One of the most overused, misunderstood, and confusing things in the church is the idea of leadership. This is especially true when it comes to men in relation to women. It’s my hope today to make that even more confusing. Just kidding. Maybe.
In my last post I began talking about this idea of being a servant leader that we toss around in Christian circles. I’m not going to rehash all of that here. You might start by reading that post. Today I want to talk about the servant part and in another post I’ll talk about the leadership side.
I want to clarify a couple of things quickly. I’m not suggesting here that we shouldn’t serve people. Not at all. We often should. Again, Jesus served. He called us to serve others. What I’m suggesting that serving and leadership are not the same and our motive for serving matters.
Jesus did not serve in order to gain followers. He didn’t serve to earn relationships. The reason Jesus is the greatest servant is because he didn’t have to serve at all and yet chose to. Not only that, but He gave the ultimate service in dying for us. Jesus served His followers. But again He didn’t serve to get followers.
I was recently at a conference where we spent some time talking about leadership. The conversation was centered around what makes a good leader and how do we be good leaders to others. One of the interesting things that was said was something to the effect of the only way to be a good leader was to be a servant. This is of course a common theme in Christian culture. And like a lot of themes in Christian culture it’s only sort of true.
I’ve been giving the idea of leadership a lot of thought lately – both in the context of my job and in the context of singleness and marriage. You can see some of my thoughts about leading while dating here.
I think in our context as a Christian man, be it single or married, this idea is very confusing. Partly because we use a lot of words like servant and leader interchangeably and I’m not so sure that’s helpful.
So recently I heard a song by Sean Mendes aptly titled “Treat You Better”. This song frankly encapsulates how guys (especially young guys) often see the dating scene completely wrong. Especially “nice” guys. Especially Christian “nice” guys. I know this, because for a long time, longer than I care to admit, I was this guy. In my teen years (Mendes is 18) I could have written this song. Heck, I wrote some songs like this.
When I was a teenager, I always liked the girl that dated the guy that was “bad” for her. Pretty much literally all of my high school crushes could be summed up in that. I was the good guy friend. Sometimes I actually was a real friend, but other times that was just the line they told me to be nice instead of telling me to get lost.
I was seen as the nice guy. The guy who would make some girl happy one day, just not that girl. She instead dated the guy who was crazy, dangerous (read exciting) and who they were typically sleeping with (read sexually attracted to). I was none of those things.
In our culture we are constantly talking about how we identify. Not only that, but we know that whatever our answer is to that question, we will be judged by it. It has of course to do with who we are, what we do, or even what we believe. We are republican, democrat, conservative, liberal, American, black, white, male, female, gay, straight, feminist and on and on. In the Church identify ourselves and judge others as Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, Baptist, Calvinist, Lutheran and on and on. Heck in my town we identify people by their zip code, whether we live north or south of a street and what high school that someone went to. We can also identify ourselves and others by things that have happened to us, or that we’ve participated in or even what teams we root for.
Some of these are things that we are born into and others are things we choose or believe. But if we are in Christ none of these things are supposed to be our core identity. Meaning that they are not to be the first thing that defines us. This includes whether or not we are single or married.
Most of my usual readers know that this blog is written mainly for men. Lots of ladies read this and probably 70% of what I write here is pretty applicable to both sexes. This is especially true of all that I’ve said theologically about celibacy, family and the Church. It’s mostly true of the things we discuss having to do with living in the context of being unmarried including things like dealing with sexual desire, community, touch, money, dealing with loss, etc.
However most of what I’ve offered here in terms of what to do with attraction, how to attract people, how to get a date and how to date, have been very guy centered. I’ve had several requests from female readers at different times for thoughts on what they can do in those areas. So I want to offer some thoughts today.
Recently I attended a conference on healthy sexuality. It was very well done and the spirit of the event was super encouraging to say the least. Within the many different topics and conversations was of course the discussion of how a person who is attracted to the same sex should live out their life.
Now this wasn’t a conference where people were demanding that anyone live a certain way and it was all non-confrontational, but the general answer was that from a biblical perspective that person should not be engaged in a same sex sexual relationship. In other words they should live a celibate life.
In response to this, one person said, “So basically we are condemning them to a life of loneliness and isolation.” I’m quite sure that this person was far from the only one in the room thinking that way.
Coming into adulthood in evangelical culture one of the constant messages was that sexual sin was different and more important than other sin. Now of course the official line was that all sin was “equally” bad. This is sort of true and sort of not true and therefore super confusing.
Let’s clear up a couple of things about sin to sort of set the table for this topic.
One of the things I did a lot as a single person is pray for a spouse. That took a lot of different forms. Sometimes it was simple and relaxed. Other times it took the form of crying out (read begging) for God to bring me The One. Often when I really thought someone could be the one it was praying for God to “make it happen”, sometimes before I’d even been on a date (that hurts a little to type – Ha!).
But over and over again for years, it never happened. God didn’t “answer” my prayer.
This really begs two different types of questions. First, should we, and if so how should we, pray about gaining a spouse. Second, why is it that God doesn’t seem to answer this prayer or as I like to say, why doesn’t God just “poof” us a spouse.
One of the things that always bothers me is when we assume single people should do more ministry. This sort of thought process happens all the time for several reasons.
It comes from the pulpit because pastors either misunderstand or misuse what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7. Without going into too much depth here as I’ve written extensively about this, Paul is not saying if you are not yet married that you are therefore not distracted and able to be a better, more focused Christian. He is instead saying if you are not distracted by a desire to get married, it could be that you have the gift/calling of celibacy and that would be a good thing.
But this is where this gets really ironic is that the same people telling you to “take advantage of your singleness” in ministry don’t want you to actually lead the ministry. Perhaps what they really mean, is that while they can, they want to take advantage of your singleness.
You see it’s fine if you want to serve in the nursery or maybe the youth, on the worship team, set up and tear down, and in the rare church you might even be able to lead a small group.
But, if you want to be a pastor or elder, better think again.
More Than Don't Have Sex 