Roles

Researcher and author Rodney Reeves has been studying trends in how men are faring in America. Here’s how he summarizes one of his troubling statistics:

One [statistic] stopped me in my tracks was from a 2018 survey conducted by Pew. The sample size was small, and made use of a word-association methodology, so I haven’t cited it in most of my work. But I still wonder about it. Every single respondent thought that “masculine” was a negative term when applied to women. That’s not surprising.

What was shocking was that most people—four out of five—thought the term “masculine” was negative when applied to men. (The term “feminine” was not mentioned often enough to make it into the analysis.) This finding is consistent with another survey finding that half of men, of all races, think that society “punishes men just for acting like men.”

After multiple fights at Southwood High School in Shreveport, Louisiana, resulted in the arrests of 23 students, a group of about 40 dads stepped up to put a stop to the violence. Known as Dads on Duty, the men work shifts, so there are always several fathers on campus from the time students first arrive to when they go home for the day. The dads are there to lift spirits, tell jokes, dole out advice, and just let the kids know there's someone looking out for them.

Michael LaFitte said he started Dads on Duty because "we decided the best people who can take care of kids are … us." Since the group formed, there have been no fights on campus, with one student explaining, "The school has just been happy, and you can feel it." Dads on Duty will have a permanent presence at Southwood High, and the group would like to see other chapters form across the country.

In a recent issue of Wired, Zak Jason writes:

In the 2003 Major League Baseball season, Oreo Queefs stood five-foot-zero, weighed 385 pounds, and, impossibly, stole 214 bases, obliterating the century-old single-season record of 138. A walrus with the legs of a cheetah, Queefs also regularly blasted the ball 500 feet to the opposite field. Over just two seasons with the Florida Marlins, he batted .680, hit 203 home runs, and was ejected for charging the mound 46 times. Then, before even reaching his super alien prime, Queefs vanished into thin air.

A few weeks ago, I received a text from the Marlins manager about what happened to the former Golden Glove winner. Queefs has fallen on hard times. The now 43-year-old lives with his uncle in a rented trailer in Nevada, where they run a failing off-off-Strip sausage stand called Queefs’ Kielbasa Kiosk. He is twice divorced, hasn’t seen his 15-year-old son in 12 years, and is on probation for attempted robbery of a bait-and-tackle shop.

In reality, Oreo Queefs exists only on a PlayStation 2 memory card, now likely corroding in a landfill. The manager is my childhood friend Chris, onetime owner of the EA Sports game MVP Baseball 2003. We conceived Queefs one summer night the only way two 13-year-old boys know how: (via) the game’s Create-a-Player screen. We chose his height, weight, speed, and batting hot zones. We watched with pride as he eviscerated the league. I haven’t played any of these games in a decade, but over the years my friends and I have updated one another on the lives of our created characters. They’ve all plummeted from glory.

The media has been overanalyzing why millennials can’t grow up ever since the oldest millennials have been legal grown-ups. Still, I can’t help but take the fact that at 32—an age when Jesus Christ was leading his friends and much of humanity to eternal salvation—my friends and I text one another during the workday about the video game characters we created when we were teenagers.

The writer Sam Anderson recently quipped that “the world of sports media is basically where American men go to avoid therapy.” As kids, we lived our dreams vicariously through video game characters record-shattering successes. As adults, we process our real setbacks and failures through their imagined setbacks and failures.

Layoffs, anxieties, illnesses, divorce, fertility issues—these are a few of the realities of adulthood that men are generally less than forthcoming about. Instead of discussing these directly, they cope through abstraction. When we talk about our created characters becoming has-beens, we’re (childishly) saying we’re not children anymore. When we bring them up, they finally open the door for us to talk intimately about struggles in our own lives. These children of our childhood are now ad hoc therapists of adulthood.

Many men in the United States are struggling to thrive. Here’s how Georgetown University professor Joshua Mitchell summarizes the data:

With respect to the criminal justice system: men have a lower chance of posting bail than women; men go to prison at a higher rate and are treated worse in prisons than women; men are punished more harshly for the same crimes; men have higher rates of solitary confinement; men serve a higher percentage of the prison sentence.

With respect to education: men attend college at a lower rate, and graduate at a lower rate.

With respect to death: men have a lower life expectancy, by five years; men are 20 times more likely to die in a work-related injury; men have a higher rate of suicide.

With respect to physical violence: men endure a higher rate of corporal punishment in childhood.

With respect to war: men are forced by law and by societal pressure to fight and die in war. As veterans: men suffer higher rates of homelessness, suicide, PTSD, and drug addiction.

With respect to employment: almost all of the thankless work done "below ground"--in mining, utilities, fishing, and excavation--is done by men.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This is not intended to pit men against women and debate who has more struggles in today's society. It is merely to show that men in our culture need our grace our support.

In a book on modern manhood Helen Smith writes:

On January 13, 2012, an Italian cruise ship, the Costa Concordia partially sank off the coast of Tuscany with 4,252 people on board. 32 people died and 64 were injured. The captain, Francesco Schettino, was charged with “abandoning incapacitated passengers and failing to inform maritime authorities.” Crew members were not much more help as passengers reported that many of them left them to fend for themselves. Rich Lowry at National Review compared the crash of the Costa Concordia to the Titanic and how men responded in each:

“’Every man for himself” is a phrase associated with the deadly Costa Concordia disaster. An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats. A grandmother complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.” If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight—and would have volunteered to perform the service …

Lowry seems to be blaming men for what happened on the Concordia, but he misses the point. The guys’ behavior is a culmination that has been years in the making. Our society, the media, the government, and women, have demanded that any incentives men have for acting like men be taken away and decried masculinity as evil. Now they are seeing the result. Men have been listening to what society has been saying about them for more than forty years; they are perverts, wimps, cowards, jerks, good-for-nothing, bumbling deadbeats and expendable. Men got the message; now they are acting accordingly. As you sow so shall you reap.

The Concordia is just a microcosm of what is happening in our greater society. Men are opting out in response to the attack on their gender. A society can’t spend more than forty years tearing down almost half of the population and expect them to respond with “give me another” forever. The war on men is suicidal for our society and treating men like the enemy is dangerous, both to men and to the society that needs their positive participation as fathers, husbands, role models and leaders.

Bestselling author Peggy Orenstein spent two years speaking to boys across America. In a lengthy piece for The Atlantic, she cites a survey of 1,006 ten to nineteen-year-olds, on a variety of youth issues. Orenstein writes:

The definition of masculinity seems to be … contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of males in the survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills. When I asked them what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore. “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

As part of her research, Orenstein interviewed those knowledgeable on the history of Western masculinity:

The ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker. But such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. ... Today there is much confusion about masculinity and the proper way to raise boys.

Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood—early marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them. Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyper-rationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.

In her book Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin writes about her struggles with the concept of submitting to her husband (as found in Ephesians 5:22):

I came from an academically driven, equality-oriented, all-female high school. I was now studying in a majority-male college. And I was repulsed … I had three problems with this passage. The first was that wives should submit. I knew women were just as competent as men. My second problem was with the idea that wives should submit to their husbands as to the Lord. It is one thing to submit to Jesus Christ, the self-sacrificing King of the universe. It is quite another to offer that kind of submission to a fallible, sinful man. My third problem was the idea that the husband was the “head” of the wife. This seemed to imply a hierarchy at odds with men and women’s equal status as image bearers of God.

At first, I tried to explain the shock away … But when I trained my lens on the command to husbands, the Ephesians passage came into focus … When I realized the lens for this teaching was the lens of the gospel itself, it started making sense. If the message of Jesus is true, no one comes to the table with rights. The only way to enter is flat on your face. Male or female, if we grasp at our right to self-determination, we must reject Jesus, because he calls us to submit to him completely.

Ephesians 5 used to repulse me. Now it convicts me and calls me toward Jesus: the true husband who satisfies my needs, the one man who truly deserves my submission.

I have been married for a decade, and I am not naturally submissive. I am naturally leadership-oriented. I hold a PhD and a seminary degree, and I am the trained debater of the family. Thank God, I married a man who celebrates this! Yet it is a daily challenge to remember my role in this drama and notice opportunities to submit to my husband as to the Lord, not because I am naturally more or less submissive or because he is more or less naturally loving, but because Jesus went to the cross for me.

In Ubang, southern Nigeria, men and women speak different languages. They view this unique difference as “a blessing from God.” Dressed in a brightly colored traditional outfit, Chief Oliver Ibang calls over his two young children, eager to demonstrate the different languages.

He holds up a yam and asks his daughter what it is called. "It's 'irui'," she says, without hesitating. But in Ubang's "male language" the word for yam, one of Nigeria's staple foods, is "itong." And there are many other examples, such as the word for clothing, which is "nki" for men and "ariga" for women.

"It's almost like two different lexicons," says anthropologist Chi Chi Undie. "There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, then there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don't sound alike, they don't have the same letters, they are completely different words."

However, both men and women are able to understand each other perfectly--or as well as anywhere else in the world. This might be partly because boys grow up speaking the female language, as they spend most of their childhoods with their mothers. But by the age of 10, boys are expected to speak the “male language” as evidence of entry into manhood.

Chi-Chi Unde explains: “Men and women operate in almost two separate spheres. It's like they're in separate worlds, but sometimes those worlds come together and you see that pattern in the language as well.”

Possible Preaching Angles: Communication; Gender Differences; Human Nature; Marriage – 1) There is a mysterious and delightful difference between men and women which God intends for us to recognize and enjoy (Genesis 2:20-25); 2) Wouldn’t it be great if you really knew your spouse’s emotional language and used it to communicate fluently with him or her? 3) In our society, there is an increased blurring of gender differences between male and female. But as this small community illustrates there are natural differences that are instinctively known (Romans 1:18-27).

Pastor Timothy Keller and his wife Kathy Keller wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. In it Kathy Keller gives an example of submission in a tough life choice:

In the late 1980s, our family was comfortably situated in a very livable suburb of Philadelphia where Tim held a full-time position as a professor. Then he got an offer to move to New York City to plant a new church. He was excited by the idea, but I was appalled. Raising our three wild boys in Manhattan was unthinkable! Not only that, but almost no one who knew anything about Manhattan thought that the project would be successful. I also knew that this would not be something that Tim would be able to do as a nine-to-five job. It would absorb the whole family and nearly all of our time.

It was clear to me that Tim wanted to take the call, but I had serious doubts that it was the right choice. I expressed my strong doubts to Tim, who responded, “Well, if you don’t want to go, then we won’t go.” However, I replied, “Oh, no, you don’t! You aren’t putting this decision on me. That’s abdication. If you think this is the right thing to do, then exercise your leadership and make the choice. It’s your job to break this logjam. It’s my job to wrestle with God until I can joyfully support your call.”

Tim made the decision to come to New York City and plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The whole family, my sons included, consider it one of the most truly “manly” things he ever did, because he was quite scared, but he felt a call from God. At that point, Tim and I were both submitting to roles that we were not perfectly comfortable with, but it is clear that God worked in us and through us when we accepted our gender roles as a gift from the designer of our hearts.

Possible Preaching Angle: Submission recognizes and affirms leadership. There’s a certain respectful and trusting quality about submission. A husband’s leadership in marriage should be self-sacrificial.

A collection of Einstein's letters auctioned off in 1996 contains a list of marital expectations for his wife, Maliva Maric. The list includes daily laundry "kept in good order," "three meals regularly in my room," a desk maintained neatly "for my use only," and the demand that she quit talking or leave the room "if I request it." The marriage ended in divorce, but the list lives on as an illustration … of assumptions commonly held about marriage in 1914.

Compared with Einstein's requirements, modern marital expectations have surely evolved for the better. Or have they? An insightful study theorizes that as people abandon religious institutions, they start expecting romantic relationships to satisfy a host of needs that formerly were satisfied through religion. If you think clean laundry and regular meals require effort, try meeting the demands of relationship-worship today by providing transcendence, unconditional love, wholeness, meaning, worth, and communion.

An article in First Things concludes:

The Western fixation on romantic love creates a crushing burden for mere mortals. It engenders a powerful myth regarding love, courtship, and marriage: that a fallible human partner can not only share our passions but sate our existential yearnings. Contemporary couples expect much more from marriage than it can realistically deliver … As Eli Finkel of Northwestern University observes, "most of us will be kind of shocked by how many expectations and needs we've piled on top of this one relationship."

A survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 81 percent of lawyers said they'd seen an increase in divorce cases using evidence found on social media. A group of divorce lawyers gave the following five ways social media can hurt a marriage. (All the quotes are from divorce lawyers.)

#1) Screentime got in the way of face time. "Instead of getting into bed and discussing how each other's day was, couples opt to be on social media … [They] engaged with friends, acquaintances or even followers during times that they would otherwise be growing and improving their marital relationship … Put down your device, ask your spouse how their day was and listen."

#2) Reconnecting with old partners led to an affair. "Your former partners bring you back to a time when life was less complicated and your greatest challenge was a term paper. Some get so caught up in the romance that they move from posts, to emails, texts, calls and then secret rendezvous. Even if things don't work out with the old fling, the temporary checking out from your marriage can cause irreparable harm."

#3) Everyone else's marriage appeared perfect in comparison. "As you scroll your news feed and see so many seemingly perfect marriages, there is a tendency to compare your own relationship to the perceived perfection of another's. The weaknesses in your own marriage may become more obvious."

#4) Too much personal information was shared online. "Intimate details about your relationship and marriage should never be exposed on social media. It causes distrust between partners and it can backfire if you and your partner divorce."

#5) The single life started looking more and more attractive. "The social media posts of your single 'friends' look … so much better than your own life because many people's posts are [staged] to portray their own lives in the most positive light. There is a reason the selfie stick was one of the most popular holiday gifts last year."

Boston Light, America's first lighthouse, just celebrated its 300th birthday—but Sally Snowman will be the first to let you know some more specifics about what that "birthday" really means. "The original tower built in 1716 was blown up by the British in 1776," she explains. "We have the new one."

Sally Snowman mans—or "womans," in her words—the lighthouse, serving as its 70th keeper (and the first female to have the title). Over the three centuries since its inception, a keeper has kept the light burning; however, the position in 2016 looks markedly different from those who held the role in the 18th century. As the lighthouse is now "fully automated," Snowman "maintain[s] the grounds, giv[es] tours and manag[es] 90 volunteers."

Yet even with these modernized tasks, Snowman realizes the significance of her job: "Here I am in 2016, the keeper for our 300th anniversary," she says. "That's way beyond my wildest dreams."

Possible Preaching Angles: The various roles within the body of Christ—missionary, teacher, preacher, etc.—look drastically different within various contexts: whether historical eras or cultural circumstances. The importance and the purpose of those roles, however, has remained constant since Jesus' command to "go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19).

While imprisoned by the Nazis in Tegal Prison's Cell 92, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a beautiful sermon for the wedding of his niece and his friend (Eberhard Bethge). Bonhoeffer never had a chance to preach the wedding sermon, but this line has continued to challenge and bless many young couples: "Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love will sustain your marriage. It won't. But your marriage can sustain your love!"

On May 13, 1965, Housekeeping Monthly offered the following advice to women in what they called "The Good Wife's Guide":

Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious dinner ready when your husband gets home from work. This is a way of letting him know you have been thinking about him and are concerned with his needs … Prepare yourself. Put on some make-up, put a ribbon in your hair, and be fresh-looking. He's been with a lot of work-weary people. Prepare the children. Take a few minutes to wash them up, brush their hair, and change their clothes if needed. Remember, they are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part … Have a cool or warm drink for him, and arrange his pillow and take off his shoes … Over the cooler months you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. After all, catering to his comfort will bring you immense satisfaction … Let him talk first. Remember that his topics of conversation are more important than yours … Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner or entertainment without you. Instead try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his need to relax.

Possible Preaching Angles: Bryan Wilkerson comments, "Obviously, times have changed. The irony is that there really is some wisdom here—it's just buried under layers of stereotype and patriarchy. There really is something good and noble about doing these simple, everyday tasks for another person. It's just that it was never meant to flow just one way—from wife to husband, or from woman to man. In the New Testament, Paul tells us all to serve one another, to defer to one another, to submit to one another. He tells husbands to love their wives, to care for their wives as they care for themselves, and to lay down their lives for their wives."

You know that squeaking chair sound or the footsteps and swishing of pants you hear on TV and in the movies. Let us to introduce you to their creator: Gregg Barbanell, the man who creates theses small sounds. In over 44 years as a "Foley" artist, he has over 600 credits to his name, including the hit TV shows Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and even the movie Little Miss Sunshine. "Barbanell's job—to create custom, post-production effects for movies—can be broken down into three components: 'cloth, feet, and props.'" Without these small sounds these shows would be missing something.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even the smallest sounds play an important part in the entire plot of the movie or TV show, just like the smallest contributions—even a cup of cold water! - are important in God's kingdom.

When it comes to winning games, most pro sports teams go after talented players. Everyone wants a team of stars. But a new research study published in Psychological Science argues that too many talented players can actually hurt the team's overall performance. The research study is titled "The Too-Much Talent Effect."

When the researchers analyzed professional sports, especially basketball and soccer, they discovered that talented players helped teams win—but only up to a point. Teams loaded with star players found that the too-much talent effect actually hurt the team's chances of winning. Teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players. Star-studded basketball teams had less assists and rebounds than teams with more average players. The researchers concluded, "When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart."

An article summarizing the study observed:

Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. In many endeavors, success requires [team effort] towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual … When a team roster is flooded with individual talent, pursuit of personal star-status may prevent the attainment of team goals. The basketball player chasing a point record, for example, may cost the team by taking risky shots instead of passing to a teammate.

In 1950, Indy car pit crews consisted of four men—including the driver! No one was allowed to get near the car except this small crew of specialists. A routine pit stop to replace two tires and fill the tank back then took more than 60 seconds. Today, a crew consists of 11 members—excluding the driver. Six are permitted direct contact with the car. Five serve as behind-the-wall assistants. A full service pit stop that replaces all four tires, adjusts the wings, and tops off the tank now takes less than eight seconds! Formula 1 pit crews are even bigger—sometimes involving over 20 people who all have their role to play. When everyone understands his role, and when everyone on the pit crew does his job with purpose and passion, the team can complete the same job in under three seconds.

When the work of the church is carried out by a small handful of people, including the pastor, progress is slow and sometimes awkward. But when every member knows and fills his or her role, the difference can be amazing to behold.

Author and preacher Tony Campolo said that when his wife, Peggy, was at home fulltime with their children and someone would ask, "And what is it that you do, my dear?" she would respond, "I am socializing two Homo sapiens into the dominant values of the Judeo-Christian tradition in order that they might be instruments for the transformation of the social order into the kind of eschatological utopia that God willed from the beginning of creation."

Then Peggy would ask the other person, "And what do you do?"

Sociologist Maggie Gallagher writes:

The reality of family life is that men have to really give quite a lot to women and to children in order to make things work. They have to give up a lot of autonomy, give up a lot of the power to do whatever they want whenever they want. They have to give up lots of income and their mission in life.

Both men and women are happier and more effective if men see this as a manly role. Most commonly, it's a ceremonial title—it's an indication that this man has agreed to take responsibility for this family. And I think men need to be honored and supported in that. But if you use the idea of headship as a reason to believe you should get your way in family life, you've missed the whole point.

A controversy has arisen in Switzerland regarding the well known St. Bernard dogs and the accompanying St. Bernard hospice that have kept watch over an ancient alpine pass for centuries. The monks at the hospice are trying to find another organization to take care of the large dogs. St. Bernard hospice was founded in 1050 A.D., some 650 years before the first dog showed up. But for the last 300 years the hospice has been mostly about dogs.

Over the years, the hospice and the famous dogs—wearing barrels marked with a red cross—helped more than 200,000 safely cross the 8,000-foot pass. Neither the dogs nor the monks of St. Bernard's have actively worked in rescues for at least 50 years. Faster and safer methods of rescue such as helicopters and emergency personnel have been introduced in the area. The only dog at the hospice currently is a golden retriever, while only four monks remain.

St. Bernard hospice is largely operated for the tourist industry these days. The dogs are only present during the summer months. Father Frederic Gaillard says the decreasing numbers of monks and the hard work required to keep up the dogs are causing St. Bernard's to shift their focus. He says the dogs eat four to five pounds of food daily, and the big energetic dogs need to get out for exercise several times a day. He adds, "We think it's better to spend more of our time listening to people and not just them (the dogs). They take up too much energy. It's people that need us, and that's not well understood."