Church Voices

Being a huge Pistons fan I was perusing through one of my favorite NBA sites, aptly named Basketbawful and came across this little snippet of Intolerable Cruelty and this jumped out at me:

(Here’s a true story. When I was in college, a buddy of mine went to Sweden to attend Bible school. While he was there, he and several of the other students went down to the town square and sung hymns. Some of the local tough guys didn’t like that, and so they started heckling the group, which was comprised mostly of women and the kind of men who go to Bible school — interpret that however you want. Anyway, my friend confronted them, and, despite the Swedish history of wartime neutrality, one of the tough guys bitchslapped my friend. But being a God-fearing man well-versed in scripture, he remembered Jesus’ advice and turned the other cheek…only to have that one bitchslapped as well. He turned his cheek again, and he got slapped again. This went on for several minutes, until my friend collapsed into unconsciousness. Afterward, he called me from Sweden — which, at that time, was something like $153 per minute — to proudly tell me about getting his ass kicked in front of his friends, just like Jesus would have done! This story always cheers me up.)

There’s a fairly well known story about Teddy Roosevelt getting fired from being a Sunday School teacher. He had a boy in his class who had just come from fighting. When Teddy asked why he had been fighting the boy said because some other boy had called his sister a bad name. Teddy gave the kid $1 and told him to keep up the good work. When the den mothers of the church found out they had him removed from the Sunday school classroom.

Sadly, since that day the Church Den Mothers have ruled the church with an oven mitted fist tightly clenched around anything resembling manliness. In fact, I have it on good authority that the phrase “man up” has never been uttered in a church building, and as time has gone on (as time is wont to do) men began their exodus from the apron stringed slavery found in church buildings until we’ve reached the point where demographic commentary on the men who remain can be made accurately by sites like Basketbawful.

In a related story, Mark Driscoll handled the question from Relevant magazine about challenges the church faces in the future with his usual double fisted aplomb:

Q. What do you see as the greatest challenge for young Christians in the next 10 years?

A. 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 pride 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. I fear some are becoming more cultural then Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.

Now am I suggesting that we have arm wrestling contests as part of our worship? No. but I am suggesting that giving a kid a buck for pounding on a bully that picks on his sister is the kind of behavior that should be encouraged from Godly men.