Men

This is from The Resurgence.com . Hope this challenges you much as it has challenged me....

"Would you like Barack Obama on your kid's work rota? OK, maybe someone with his leadership gift and—assuming he loves Jesus—you'd be pleased, right? Not a man to let go lightly. Well, a former US President (and a legendary one) was let go. Why? As a young man Theodore Roosevelt, serving in a Sunday school, noticed a boy arriving with a black eye. When Roosevelt asked, the boy explained with embarrassment that another boy had pinched his sister, so he'd taken a swing at him and gotten into a scrap. Roosevelt gave the kid a dollar and a pat on the back. The future president was quietly removed that week.

I reckon there's a parable for us, and by "us" I mean the contemporary church. There is an expression of masculinity—an aggression, protectiveness, and a sense of injustice—which is primal in all men. I even see this in my boys. (The youngest seems to have come out of the womb yelling "charge!") Sure it has been horridly distorted in all men by the fall, but it's there.

The Choices

Men are wired with instincts, and it seems we have three choices:

• Abdicate indiscriminately to these instincts. This option leads to ungodly, ill-disciplined, boastful masculinity (chauvinism).
• Exclude them. The second leads to what we have had for centuries: churches that can't cope with men who reward boys for fighting for their sisters. (Churches which, in the words of Leon Podles, are "women's clubs with a few male officers." The husbands stay home or get dragged along, and look glazed till they hear the golden words, "We'll close the meeting there.")
• Redeem and channel them. The third option is the most difficult and the least fashionable, but it's also the most biblical and the most promising when it comes to getting the world changed for good."

For the rest click here.