Yes, the Moody interview was a good episode. Regarding his reframes, the first reminds me of a time years ago when I was picking up my daughter from a friend's house across town. I was driving Houston's West Loop (I-610), one of the busiest freeways in Texas, but it was late Sunday night, so was just sailing along. But I got quite a shock, hardly 15 minutes later coming back, to see a massive number of emergency vehicles and a huge wreck on the other side, which must have happened moments after I had passed through that space. It's times like that where I'm suddenly confronted with the reality of how important God's protection is.
And regarding his second reframe, we've had a number of frustrations with neighbors over the years, sometimes because they don't like our Christian 'witness' (even though we never say anything), our many kids running around the neighborhood, our antisocial behavior (homeschooling), or whatever petty thing. But I've learned to try to be charitable, many times discovering later that they were indeed, like Moody observed, going through some unseen trial or tribulation.
I think there's a distinct but related issue of the… ah, let's say, mode of worship, or perhaps just "what activity goes on, in your community, on Sunday".
Some parishes these days place a heavy emphasis on the touchy feely aspects of being friends with each other and God. (Some of these to their credit emphasize Him and His love, others barely seem to remember Him except maybe as a projection of our own desires and emotions.) The extreme examples can be very "horizontal" (as opposed to "vertical" towards the Almighty), very emotional, very social but much more the feminine sort of socialization than masculine activity – the stuff of pop psychology, groups of people coming together to celebrate the way they believe they're empathetic (whether they actually are towards those less touchy feely than themselves, is another question). These ones, anecdotally, don't seem to get a lot of engagement out of men – especially not younger men.
Whereas, say – this example's obviously from the Catholic world, but that's what I can speak to firsthand – parishes where they still chant in Latin and their liturgies place an emphasis on sacrifice and so forth, have a much more balanced sex and age ratio, often being full of young couples and their families, and the men being much more engaged and active in leading said families.
This is the case even though in my experience these parishes seldom address men one way or the other, directly – though they are much more likely to provide instruction in actually living the Faith, both in terms of being willing to tell people the doctrinal teachings and the dos and don'ts (politically incorrect though that is) but also in terms of how to pray, how to grow in virtue, how to exercise charity (the action not just passionate feelings), etc. (Even if not being addressed as men, at least being addressed in terms of actual right and wrong with actual purpose or a concrete mission, seems to be the kind of thing men can get involved with.) Getting meat in terms of Faith advice is certainly part of it, but so is the sense that worship is ritual directed towards God, that "Sunday services" are not just everybody coming together for a spiritually inspired group hug.
I should say that there's a third option, and that's the informal but zealous praise and worship sorts of communities driven by actual youthful energy. That seems to fall somewhere in between, anecdotally; I don't recall seeing as many young families and I don't know how many of the kids – excuse me, young adults (I'm just barely old enough I'm starting to see the younger ones like children now) – end up holding onto the Faith as they make their way into the world, but they at least do have a more balanced sex ratio as far as I've noticed. If anything, I think maybe they have the reverse challenge: rather than not appealing much to young men, they don't appeal much to anyone but the very young, men or not. But it's been a while since I moved in those circles, so, I can't say for sure.
A little bit of pushback: just because people aren't responding to you doesn't mean that your message is bad. The fact is that a lot of online influencers speaking to men's issues either appeal to men's baser instincts/hindbrains (Andrew Tate, and the various folks who've converted to Islam) or appeal to pride/forebrains (Jordan Peterson and the more virtue-focused crowd)..
Christianity, with its message of dying to self so that you might live, will always be less immediately attractive than either of the above.
"The fact that millions of men turn to online influencers but not to the church ought to be an embarrassment to American church leaders. The unfortunate reality is that the church simply isn’t credible with young men (and increasingly women, too) because it’s not courageous enough to say the true things like this you can hear from Peterson and others."
I'm courageous enough to say that this is BS. The church's mission is to equip the saints for good works not to give men a pep talk similar to Jordan Peterson (whom I like) on how to be attractive to women or how to get married. Yes, I know that many pastors talk about a lot of things not in the Scripture and that is wrong too. Aaron has said he is not a theologian, and it shows. The statement above is a similar marketing strategy that the seek sensitive churches had in the past - like Saddleback - who have now gone woke. Preaching the gospel and making disciples is what the church is called to do.
So, what would you say equipping the saints for good works, preaching the Gospel and making disciples involves and looks like? Not a rhetorical question, want to know how it contrasts with what you say shouldn't be part of the Church's message.
If it is, then it seems obvious that if one is preparing the saints to do good work, helping them set things up so that they can have children to raise in the way of the Lord is something that is licit for a pastor to do, so long as he does not neglect his other duties.
I will also point out here that a constant theme in the New Testament is that there should be community among believers and that we should take care of one another, and that facilitating that is also part of the church's role, in addition to preaching the gospel and making disciples.
The notion that the church only needs to concern itself with the "spiritual" health of its members is a product of secularization, not Scripture.
I’m not saying that raising Godly children isn’t a good work. But the example of Jordan Peterson (whom I quote many times when I’m talk/discipling others) is not and shouldn’t not be a sermon. Practical advice for living in a Godly manner can be part of it, but the impression I get from this is that to draw men to church we need to focus on things men care about in their secular lives instead of God’s call for their eternal lives. Marketing strategies for the church are abysmal failures because they are aimed at superficial consumer wants - not what their eternal needs. We are called to be faithful not effective.
I have seen this disconnect pop up several times recently. When we say "church" we could mean the institutional church, responsible for Sunday sermons, OR the body of believers that live in community.
I don't know what exactly Aaron meant, but I don't think it was that pastors should read Jordan Peterson transcripts in worship services. Rather, it's that if you are a 25 year old man trying to figure out how to live righteously in this world, that the elders and godly men in your church should be people you immediately think to turn to. Every man WILL make decision about where and how to work, date, marry,spend money, etc. If they want to get better at it, they'll look for advice. Your point seems to be that since pastors usually shouldn't give that advice in a sermon, it's best if young people just get it from people like Peterson who actively reject Christ.
That would be a valid criticism if we were discussing a marketing strategy. I would argue that in order for the church to be faithful, it has to tell the truth about social trends and help its members to navigate them. Further, I will go so far as to say that if the church speaks biblically to men about what being a "servant leader" actually is ("mission, men, me" rather than "happy wife, happy life") I think you'll get men coming in.
However, that requires at least occasionally speaking directly to men about how their God-ordained tendencies can be used for His glory rather than only talking about generic piety or focusing mainly on the virtues more commonly associated with women. (Now, it should be noted that this situation is much better now than it was ten or twenty years ago, but in a lot of ways that's more a comment on how bad it was then than how good it was now.)
After reflection, my issue with this whole line of encouraging men to come to church and then complaining about how people like Jordan Peterson are getting men involved is missing the whole point of the church. And saying that the church should be embarrassed is something that distracts and hampers what the church should be doing. The church has a clear message to all people - men and women alike. I have no problems with clarifying that servant leadership is not to do whatever your wife wants but is instead to lead a family in a more Godly manner. If men - or anyone else - are staying at a church for a self-help session on how to get married, etc. then to worship the one true God then we are off the right path and heading towards apostasy. Church is about God - not about us.
The "clear message" the church is sending is actually a lie when it comes to marriage. For example, academic research has shown the conservative evangelical pastors, in their sermons, use language that describes divorce as male initiated when it is in reality predominately female initiates. They also clearly misrepresent the scriptures on marriage and other problems.
Aaron - you pay much more attention to the academic research so I will not dispute you; however, the impression I am getting from reading your posts is that churches are failing because they are not attracting men. Your solution seems to be to focus on men's issues. As I have said above, churches should undoubtedly have classes and discipleship focus on men, but what I am hearing is that you think sermons should be like therapy sessions for men. I have heard sermons in other churches focusing on men's and women's problems and the solution is what God can do for them. I submit that is dead wrong. God has already done the work; people need to accept what He has given them as new creations. If I am misunderstanding you, the please forgive me.
I started reading that article but couldn't finish it, which is something I rarely say. Out of anything I've ever read, I think it contains the highest density of individual sentences that make me angry and disgusted.
Helping people, especially men, find a spouse is something the church is completely indifferent to. Maybe they talk about family issues, but mostly they treat their congregants as sexless atomized individuals who need more piety in some general good (gnostic) characteristic. There might be a singles group at a large mega church, but that isn’t much help.
This is something I've actually seen in multiple confessional churches on the positive end. I've known multiple arranged introductions in multiple denominations. In one case, the parents were in the same presbytery but the son of one was out of state. They introduced the couple and bang, they completely hit it off.
I know another introduction set up by a pastor at my church from across the country that resulted in marriage and of several others more anecdotally. Even cross-denominationally but within the Reformed/NAPARC world, I've seen it done well or heard it mentioned by them.
It didn't work out for the two of us but I myself got very welcomed by a church when I visited a girl I was interested in's church where the pastor had mentored my former pastor. Had the two of us ended up working as a couple, our two churches would have totally smoothed out as much as they possibly could.
One of the many problems of broad evangelical settings is that there's so many wild differences that it's more personality (pick your celebrity or local version type) or a newfangled ethos that it's not actually a given that you are going to have the same shared bonds that more confessional or liturgical groups will inherently have. I shuddered at some of the singles meat markets I've encountered from a distance in the local evangelical megachurches - very popular but only marry the people who would marry easily anyway - no such luck for anyone even slightly off the beaten track.
Yes, the Moody interview was a good episode. Regarding his reframes, the first reminds me of a time years ago when I was picking up my daughter from a friend's house across town. I was driving Houston's West Loop (I-610), one of the busiest freeways in Texas, but it was late Sunday night, so was just sailing along. But I got quite a shock, hardly 15 minutes later coming back, to see a massive number of emergency vehicles and a huge wreck on the other side, which must have happened moments after I had passed through that space. It's times like that where I'm suddenly confronted with the reality of how important God's protection is.
And regarding his second reframe, we've had a number of frustrations with neighbors over the years, sometimes because they don't like our Christian 'witness' (even though we never say anything), our many kids running around the neighborhood, our antisocial behavior (homeschooling), or whatever petty thing. But I've learned to try to be charitable, many times discovering later that they were indeed, like Moody observed, going through some unseen trial or tribulation.
I think there's a distinct but related issue of the… ah, let's say, mode of worship, or perhaps just "what activity goes on, in your community, on Sunday".
Some parishes these days place a heavy emphasis on the touchy feely aspects of being friends with each other and God. (Some of these to their credit emphasize Him and His love, others barely seem to remember Him except maybe as a projection of our own desires and emotions.) The extreme examples can be very "horizontal" (as opposed to "vertical" towards the Almighty), very emotional, very social but much more the feminine sort of socialization than masculine activity – the stuff of pop psychology, groups of people coming together to celebrate the way they believe they're empathetic (whether they actually are towards those less touchy feely than themselves, is another question). These ones, anecdotally, don't seem to get a lot of engagement out of men – especially not younger men.
Whereas, say – this example's obviously from the Catholic world, but that's what I can speak to firsthand – parishes where they still chant in Latin and their liturgies place an emphasis on sacrifice and so forth, have a much more balanced sex and age ratio, often being full of young couples and their families, and the men being much more engaged and active in leading said families.
This is the case even though in my experience these parishes seldom address men one way or the other, directly – though they are much more likely to provide instruction in actually living the Faith, both in terms of being willing to tell people the doctrinal teachings and the dos and don'ts (politically incorrect though that is) but also in terms of how to pray, how to grow in virtue, how to exercise charity (the action not just passionate feelings), etc. (Even if not being addressed as men, at least being addressed in terms of actual right and wrong with actual purpose or a concrete mission, seems to be the kind of thing men can get involved with.) Getting meat in terms of Faith advice is certainly part of it, but so is the sense that worship is ritual directed towards God, that "Sunday services" are not just everybody coming together for a spiritually inspired group hug.
I should say that there's a third option, and that's the informal but zealous praise and worship sorts of communities driven by actual youthful energy. That seems to fall somewhere in between, anecdotally; I don't recall seeing as many young families and I don't know how many of the kids – excuse me, young adults (I'm just barely old enough I'm starting to see the younger ones like children now) – end up holding onto the Faith as they make their way into the world, but they at least do have a more balanced sex ratio as far as I've noticed. If anything, I think maybe they have the reverse challenge: rather than not appealing much to young men, they don't appeal much to anyone but the very young, men or not. But it's been a while since I moved in those circles, so, I can't say for sure.
A little bit of pushback: just because people aren't responding to you doesn't mean that your message is bad. The fact is that a lot of online influencers speaking to men's issues either appeal to men's baser instincts/hindbrains (Andrew Tate, and the various folks who've converted to Islam) or appeal to pride/forebrains (Jordan Peterson and the more virtue-focused crowd)..
Christianity, with its message of dying to self so that you might live, will always be less immediately attractive than either of the above.
"The fact that millions of men turn to online influencers but not to the church ought to be an embarrassment to American church leaders. The unfortunate reality is that the church simply isn’t credible with young men (and increasingly women, too) because it’s not courageous enough to say the true things like this you can hear from Peterson and others."
I'm courageous enough to say that this is BS. The church's mission is to equip the saints for good works not to give men a pep talk similar to Jordan Peterson (whom I like) on how to be attractive to women or how to get married. Yes, I know that many pastors talk about a lot of things not in the Scripture and that is wrong too. Aaron has said he is not a theologian, and it shows. The statement above is a similar marketing strategy that the seek sensitive churches had in the past - like Saddleback - who have now gone woke. Preaching the gospel and making disciples is what the church is called to do.
So, what would you say equipping the saints for good works, preaching the Gospel and making disciples involves and looks like? Not a rhetorical question, want to know how it contrasts with what you say shouldn't be part of the Church's message.
Is not the raising of godly children a good work?
If it is, then it seems obvious that if one is preparing the saints to do good work, helping them set things up so that they can have children to raise in the way of the Lord is something that is licit for a pastor to do, so long as he does not neglect his other duties.
I will also point out here that a constant theme in the New Testament is that there should be community among believers and that we should take care of one another, and that facilitating that is also part of the church's role, in addition to preaching the gospel and making disciples.
The notion that the church only needs to concern itself with the "spiritual" health of its members is a product of secularization, not Scripture.
I’m not saying that raising Godly children isn’t a good work. But the example of Jordan Peterson (whom I quote many times when I’m talk/discipling others) is not and shouldn’t not be a sermon. Practical advice for living in a Godly manner can be part of it, but the impression I get from this is that to draw men to church we need to focus on things men care about in their secular lives instead of God’s call for their eternal lives. Marketing strategies for the church are abysmal failures because they are aimed at superficial consumer wants - not what their eternal needs. We are called to be faithful not effective.
I have seen this disconnect pop up several times recently. When we say "church" we could mean the institutional church, responsible for Sunday sermons, OR the body of believers that live in community.
I don't know what exactly Aaron meant, but I don't think it was that pastors should read Jordan Peterson transcripts in worship services. Rather, it's that if you are a 25 year old man trying to figure out how to live righteously in this world, that the elders and godly men in your church should be people you immediately think to turn to. Every man WILL make decision about where and how to work, date, marry,spend money, etc. If they want to get better at it, they'll look for advice. Your point seems to be that since pastors usually shouldn't give that advice in a sermon, it's best if young people just get it from people like Peterson who actively reject Christ.
That would be a valid criticism if we were discussing a marketing strategy. I would argue that in order for the church to be faithful, it has to tell the truth about social trends and help its members to navigate them. Further, I will go so far as to say that if the church speaks biblically to men about what being a "servant leader" actually is ("mission, men, me" rather than "happy wife, happy life") I think you'll get men coming in.
However, that requires at least occasionally speaking directly to men about how their God-ordained tendencies can be used for His glory rather than only talking about generic piety or focusing mainly on the virtues more commonly associated with women. (Now, it should be noted that this situation is much better now than it was ten or twenty years ago, but in a lot of ways that's more a comment on how bad it was then than how good it was now.)
After reflection, my issue with this whole line of encouraging men to come to church and then complaining about how people like Jordan Peterson are getting men involved is missing the whole point of the church. And saying that the church should be embarrassed is something that distracts and hampers what the church should be doing. The church has a clear message to all people - men and women alike. I have no problems with clarifying that servant leadership is not to do whatever your wife wants but is instead to lead a family in a more Godly manner. If men - or anyone else - are staying at a church for a self-help session on how to get married, etc. then to worship the one true God then we are off the right path and heading towards apostasy. Church is about God - not about us.
You seem to have a problem with the idea of churches offering Biblically-based practical advice in addition to their core duties.
Why?
The "clear message" the church is sending is actually a lie when it comes to marriage. For example, academic research has shown the conservative evangelical pastors, in their sermons, use language that describes divorce as male initiated when it is in reality predominately female initiates. They also clearly misrepresent the scriptures on marriage and other problems.
Aaron - you pay much more attention to the academic research so I will not dispute you; however, the impression I am getting from reading your posts is that churches are failing because they are not attracting men. Your solution seems to be to focus on men's issues. As I have said above, churches should undoubtedly have classes and discipleship focus on men, but what I am hearing is that you think sermons should be like therapy sessions for men. I have heard sermons in other churches focusing on men's and women's problems and the solution is what God can do for them. I submit that is dead wrong. God has already done the work; people need to accept what He has given them as new creations. If I am misunderstanding you, the please forgive me.
Girls are outperforming boys so much, some parents only want daughters. https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html
I started reading that article but couldn't finish it, which is something I rarely say. Out of anything I've ever read, I think it contains the highest density of individual sentences that make me angry and disgusted.
Helping people, especially men, find a spouse is something the church is completely indifferent to. Maybe they talk about family issues, but mostly they treat their congregants as sexless atomized individuals who need more piety in some general good (gnostic) characteristic. There might be a singles group at a large mega church, but that isn’t much help.
This is something I've actually seen in multiple confessional churches on the positive end. I've known multiple arranged introductions in multiple denominations. In one case, the parents were in the same presbytery but the son of one was out of state. They introduced the couple and bang, they completely hit it off.
I know another introduction set up by a pastor at my church from across the country that resulted in marriage and of several others more anecdotally. Even cross-denominationally but within the Reformed/NAPARC world, I've seen it done well or heard it mentioned by them.
It didn't work out for the two of us but I myself got very welcomed by a church when I visited a girl I was interested in's church where the pastor had mentored my former pastor. Had the two of us ended up working as a couple, our two churches would have totally smoothed out as much as they possibly could.
One of the many problems of broad evangelical settings is that there's so many wild differences that it's more personality (pick your celebrity or local version type) or a newfangled ethos that it's not actually a given that you are going to have the same shared bonds that more confessional or liturgical groups will inherently have. I shuddered at some of the singles meat markets I've encountered from a distance in the local evangelical megachurches - very popular but only marry the people who would marry easily anyway - no such luck for anyone even slightly off the beaten track.