The 800 lb Gorilla

Yesterday, I mentioned that it was a piece that I wrote for a forum that was the seed for this. I had forwarded it to a guy I recently met, and he asked if I had a blog.

Here is the piece, edited from the grammatical and other errors I made the first time:

The problem isn't the church.

The problem isn't clergy.

The problem isn't women.

The problem is that "We're a generation of men raised by women" to quote from the movie Fight Club

It's worse than that. We're a generation of men descended from a generation of men descended from a ... each raised by women.

We have ministries to men that tell us that we need to be better men, better fathers, better church members, better Christians, better nice guys, better sons, better (fill in the blank). And to help us, we get nothing but platitudes, tips, techniques yet no real help. Preaching and teaching isn't needed, even though learning is.

In the intro to John Eldredge's wonderful The Way of the Wild Heart, he tells the story of being in Alaska on a vacation, and a guide showed him an ancient bear path through an unstable marsh area. Generation after generation after generation of bears, for perhaps hundreds of years, had taken that path, walking exactly in one another's paw steps.

For millenniums, it was a lot like that for men. Until the industrial revolution, the man of the family worked from the home, or the home was over the shop, or the home was on the farm. Dad was at home. When a boy reached a certain age, he joined in the family business along side his dad. This was typically between six and ten, depending on the business. A man knew how to be a man by engaging with a man and men from an early age.

The industrial revolution began the change. Some boys "lost" their dad to the factories. In the U.S. the Civil War took a lot of men about the same time. Then into the 20th century, the automobile allowed for commutes, the airplane could take a man from his family totally during the week. The school systems that a boy entered were increasingly dominated by woman. No men in the neighborhoods during the day. And liberalized laws and attitudes on divorce took more men as courts favored custody to the woman. Liberalized attitudes on sex increased out of wedlock births. Now less than half the male population is being raised in houses with his father.

And not only is the church doing little about the boys being raised like this, they are doing even less for men who were raised like this. Other than to challenge them to be better, without setting up real communities to help. No, they just preach to be better at men who haven't a clue how to do better.

You want to reach men? It isn't going to happen in changing services to man-friendly. or the structures of the church, or defending them. Nor a creed, another set of rules, or any of that s**t. No, there's an 800 lb gorilla in the room that is being ignored. It is that we are a generation raised by women. Start to address that, and men will storm the gates of hell for you.