmen were compelled to erect effigies of them and the odd bird they came in. Totemic planes built of reeds were set up in hopes that the gods would some day return and bless the people. This persisted for generations.

Today, our churches resemble aviator cults. We have a vague memory of generations ago when God showed up in our churches in power. But as time goes on, the story breaks down, the reason for it becomes muddied, and we start dancing around trying to make the aviator gods return. Churches do this in a variety of ways. Most churches entertain, rely on clever marketing campaigns to put posteriors in the pews, or scour the demographic data to tailor their message to what the neighborhood wants to hear. They advertise the ashes of the fire that might have once burned brightly, but is no more. They'll sculpt the ashes into amusing shapes and toy around with the properties of the ashes until they've mined all the ashes are worth—but on reflection, the ashes remain ashes and the fire is eventually forgotten.

You never have to advertise a fire. The Holy Spirit's fire in a church will obliterate whatever feeble gains a marketing campaign can create. The Holy Spirit's fire in a church catches in the community and changes lives profoundly. The Holy Spirit's fire cleanses, renews, and empowers.

For all too many churches today, there is no fire, only ashes. This is the dirty little secret that no one can utter. And when the Sunday service is over, it's the nagging doubt in every person's mind as they walk out wondering why they feel so empty even though they just spent all that time in church.

Everything besides the Spirit will fail to change this condition. The Christian pundits out there are misdirecting people into thinking there are other ways to get there, but there aren't. Only the Spirit of God satisfies. And once you have the Spirit, all that other dross is burned away.

It's time to stop pretending. For too many the Holy Spirit has become a dim memory in a dim church filled with dim people. God, send us your Fire!