Masculinity Reclaimed Series: Click | View Series

Would you like Barack Obama on your kid's work rota? OK, maybe someone with his leadership gift and—assuming he loves Jesus—you'd be pleased, right? Not a man to let go lightly. Well, a former US President (and a legendary one) was let go. Why? As a young man Theodore Roosevelt, serving in a Sunday school, noticed a boy arriving with a black eye. When Roosevelt asked, the boy explained with embarrassment that another boy had pinched his sister, so he'd taken a swing at him and gotten into a scrap. Roosevelt gave the kid a dollar and a pat on the back. The future president was quietly removed that week.

I reckon there's a parable for us, and by "us" I mean the contemporary church. There is an expression of masculinity—an aggression, protectiveness, and a sense of injustice—which is primal in all men. I even see this in my boys. (The youngest seems to have come out of the womb yelling "charge!") Sure it has been horridly distorted in all men by the fall, but it's there.

The Choices

Men are wired with instincts, and it seems we have three choices:

• Abdicate indiscriminately to these instincts. This option leads to ungodly, ill-disciplined, boastful masculinity (chauvinism).
• Exclude them. The second leads to what we have had for centuries: churches that can't cope with men who reward boys for fighting for their sisters. (Churches which, in the words of Leon Podles, are "women's clubs with a few male officers." The husbands stay home or get dragged along, and look glazed till they hear the golden words, "We'll close the meeting there.")
• Redeem and channel them. The third option is the most difficult and the least fashionable, but it's also the most biblical and the most promising when it comes to getting the world changed for good.

One Saturday afternoon, I sat in my car outside a football ground (soccer field) in my city as it emptied. As thousands of young blokes spilled onto the pavements, I imagined the force for God unleashed in Brighton should the vigor, comradeship, belligerence, and strength before me be put to use for Jesus' kingdom! What would have to change for us to harvest and harness this multitude? Probably quite a lot (the next Teddy Roosevelt would get to keep his job, for example). Is it worth that price?

Death By Love:

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears tackle some of the most serious redemptive aspects of Jesus' work in these twelve letters of counsel to individuals. Find out more.