So we talked last week about men's community--how dysfunctional we tend to be, and what it might look like to live beyond the crisis of the week.
This week, I have some fresh rants for the guys to think about (and you know who you are), along with those of you who care about us guys.
So when guys do get around to getting together in some sort of intentional, regular gathering for spiritual/real life conversations, there seems to be one of two roads it goes down.
The first is the check-in. This group is laid back, over coffee or breakfast or lunch. This is a great place for men to start. Most of us are pretty inept at talking about stuff like marriage or parenting or our spiritual lives, so this (again, especially for college guys) is a really helpful place to begin.
The second road in evangelical spirituality is a little more aggressive: it's the 'accountability group.' This is a group of guys who are regularly checking in on a pre-agreed-upon list of areas in their lives where there is an ongoing struggle to resist sin or an area where apathy has set in and there's a desire to get the proverbial rear in motion.
The problem with this meeting, as good as it is to be honest about where we need help, is that it's not actually helping to solve the problems that many of us guys have. Let me explain--and here I'm borrowing heavily (aka flat-out stealing) from my favorite ministry-type book that I've read in the past five years, How People Grow.
We learn internal disciplines/boundaries/motivations starting externally--from our parents in childhood. As kids, our parents are supposed to set regular, good, healhty limits on us. Those limits over time become internalized and if all goes well, we grow up to be healthy adults with a reasonable amount of self-control/motivation--mitigated, of course, by our own innate wiring (the "nature" part).
Of course, all doesn't always go well. And so sometimes, often in fact, we need a fresh run at someone helping us with boundaries from the outside in order that we might learn them internally in a particular area of our lives.
But the weekly accountability group doesn't do this as well as it might. Because all it is in many cases is just a fresh recitation of the law: did you or did you not measure up this week to these standards?
And if someone fails, we pat them on the head and tell them to do better next week. But if they could do better on their own next week, they wouldn't need the accountability group. The point is, they need more help than just a weekly check-in because they don't have the internalized discipline to do better on their own. That's why they're struggling.
What we need is community. Real-time, real-life, "I'm struggling today, can you remind me that I do/don't want to do this" conversations that overflow from the island of just a meeting into every day life.
What we need is guys who we can call on the way home from work when we're spent who can help us to remember that loving our kids matters. What we need is guys we can call when we're struggling, right then, right at that moment, who can talk us down off the ledge, call us to purity, to grace, to love, to life.
What we need is Christ-centered-community-in-real-time. Real relationships that really intersect our lives at the points of struggle, apathy, joylessness, and even and especially celebration.
Alas, that so few of us have it.
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