Just a few events that I am speaking at that are coming up soon that you might be interested in.
4th July Melbourne Jumpstart
11 – 12th July Melbourne Conversation on Mars Hill at Citylife
22 July Perth Knowing our culture: Living as Missionaries Vose/Forge
In Light of Michael Jackson’s passing I thought that I would link back to a talk that I gave at easter time which examined the cultural significance of Michael Jackson as a starting point for discussing the story of Easter. Listen Here
The Battle in the UK over the alleged anti-Christian bias of the BBC seems to be hotting up. Read about it here.
One of the great challenges of our age is the problem of doing mission in a culture which has a massive mistrust of the Church. Religious researcher Mark Chaves has illustrated the way in which people view the church with tremendous suspicion. Read about his research here
In light of some of the recent posting on this blog regarding masculinity and faith I found this article today.
Concerns over the lack of men attending services year-round has led clergy to offer a range of incentives today, including free beer, bacon rolls and chocolate bars.
Read full article here
John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge’s book God is back is gaining a lot of media attention at the moment. Miclethwait and Woolridge write,
By the end of the 20th century the intelligentsia had little doubt modern man had outgrown God. Most trend-setting books in the 1990s saw the world through secular lenses.Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man predicted the triumph of secularisation as well as liberalism. The word religion does not appear in the index of Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger’s 900-page masterpiece on statesmanship, published in 1994.
In 1980-99 only a half dozen of the articles in America’s four main international relations journals dealt with religion. The Economist was so confident of the Almighty’s demise that it published his obituary in its millennium issue. Today an unsettling worry nags at Western liberals: what if secular Europe (and for that matter secular Harvard and secular Manhattan) is the odd one out? They are right to be worried. It now seems that it is the American model that is spreading around the world: religion and modernity are going hand in hand, not just in China but throughout much of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America. It is not just that religion is thriving in many modernising countries; it is also that religion is succeeding in harnessing the tools of modernity to propagate its message. The very things that were supposed to destroy religion – democracy and markets, technology and reason – are combining to make it stronger.
Almost everywhere you look, from the suburbs of Dallas to the slums of Sao Paulo to the back streets of Bradford, you can see religion returning to public life. Most dramatically, Americans and their allies would not be dying in Iraq and Afghanistan had 19 young Muslims not attacked the US on September 11, 2001. America’s next war could be against the Islamic Republic of Iran, or it could be dragged into a spat in Pakistan, where religious fanatics are determined to seize the country’s nuclear weapons, or perhaps in West Africa, where there is a monumental clash between evangelical Christianity surging northward and fundamentalist Islam heading south. Indeed, there are potential battlegrounds all around Islam’s southern perimeter, along the 10th parallel, stretching through Sudan to The Philippines. Nor is it just a matter of Christians and Muslims. In Burma, Buddhist monks nearly brought down an evil regime; in Sri Lankathey have prolonged a bloody conflict with Hindu Tamils.
On one hand Mickelthwait and Woolridge seem to be stating a very similair case to Phillip Jenkins in his book The Next Christendom, that is that in the two-thirds world religion is booming. However Mickelthwait and Woolridge go on to make the case the secularism is reversing in Europe,
Religion is even (re-) emerging as a force in the very heartland of secularisation. Europe is still a long way behind the US: for instance, only one in 10 French people say that religion plays an important role in their lives. But nevertheless there are signs that the same forces that are reviving religion in the US – the quest for community in an increasingly atomised world, the desire to counterbalance choice with a sense of moral certainty – are making headway in Europe. Across the Continent the loosening of the ties between church and state is opening the religious market. In France, the fastest growing creed is the most American of all, Pentecostalism.
Mickelthwait and Woolridgemake the point that part of this reversal has been triggered by increased Muslim immigration and by the events of September 11 which, forced many Europeans of Christian decent to take on a kind of Christian affiliation, in order to contrast themselves with their Muslim neighbours.
So should we as believers take heart from all of this? My answer is a small yes and a big no. Yes in the sense that it is becoming increasingly evident that the enlightenment project to distance God from the public sphere is failing. This however has been clear to any person who has taken the time to examine the issue in detail. The enlightenment project has one hand delivered the West relatively comfortable and stable cultures, yet this comfort has been accompanied by a gaping existential loss of meaning and increasing moral murkiness. One can only imagine what the architects of the englightement would say if they could see that the fruit of the culture that they dreamed up would not be the ‘heavenly queen of reason’ but rather Lady Gaga. So then it is little wonder that some are looking else where for frameworks of meaning.
So we should be happy that people are looking elsewhere for a story to make sense of life. But (and this is a big but) whilst we are seeing an increased skepticism in regard to the role of religion in public life amongst some politicians and segments of the public, and an increased willingness of members of secular cultures to affiliate with Christianity, what we are not seeing is an increase in the Christian practice.
In fact what we are seeing in the West is a continued dramatic decline in Church attendance and everyday practice. The figures looks slightly better due to the fact that the Church across the West the loss has been slightly offset by the growth of Christianity amongst migrants from non-European cultures. Even SouthKorea which has been held up as the prime example of religious revivalism is seeing the church decline in the face of contemporary culture. So what is going on then, more people seem to be affiliating with Christianity, faith is gaining more attention in the media, yet Church attendance is in decline?
In God’s Continent Jenkins makes the point is that what we are seeing is a re-negotiation of how people practice their Christian faith,in the same way that we have seen the West re-negotiate the idea of coupling from life long marriage to short term rolling bouts of de facto living. The dominance of individual autonomy means that the contemporary Christian looks not to the authorityof the church, the weight of tradition or the framework of scripture to make their life decisions, rather people are picking what they like from Christianity and mixing it with what suits them from the contemporary culture. This is the concept of multiphrenia (mulipleselves) in practice that sociologist Kenneth Gergen described in The Saturated Self, and the plurality of self that theologian Jonathan R Wilson described in Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World .
This phenomenon is not just limited to Christians, Jenkins notes that the media has portrayed the European Muslim as a young and radical fundamentalists living in urban islands of Shariah law. The reality is more the image of a young man of Algerian decent listening to Lil Wayne on his Ipod hanging out in a mall in the suburbs of Paris, or a young woman minus veil dancing in a nightclub with her friends in Ankara. Recent research here in Australia amongst Muslim youth has shown that they hold almost the same relativist approaches to truth as their secular peers.
So the real question is how do we live as faithful disciples in the face of Western Culture? This is not just a question for the West but for the countries which are importing Western culture as well. What does a faithful community of believers look like in the West who are living lives that are wholly integrated with their faiths look like? These are questions that we must wrestle with as they are at key to the future of the Church in the West.
The current edition of Time magazine is heralding the good news of twitter for the world to hear. The article lauds twitter and it’s part in creating Ambient Awareness . Time writes,
In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask. The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Mmmm still don’t buy it sorry Time magazine. Despite the non stop twitter evangelism, I still find myself cynical and with serious lingering doubts about it all (as regular readers of this blog will know see here) Apart from the amount of banality that twitter seems to add to our culture. I have two other concerns.
1) ‘Out thereness’
I realize that my life has changed significantly since the early ninties, that is before the net and before the mobile cell phone became ubiquitous. I realize that much of my time now, despite trying not to, is spent in this out there realm, wondering what is happening with my blog, what is happening on facebook, etc. Now I can check all of these things on my phone even while I wait at the lights, I am now transported at least mentally away from where I am and what I am doing to this seemingly other world.Back before all of this, I was so much more present. Who I was spending time with that day was who I was spending time with. If I was sitting at a bus stop, I had to take in my surroundings, and even maybe converse with the person next to me despite the fact that they were completely different from me.
This ’out thereness’ was illustrated recently to me when we had an earthquake here in Melbourne. In my city earthquakes are a rare event, so when my office shook, I thought that either a truck had hit our building or that we had indeed had an earthquake. As I was alone, I was just about to get up and go and ask my neighbours the hairdressers downstairs if they had felt the shocks, when I looked at my computer screen and realized that all I had to do was to hit refresh the facebook page I had running in the background and sure enough 30 status updates flashed before me confirming that we indeed had felt a shock here in Melbourne. A victory for the power of social networking yes, but a loss for encountering the ‘other’ as a opportunity to connect with my neighbours downstairs was made redundant by the new technology. In light of Martin Buber’sconcept of ’I -thou” this has a profound effect on our faith, the Bible reminds us time and time again that we encounter Christ in the ‘other’, yet technology pushes us into virtual ghettoes of shared interest. Where the person standing next to us on the platform might as well be on the otherside of the world.
This new techo fuelled Ambient awareness also has the potential to drown out the ’still small voice’ of God’. That whisper that we pick up only when we sit and be still and be present in the moment. Those messages that God gives us when we are present in the moment, and fully attuned to our context and environment. When our minds are not drifting off into wondering what is happening online, or where we will go on for a break later in the year. Contemporary culture might downplay the seemingly mundane nature of being truly present in the moment, but we must remind ourselves, that when we are truly present, we are communing with God who is always truly present in each moment, just waiting for us to ’be still’ and know that God is God.
2) The Death of Conversation
As I have stated before on this blog, increasingly our public discourse is simply about broadcasting our thoughts and view, at risk is the rich resource of conversation. Being the strange freak that I am I have been reading lots of books recently on the way that coffee houses, salons, and conversation clubs changed culture in the 18th-19th centuries. The more I have read, the more I am convinced of the power of face to face, long term, relationally based conversations. Europe was radically changed at almost every conceivable level as the result of the lost art of activist conversation. Yes the web today does allow us to have conversations, but the more I read of the history of the discourse of ideas and the power of conversation to change our world, I realise that a key element is a relational component that the new titter style of broadcasting simply obliterates.
At the end of the day, we follow a God who is at his Trinitarian core relational. He is a God who could have simply snapped his fingers to right the world, but instead chose to begin with a relational framework with the patriarchs, with Israel. This relational face to face value is seen most strongly in the incarnation, where God choses not to simply broadcast from above but to live amongst, to converse, to influence humanity face to face. As our culture shifts towards a collection of automous individuals broadcasting the relational nature of our faith becomes a precious resource for the witness of the people of God.
Interesting quote from journalist Amitai Etzioni who delineates between consumption and consumerism, I have often tried illustrate this nuance by delineating between the concepts of consumerism and hyperconsumerism. Etzioni does a lot better than me and writes,
What needs to be eradicated, or at least greatly tempered, is consumerism: the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life. This is not the same thing as capitalism, nor is it the same thing as consumption. To explain the difference, it is useful to draw on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. At the bottom of this hierarchy are basic creature comforts; once these are sated, more satisfaction is drawn from affection, self-esteem, and, finally, self-actualization. As long as consumption is focused on satisfying basic human needs–safety, shelter, food, clothing, health care, education–it is not consumerism. But, when the acquisition of goods and services is used to satisfy the higher needs, consumption turns into consumerism–and consumerism becomes a social disease.
The link to the economic crisis should be obvious. A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume–working slavish hours, behaving rapaciously in their business pursuits, and even bending the rules in order to maximize their earnings. They will also buy homes beyond their means and think nothing of running up credit-card debt. It therefore seems safe to say that consumerism is, as much as anything else, responsible for the current economic mess. But it is not enough to establish that which people ought not to do, to end the obsession with making and consuming evermore than the next person. Consumerism will not just magically disappear from its central place in our culture. It needs to be supplanted by something.
Read the full article ‘Spent’ in the New Republic
Last week on my radio spot we looked at how the media and culture tries to shape images of masculinity, so this week we are going to be looking at the images of femininity that the media culture shapes.
10:30 am (Aust EST) Light FM 89.9
Douglas Groothuis is a noted apologist and author of a number of books such as Truth Decay and The Soul in Cyberspace and he has just written an interaction with and review of The Trouble With Paris. Groothuis is quite kind in his review to the book, although he does pull me up on a couple of things. One being the fact that whilst I mention a lot in the book about the coming redemption Idon’t mention the fact that not everything in the world will be redeemed and there is also a judgement at the end of the age. On this I agree with Groothuis, on reflection I would probably have added something about this. This is one of the downsides of writing a book, in someways it is like painting your ceiling, you labour to make it just right, and then four months later you are sitting there staring up and notice a spot you missed. Anyways here is the full article
Interesting couple of blasts the net has received in the last week or so by musicians.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails decided to leave behind the traditional means of marketing his music and go all facebook and twitter in his approach, However he now regrets this move the NME reports
“According to Reznor, the experiment did not yield the results he had hoped for, and he will therefore be “tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.”
This outburst follows hot on the heels of Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers in Q magazine dismissing the entire Internet as a tool to promote vanity
The internet is the grandest illusion ever created. It makes people think they’re really informed, they’re really popular, they have loads of friends, they’re part of a community. And they actually have a voice. They don’t realize that like all of us, they’re completely f*cked and powerless. That was always our starting point as a band: ‘You are f*cked.’ ‘I am f*cked.’ It is delusory, it can create unbelievable misconceptions of the self… it’s all about self-ism, how popular you can be.”
Cranky old Gen X rock stars not getting the new technology? Maybe, but I think there is some truth in both statements. The potential of the internet to connect and communicate seems to be matched to its power to dumb down human existence.
Last night I caught the end of a documentary about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald the assassin who killed JFK. The whole phenomenon of how contemporary culture has processed the assasination of JFK gives us some facinating and revealing insights into how belief functions in a secular culture.
Approximately 70% of Americans believe that JFK’s asssianation was not the work of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone, but rather the results of a massive and complex conspiracy. Despite this widespread belief in a conspiracy virtually no evidence proving a massive conspiracy has come to light. Many experts have come to the conclusion that this belief in a web of conspiracy comes from the public’s inability to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, a disturbed loner and social outcast could have got a few shots off to kill the world’s most powerful man.
You have to ask why is this not possible, Oswald was a former marine, and his workplace afforded a snipers position from which to get at least a couple of shots at the president who was riding in an open car. At the end of the day, it is all about mythology. Popular culture has attached the name ‘Camelot’ to the JKF presidency, overlaying the president with a kind of celebrity mystique that borders on the semi-religious.Here was this leader with Hollywood good looks, who took on the mafia, who challenged his country to reach the moon, who managed to attract a wife as stylish and glamorous as Jackie Onassis, and also at the same time allegedly conduct an illicit affair with the world’s most sexualized woman Marilyn Monroe. He was a pop culture demi -god.
It is not that we can’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could have got a few lucky shots off to end his life in a random moment of violence. It is that we don’t want to believe it.We rather would believe that a man of JFK’s cultural importance could only be brought down by a massive conspiracy that was not random but part of a giant drama between the forces of good and evil.
The same phenomenon occurred with the death of Princess Diana. Diana’s life also was mythologised. Her life (or at least the life that was presented to us via the media) was something lifted from from the pages of a fairytale or medieval romance. So when she died within eight hours conspiracy theories were posted on the internet. The public simply could not believe that someone who carried so much mythical symbolism could die in such a random and seemingly accidental way. The massive pouring out of public affection after her death simply goes to prove the cultural power and symbolism that she carried. If anyone else had been killed being driven by a drunk driver who was driving at over a hundred kilometers an hour in a downtown underground tunnel, we would not bat an eyelid.
These kind of conspiracy theories arise in a culture which at least at a public level is told that life is a chaotic and random process which is not guided at all by any large story that would give meaning. As the Christian story and the resultant meaning that it gave public life fades from the popular imagination, the conspiracy theory becomes another way of seeing a giant story at work, an alternate explanation for the battle between good and evil. The contemporary meta narrative that we are given that everything in life is simply a collection of random happening simply doesn’t work on the ground. These desires to see conspiracies and overaching webs of meaning behind random events, tell us that underneath the surface of the secular West there still dwells an implicit yet powerful desire to hear a story which links and unites the whole of life.
It seems that the fast paced, sleep deprived lifestyle that many of us lead is making us desperately unhappy The Age Newspaper reports
Depression is the by-product of modern hectic lifestyles, a US expert says.
Dr Stephen Ilardi says the 20-fold increase in depression over the past century is proof that “humans were never designed for the pace of modern life”.
“We’re designed for a different time,” says Dr Ilardi, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Kansas.
“… when people were physically active, when they were outside in the sun for most of the day, when they had extensive social connections and enjoyed continual face time with their friends and loved ones.”
He says modern humans should re-connect with these primitive ways by eating foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, through regular exercise and sun exposure, by being more social and getting more sleep.
Teens who go to bed early are less likely to suffer depression.
A US study of more than 15,500 teens found seven per cent suffered from depression, and 13 per cent had suicidal thoughts.
When quizzed on what time they went to sleep, researchers found those who did so at midnight or later were significantly more likely to be mentally troubled.
They were 25 per cent more likely to suffer depression and 20 per cent more likely to have suicidal thoughts compared to adolescents who were sent to bed by their parents at 10pm, or earlier. Read full article here
Tonight or Tommorow depending where you are in the world I will be on Alex McManus’ internet radio show. Alex is a facinating thinker and leader and is the author of Making the World Human Again. Alex also served on the Leadershp team of MOSAIC Los Angeles from 1998 through 2004. He was a key leader behind ORIGINS, the Mosaic Leadership Experience, and from 2002 through 2006 grew the conference from a small pilot event to an experience of International reknown and status. During this same time, Alex helped create the Mosaic Alliance and served as the Global Liason from 2002 through 2006. In October 2004, Alex launched the International Mentoring Network, a custom made mentoring process with dense relational components, to discover, develop and deploy leaders.
Broadcast Friday 11am US Eastern Standard Time (Sat 1 am Australian Eastern Standard time)
You can log in and hear from here
It seems I was onto something with my my article Masculinity and the Emerging Church when I coined the term Emosexuals. The Japanese who always seem to be onto everything first, have a similar concept – Herbivore Men. This Blog’s Scandinavian correspondent Catters, sent through this CNN article describing the Herbivore men.
They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance — meet the “herbivore men” of Japan.
Author and pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa coined the term in 2006 in a series of articles on marketing to a younger generation of Japanese men. She used it to describe some men who she said were changing the country’s ideas about just what is — and isn’t — masculine.
“In Japan, sex is translated as ‘relationship in flesh,’” she said, “so I named those boys ‘herbivorous boys’ since they are not interested in flesh.”
Typically, “herbivore men” are in their 20s and 30s, and believe that friendship without sex can exist between men and women, Fukasawa said.
The term has become a buzzword in Japan. Many people in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood were familiar with “herbivore men” — and had opinions about them.
Shigeyuki Nagayama said such men were not eager to find girlfriends and tend to be clumsy in love, and he admitted he seemed to fit the mold himself.
“My father always asks me if I got a girlfriend. He tells me I’m no good because I can’t get a girlfriend.”
…Japanese men from the baby boomer generation were typically aggressive and proactive when it came to romance and sex. But as a result of growing up during Japan’s troubled economy in the 1990s, their children’s generation was not as assertive and goal-oriented. Their outlook came, in part, from seeing their fathers’ model of masculinity falter even as Japanese women gained more lifestyle options.
Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori, a self-described herbivore, said the idea goes beyond looks and attitudes toward sex.
“Some guys still try to be manly and try to be like strong and stuff, but you know personally I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness.”
Older generations of Japanese men are not happy about the changes. At a bar frequented by businessmen after work, one man said: “You need to be carnivorous when you make decisions in your life. You should be proactive, not passive.”
Read full article here
New bible formats seem to come out by the day. But what is interesting about this controversial version is that it has sold like hotcakes in secular Scandinavia. (Thanks Ben for pointing this out to me)
The more and more I study media the more and more convinced I am that very little we are exposed to has not been spin doctored. One fascinating study of this phenomenon is the whole Susan Boyle drama. What I find interesting is the way that media sells us back our discontent with media. The world went nuts for Susan Boyle because she was sold as someone authentic in contrast to what was seen as the superficiality of pop culture. Commentator after commentator gushed how great it was to have someone who was talented and did not fit the superficial female beauty stereotypes so prevalent in the media. Yet few managed to note that the media is not interested in pushing certain stereotypes, the media at the end of the day is interested in pushing the bottom line. Journalist Nicci Gerard writes
I watched Susan Boyle on YouTube and afterwards I dearly wished I hadn’t — not just because of the sheer humiliating ugliness of a spectacle where celebrity judges patronised a dumpy, unmarried, middle-aged woman, where the audience tittered and gave derisive wolf-whistles and where she compliantly wiggled her hips while everyone seemed shocked and delighted and a bit embarrassed that even the unbeautiful can have talent, but because from the very start it was so obviously a fake, a set-up. The “surprise” — that someone looking like her could win — was just another clever construct. This is not real life, this is a drama — a nasty, demeaning drama, with a vulnerable, unprepared, star-struck woman at its centre and media-savvy judges licking their lips on the sidelines.
The media machine will not only objectify the Paris Hiltons of the world, it will manipulate, chew up, commodify and objectify the Susan Bolyes of the world as well. It is not about pushing a political or social platform it is about ratings and media attention.
Take for example the whole Real Beauty campaign by Dove.
The problem is that this seemingly social aware campaign was that it was made by the same advertising department which produced campaigns that were highly criticized for being sexist and for their objectified stylized images of women, one of which featured men secretly filming the kind of sexualized images of women that the dove ad was criticizing. Yes, it is horribly pragmatic, but it is a case of making bucks by giving the people what they want, be it campaigns that objectify women, or campaigns that criticise campaigns that objectify people. When I was studying advertising one of my lecturers told me that the good ad man leaves their morals at the door of the agency.
So what is being sold to us today is not just stylized, airbrushed images of objectified women, or men. But what our meaning starved post-Christian culture is being sold is manufactured stories of triumph and redemption, the pity is that in this process redemption itself is objectified and turned into a commodity.Sadly in this process people like Susan Boyle get commodified and then like a product that has past its used by date thrown out. I will leave the last words to Nicci Gerard who says it so much better than I could,
People call reality television and the cult of celebrity just good harmless fun. This wasn’t harmless. I never saw anything else of Susan Boyle, though I did manage by some mysterious osmosis to pick up several facts about her. She was deprived of oxygen at birth and so suffered from learning difficulties, she was bullied at school, she was a virgin who had never been kissed, she had looked after her mother for most of her life, she had a cat. All of these facts served the narrative that we were being spoon-fed and were gobbling up: that she was Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty; that the poor may inherit the earth, and that dreams may come true.
And because we live in an age of extreme volatility, sentimentality and instant gratification, it was no surprise that the hapless woman who was one day an inspiration to all of us ordinary people had to be taken down a peg or hundreds. In the weeks between her initial triumph and coming second place in Saturday’s final, she was praised, pilloried, mocked, adored, demeaned, dismissed and never left alone. She had what so many crave: fame. Beware what you wish for.
It probably wasn’t in the script that she should come second — although even that made a kind of sense, because she had already had the world-wide celebrity after her first victory. And it wasn’t in the script either that, after she had left the show, graciously praising the winners, she returned to her hotel where she was found suffering from what is being called “exhaustion” and was admitted to hospital, where you can be fairly sure that she will not be left in peace.
However, even this small human tragedy can be easily turned by those so adept in the manipulation of individual stories to fit the required narrative. In fact, it makes it even more gripping. You can be pretty sure that soon, brave Susan will be back — just in time for her album and autobiography (released before Christmas). And after that, we will all forget about her. She will be yesterday’s story — a barely remembered casualty devoured and spat out by our celebrity-addicted age.
You can read Nicci Gerard’s full article here
Well I did not anticipate that my last post Masculinity and the Emerging Church would generate so many hits and so much feedback, but I guess that the issue of masculinity in the church is a hot topic. A number of you seem to be thinking “here we go Sayers is chucking up more observations and criticisms, but where are the answers? Where are the actual examples of men who are tough and strong and yet who are confident enough to share their sensitive sides?” Some of you who wrote to me asked “what would a redeemed masculinity looked like expressed in worship?” Well enough with the observations and commentary, this time I am serving up answers. It’s a simple recipe really but one that could revolutionize the church.
Take one velvet jacket, a cigarette and a tough guy sharing up his soul over a haunting melody. This is the answer folks, its manly, yet gentle. Macho, yet soulful. It’s a steaming hot dish of spoken word and if I get my way its coming to a church near you.
This is a real as it gets people. Guys take out your notepads for a lesson in what it is to be a real man, ladies you might want to get your accountability groups numbers up on speed dial. Masters Shatner and Savalas start the lesson please.
(Post note: I am planning to promote my new book next year with a Spoken Word tour of various Churches around Australia. I am off now to rent the velvet tux, hire the moog keyboard and take up smoking. )
One of the unspoken subtexts to the whole emerging church discussion of late has been the issue of masculinity. In some senses this discussion mirrors a wider wrestling going on in contemporary culture about what it is to be male today.
OK remembering that I am speaking in generalizations, so here I go.
On one hand we have one segment of the emerging church, who seems to have taken their cues for new models of masculinity from SNAGS, metrosexuals, and the Neo-Hippies that are to be found across the western world in hipster locales, Bobo neighbourhoods, and latte towns. This model of masculinity is born of a reaction to what is seen as the overly ‘macho’ John Wayne-esque masculinity of previous generations (and some would say evangelicalisms). Thus an attempt is made to live out a softer, more inclusive, more creative, possibly more culturally liberal way of being male.
However many have reacted to this new more sensitive model of masculinity, claiming that this model of masculinity is nothing more than a capitulation to feminism and one of the reasons that the church in the West is floundering. Thus some propose a return to a more manly mode of masculinity. Mark Driscoll writes
“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”
Many (particularly in the emerging reformed camp) have responded to Driscoll’s call for a more macho expression of masculinity. A movement particularly in the United States has sprung up trying to re-masculinize what is seen as a feminized church. But you see I have a problem with all of this. Both expressions of masculinity seem to me to be inauthentic, both seem to be trying way too hard.
Both camps have seemingly fallen for what are extremes, what are parodies of gender and masculinity. After over a decade working with youth and young adults you see this all the time in young guys that you disciple. Often guys would come into your church who had not been affirmed in their sense of masculinity. Some, particularly those who had been raised in largely female environments or by violent, angry or emotionally distant fathers would tend to relate to females or other males with the cues that they had learnt from their mothers and the females in their lives. On the other hand, guys who had been affirmed in their masculinity by their fathers but not their mothers, would often attempt to relate to the world through a kind of exaggerated masculinity. Over time you begin to realize that both reactions were simply two responses to young guys feeling insecure about their sense of masculinity.
On one hand I do think that many guys today have grown up in female only environments, with only mothers, or distant fathers. They go to schools with a majority of female teachers and thus grow up with very few genuine male role models. Thus we have seen the rise of what I call emo-sexuals, that is heterosexual males who relate to females in the way that traditionally females have (just watch the films Garden State or Elizabethtown to see example of the emo-sexual male love story). This has in some situations created environments and practices in Christian culture which alienates some males, and tends to focus on a more feminized theology and praxis.
Yet many of the attempts to reconnect with a genuine sense of masculinity seem trapped in externals and posturing, and seem like surface dressing. I can’t help but feel this as I read Driscoll’s quote. On one hand I agree with him that many in the emerging church ( or should I say emergent church) have unwittingly recast Jesus as some kind of 21st century indecisive inner city hipster in skinny jeans, yet I also cannot buy Jesus as some kind of tattooed, no rules fighter driving a black SUV with a gun rack. Both metaphors seem to be stretching. A recent survey here in Australia surveyed thousands of young men, it found that level to which they drove what were seen as more ‘manly’ cars, the more insecure they were about their masculinity. Thus the more someone talks and makes a deal of their ‘macho-ness’ the more likely they are to be deeply insecure about their sense of being male, and insecure about their interactions with females.
C.S Lewis once said that if you met a truly humble man you would probably not realize it, he would just be a pleasant guy who would not be prattling on about how truly humble he is. I think that when you meet men who are truly comfortable with their sense of masculinity you would not realize it because they would not be showing how macho they were by outward displays of faux-masculinity. When I think of men who are comfortable in their sense of masculinity, I think of men who are equally comfortable in relating to both men and women, who can be strong, decisive and responsible, who yet also creative, nuturing and caring, who are not afraid to tell it how it is with fire and brimstone, yet who are also comes with a gentle, inclusive word. You know, kind of like that guy, what’s his name? Oh yeah Jesus.
