Here's an interesting article on manhood today. (Or should I say boyhood?) It's the Wall Street Journal so maybe their paywall will keep you out? Teaser:
Except perhaps in very conservative communities, men with sufficient social skills can find sex and companionship without need of a matrimonial commitment (and for those who lack social skills, a willingness to marry is unlikely to provide much compensation). The culture's unrelenting message—repeated in Hymowitz's article—is that women are doing fine on their own. If a woman doesn't need a man, there's little reason for him to devote his life to her service.
George Gilder said it all back in the seventies in a book titled Sexual Suicide (since updated and retitled Men and Marriage
Sadly, I'm not sure Protestant Reformed churches qualify any longer.
In our experience here in a university community where we watch college students individuate from their PCA and Reformed Baptist (including SBC) parents, the prevailing message of Reformed parents to their college and grad student children is that a good education trumps sexual purity and holiness. Of course, they don't put it so honestly. Instead, they tell their daughter that she must...
finish college before getting married, she must get established in her profession or finish her graduate degree before having children, she must keep active in her career or profession after having children, she must have only one or two children so she and her husband can afford daycare after their paternity and maternity leaves expire—the list goes on and on.
It's a life sentence.
Being in a university community, we minister in the interface between children awakening from spiritual sloth and unbelief to faith and zeal, and regularly the response of their rich Reformed parents is horror. Horror that their brilliant daughter now wants to be a wife and mother more than she wants to be a world-famous harp player or hip and rich marketing director. Horror that she wants to marry instead of burning. Horror that she wants to stay home and be a mother instead of going to work and being a drone.
And especially fury that her church's elders and their wives encourage and seek to strengthen her in her newfound Christian faith.
But behind those scenes are all the hard work of teaching and admonishing and disciplining young men who were well on their way to living a life of updates, texts, tweets, and selfie narcissism that's finished off each evening with pizza, video games, and masturbation. In other words, our Clearnote Pastors College men, elders, deacons, pastors, and college ministers all work hard to teach and admonish and exhort and encourage the young men of our church to repent and believe in Jesus Christ, and to obey everything He commanded. Consequently, they leave sodomy and fornication and narcissism behind
I mean, really: could it be any other way for a Reformed church in a college or university community? Must we not live and minister Biblically? Is that not our calling and our vow? Should not the Reformed church be that "very conservative community" the Wall Street Journal speaks of?
This is why I keep telling readers to send their sons and daughters to Bloomington for their college training. Encourage them to come to Athanasius College. To come to Indiana University and be a part of our campus ministry. To take some Bible or church history or theology classes at Athanasius College while pursuing their IU degree.
Encourage them to get an education while you buy them a piece of paper granted by IU that will assure them of lifelong status and wealth. And that education, need I say it, will come from their time studying at Athanasius College, being taught our David's Mighty Men curriculum, and sitting under the preaching of the Word each Lord's Day.
We are not to raise proud materialists who are risk averse. That's the Reformed world today and its repulsive and faithless. We're to raise up a godly seed and Clearnote Church and Athanasius College and Clearnote Campus Fellowship are here to serve you and your precious sons and daughters in finishing that work so you are able to pass the baton to them. As Freddie Mercury sang, "from father to son to son."
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
Want to get in touch? Send Tim an email!
