Kreitsauce's Musings

I cheated. I recently ordered Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project for small groups in churches and schools. It’s an exciting program, but I didn’t wait for training or go through a small group myself to watch the DVDs. I watched them. All of them. In less than twenty-four hours. Dr. Del Tackett is an amazing teacher, but, far more importantly, he accurately describes and defines faith in a God that is far more amazing. I won’t spoil the series for you, because I think that it is much more powerful in a group setting, but I will use one of the lessons as a jumping-in point for today’s posting.

Ever since President Barack Obama told the world that the United States is not a Christian nation, there’s been a lot of questioning about whether or not he was right in doing so. Perhaps it is better to first ask ourselves what it takes to be a Christian nation. Can you simply slap a label on a country and call it Christian? Can you deny it that label if you so choose? What would a truly Christian nation look like?

A Christian nation would begin with the understanding that God has set up a number of distinct realms in society that are dependent on each other. The Truth Project materials list these realms: Family, Labor, State, Community, Relationships with God, and Church. Each sphere is sovereign in nature. Families operate in a distinct way from churches, and one does not replace the other. One has the duty to create because we are made in God’s image, but work should not encroach upon or replace your relationship with God. Sovereignty, however, does not eliminate an appropriate relationship between spheres. Families ought to go to church. Going to church ought to bolster our relationship with God. A strong relationship with God should provide meaning to work. Work should support and enhance community and government. Government and community should find its principles for functionality from a proper view of Scripture. There is a distinction between Church and State, but the two cannot completely separate themselves from each other. God has ordained the State (Romans 13:1) for a number of reasons. When a nation forgets God, however, horrible things may happen.

In the absence of a belief in God, the State may come to believe that it has the authority to determine what is right and what is wrong. We’ve seen the results of such a government. According to R. J. Rummel’s work Death by Government, Stalin killed 42 million, Mao Zedong killed nearly 38 million, Adolf Hitler killed 21 million, and on and on and on it goes. The State-that-would-be-God is a terrible monstrosity. Unfortunately, there are those who have no problem with this mentality.  G. W. F. Hegel wrote:

“The Universal is to be found in the State. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is harder to grasp the Essence of the State. That State is the march of God through the world.”

What madness is this? The State would absorb family, labor, church, education, and community. And so it has in many Western nations.

In modern-day America, the State gets to determine what marriage is, how a parent may discipline, what should be done to the rich, how the poor must be helped, how a child should be educated, what a church may and may not do in the community, and how a community must function. From the cradle to the grave. What hideous thing mankind has created that now has us slouching toward Gomorrah! What have we done to God’s established order, this wondrous system that should have been a reflection of God’s divine attributes? Where will the West wind up if we continue in this direction? Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire portray the Roman Empire as self-destructing due to the following, among other things:

1. A mounting love of show and luxury
2. An obsession with sex
3. Freakishness in the Arts
4. An increased desire to live off the State

This path will not end any better for us than it did for Rome. It wasn’t always this way, for America at least.

Last week, I wrote about the reasons why so many men refuse to go to church. I want to follow up on that train of thought a little bit and talk about the relationship between faith in God and having a father-figure. Dr. Paul C. Vitz of New York University’s Psychology department published an article in 1999 that appears to also be the subject of an upcoming book entitled Defective Fathers: Psychological Origins of Atheism.

In his study, Vitz noted that many famous atheists had been neglected or abused by their fathers. Some fathers had simply been not nearly so strong in character or personality as they desired. Consider the words of H. G. Wells, who said: “My father was always at cricket, and I think [mum] realised more and more acutely as the years dragged on without material alleviation, that Our Father and Our Lord, on whom to begin with she had perhaps counted unduly, were also away – playing perhaps at their own sort of cricket in some remote quarter of the starry universe.” By studying atheists and a group of Christians, Vitz theorized that the atheists’ disdain for God began as a disdain for their own human fathers.

In contrast, Vitz found that Christians tend to be considered psychologically healthy. This flies in the face of Christopher Hitchens’ book, which states quite plainly that religion is grounded on wish-thinking. To Hitchens, God exists in believers’ mind simply because we want Him to be there. Our deepest longings for something- Someone- beyond ourselves cause us to create a God to believe in.

Hitchens proves nothing by noting that we long for God. There are, after all, many people who have  a good reason to long for God to be absent from the picture. They may not want Him to tell them what to do. They may not like taking ultimate responsibility. I’d say an atheist has at least as strong of a reason to disbelieve in God as a believer has for belief in God. Inner motivation has nothing to do with proving or disproving God’s existence.

No doubt, there is something within most people that does long for the Eternal. That longing doesn’t mean I fabricated God to be the object of that longing. I longed for food today, and I enjoyed some beef stew for lunch and some marinated chicken for dinner that I’m quite sure were real. I longed for fellowship, and I was able to enjoy talking to friends and family. But you may say to me: “Yes, but I can perceive the food and the friends with my senses. Those aren’t the same as God, who cannot be seen.” That’s true, but think about it a little more. Before I knew Him, I knew that I longed for something. It was only after I came to faith that I knew what my longings were all about. A child may long for food or companionship but not know what to call it. Also, hunger and loneliness are concepts, not objects to be perceived, just like a longing for the Eternal God. The desire is intangible, but the object is not.

PS- Apologetics 315 has a link to a free MP3 of Vitz if you care to listen…

This Father’s Day article is going to address a huge problem in the American Church: the lack of male attendance in congregations. I’ve read a number of articles and even a book or two on the subject, and I’ll be pointing you in the direction of a few good online articles and books if you’re interested.

A while ago, I wrote an article entitled “Jesus Isn’t ‘Nice’” about how we have altered our perception of God Himself to fit our culture. Because we have made that change in perception about God, we have feminized (I prefer the term “neutered”, since it brings to mind the stallion and the gelding) churches and our portrayal of the “godly man.” The effect on our congregations has been profound.

Consider the following statistics listed on the “Church for Men” website:

• American churches on average display an incredible gender gap- 69% women and 31% men. That translates to about 13 million more women attending than men.
• 1 in 4 “churched” women will attend the Sunday service without their husbands, while 80% of attendees at the midweek services are women.
• Over 70% of boys raised in church will drop out by the end of their college years.
• At Christian colleges, the ratio of female to male students is 2 to 1.

These statistics, verified from a number of researchers, are astounding to me. Besides the obvious problem of men abandoning or rejecting faith in Christ, think of the incredible symbiotic relationship between men and Christianity!

• Churchgoers are more likely to be satisfied with their lives, marriages, and themselves.
• Churchgoers are less likely to remain poor or depressed.
• Men who attend church are more likely to be engaged with their spouse and children, and teens with churchgoing fathers are more likely to admire and enjoy spending time with their fathers.
• The presence of men in a congregation is statistically related to whether or not the church grows or declines.

Who is being reached by the Gospel today? Women. There are women’s conferences, fellowships, Bible studies, and retreats. That’s fantastic and needed. Men, on the other hand, are fortunate if they get a monthly pancake breakfast and an annual retreat. The early church was a magnet for men seeking for something, but today’s church repels men.

The question must be asked: Why are men abandoning church in record numbers if many men believe in God, claim to be saved, and want to be good husbands and fathers? The answer is quite simple: churches have followed the trend of American culture and have become more effeminate. The average church, quite frankly, has been neutered.

Paul Coughlin at Crosswalk.com says that men have been encouraged to be harmless as doves, but not to become wise (shrewd) like serpents. Wisdom and cunning are extremely important, but men are told that shrewdness in everything from political and religious arguments to business deals is bad. That goes right along with the feminizing of Jesus and preaching “feel good” sermons. Sermons today are often geared to deal with supposedly practical issues and not deeper, more penetrating, or more intellectual issues. What’s so terrible to me about that last point is that I think this is insulting to many women as well as men!

Coughlin also points out that preaching and teaching today commonly instructs men to avoid anger. The problem is that anger is the primary emotional response for many men and some women! It’s a simple reaction that can’t be controlled! Of course, how anger is dealt with can be controlled, but anger is to some men what crying is to some women. Can you imagine a pastor telling the women in his congregation to not cry when they get upset? No one would do such a thing, because everyone knows that crying is sometimes a natural response to situations for some people. The same thing stands for anger. Good luck building a biblical case against anger, by the way. You’ll find the Bible speaks often of controlling and dealing with anger, being angry and not sinning, God’s own anger, and being meek. What you won’t find is an instruction to never be angry. You also won’t find God banning masculine qualities.

Christian men are encouraged to be “nice” in the name of Christian testimony. Sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade though. To be sure, there are times when testimony is important, but that isn’t all the time. Imagine telling Moses, David, Elijah, Daniel, John the Baptist,  and Paul to back down in the name of testimony. Personally, I’d like to see more men in church that exhibit more of the qualities of these godly men. If the righteous are bold as lions (Proverbs 28), then our churches are sadly lacking in righteous men.

Churches today are extremely relational, and seek to meet emotional needs, according to writer Nancy Pearcey. They deal with sharing feelings, soft singing, and comforting members. Praise songs describe Jesus almost as a lover, while songs such as “Onward Christian Soldiers” are avoided at all cost. As Pearcey says: “So, as long as Christianity appeals to the emotional, therapeutic, interpersonal, relational areas, it’s not going to appeal to men as much as to women.” Where is the church triumphant in all of this?

The answer is that the church today isn’t too concerned with being triumphant. As my fellow blogger Wintery Knight observes:

“All of the outward facing disciplines within Christianity, such as apologetics, theology, ethics, etc. are de-emphasized, censored or resisted in feminized churches. There is no place for rationality, moral judgments and boundaries, debates and disagreement, confrontations and persuasion, or other manly Christian practices.

Christianity is evangelical, and evangelism takes study and preparation, which culminates in confrontations and discussions. The object of these discussions is not to win the argument. It is to win the person over to your side. So facts and arguments play a huge role in  evangelism, but there has to be gentleness too, if you actually want to win. And this is what Christian men are supposed to do.”

Men seem to enjoy theology, philosophy, politics, ethics, and science more than women do. They love debate, contest, competition, adventure, challenges, danger, risk, and achievement in a unique way. It isn’t that these are “men’s areas”, but there is something different in how men are wired that gives them an affinity for these things. As John Eldridge’s book Wild at Heart observes, our self-worth is intimately connected to these things. Men don’t feel complete unless they are accomplishing, building, and standing on something larger than themselves. As Christian comedian Jeff Allen has said, men need something worth dying for to make them truly come to life.

So what’s a church to do? Jesus founded His church on men, and it only seems fitting that churches can only thrive when there is a core of both men and women willing to serve Him. Remember that the pastor of any given church probably isn’t to blame for who attends- or doesn’t attend- his church. The congregation wields great control in this area, so it is up to us- the laity- to make the changes. Christianity must be presented as more than the solution to fears and failures if men are to return to church. It must be presented as the wild journey, the incredible quest, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” that it is. There must be more preaching and teaching on being “a soldier of the cross”, of putting on the armor of light, and of rejecting spiritual milk for meat. Only then will there be a resurgence of men to the church pew.

For more information check out Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow and The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity by Leon J. Podles. Personal enrichment books on the same topic are The Silence of Adam by Larry Crabb and No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul T. Coughlin.