For Manhood to be the new black we have some work to do. On his recent visit to Australia Mark Driscoll said that Australian Christian men were the most immature Christian men he had come across. Rather than quibble let’s admit two things:
i. Quite a number of us will admit to being babies at 19.
ii. Our culture doesn’t expect anything different. We seem to expect that all the growing up happens after 18 rather than before.
Now faced with these admissions we have a choice. We can either,
• Justify our immaturity, continue to delay our progress to manhood and expect nothing different from subsequent generations,
Or we can,
• Repent of our immaturity, speed our own pathway to manhood, and try to see if we can do anything different for future generations.
I vote for the latter option.
To this end, we thought it worth having a series on manhood. We’ll look at its essence, at the spheres in which it operates (e.g. work), we’ll look at qualities it requires (like courage) and explore some of the short cuts that can be attempted to reach it (like lotto). We’ll not only look at what it is, but at how to get there (e.g. via modelling). Of course this is more than a seven post series, and so will likely be broken into a number of mini-series mixed in with other stuff.
First up next post: What is at the heart of being a man?
6 Comments
looking forward to reading on. Loving the site so far, and the articles you guys have posted. Good job.
look fwd to the read Tim.
my guess is you begin with Adam in Gen 1 & 2 and the move to Jesus in his humanity and the new creation.
would be interested to explore our own cultural expressions of manhood. Are you more manlyif you have 8 kids and a mortgage and less manly if you’re childless, renting and wife works?
Driscoll raised some wonderful aspects of biblical manhood but left me feeling that he has baptised the Malborough man at times and championed white middle american values more than the scriptures.
ps your anti psam captcha stuff is frustrating
Hi Shane,
I agree this is important to work through.
I’m sure though that it is fair to have Driscoll baptizing the Marlboro Man AND ‘white middle American values’. Driscoll’s vision of manhood would be for us to marry, have lots of kids, commit to one city. work a job, build wealth, raise those kids to follow Jesus and do the same, so that in 150 years the city we live in is different.
The Marlboro Man seems to be pretty much the opposite to that?
Tim
Sorry, typo above! “I’m *not* sure…”
Looking forward to the series, Tim. May God rescue us from immaturity.
sure… by Malborough Man I mean the “dudely dude”, you know, the super charged testosterone guy who plays football and drives a truck that sucks 20 litres per 100km. Anyhow, I think that guy turned out gay in Brokeback Mountain.
it may be that white middle american values are very biblical!