{"id":3974,"date":"2023-05-15T11:41:09","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T18:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegateway.press\/?p=3974"},"modified":"2023-05-15T11:41:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T18:41:09","slug":"reclaiming-manhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/reclaiming-manhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming Manhood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A recent article in <em>The New Yorker<\/em> asked the pithy question, \u201cWhat\u2019s the Matter with Men?\u201d&nbsp; The article describes men as floundering \u2013 in schools, relationships, and workplaces \u2013 and postulates reasons for this social phenomenon.&nbsp; The conclusions are a mishmash of social theory, secular perspectives, and moral judgments which fail to produce definitive answers.&nbsp; Doing so is also beyond the reach of a short blog post like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Men and boys, particularly in western culture, are in crisis \u2013 that part of the article seems clear.\u00a0 While solutions to their problems are complex, they seem grounded in one fundamental observation about men and boys.\u00a0 They function best when cultural expectations reinforce men taking responsibility for themselves, their families, and their communities.\u00a0 For Christian men, their churches could be inserted between families and communities on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a mother of two sons, who was herself raised with limited influence by men, my wife had to develop expectations of her sons which facilitated their developing healthy masculinity.\u00a0 She developed this simple definition: \u201ca man takes responsibility for himself, his family, his church, and his community.\u201d\u00a0 The essence of her definition was <em>takes responsibility<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Applying this definition led us to mandate and enforce our sons taking responsibility \u2013 for their clothes, rooms, chores, conflicts, etc. \u2013 from early in their childhood.\u00a0 One later started a business in middle school; the other had a job all through high school.\u00a0 Although we had enough money and they did not \u201chave to work,\u201d we knew they needed to learn the discipline of taking care of themselves and others.\u00a0 We also pushed our sons to make independent decisions \u2013 like choosing their own church when they were in high school.\u00a0 We rewarded them for serving others, not just for personal accomplishments.\u00a0 We made them do their own laundry, learn to cook, and get their driver\u2019s licenses the day they were eligible.\u00a0 In short, we pushed them to be as independent of us as reasonable and possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Teaching boys to be men isn\u2019t about stereotypical behavior or activities reserved only for men.&nbsp; It\u2019s about teaching boys they are responsible for themselves, their families, their church, and their community.&nbsp; It\u2019s teaching them to lead \u2013 by taking responsibility to serve others \u2013 which, according to Jesus, is the highest form of leadership.&nbsp; Doing this is not a simple answer to all the things that are going wrong with how boys are raised toward manhood in our culture \u2013 but it is a foundational aspect we must rediscover.&nbsp; Coddling boys and expecting them to become men is a misplaced, even foolish, expectation.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent article in The New Yorker asked the pithy question, \u201cWhat\u2019s the Matter with Men?\u201d&nbsp; The article describes men as floundering \u2013 in schools, relationships, and workplaces \u2013 and postulates reasons for this social phenomenon.&nbsp; The conclusions are a mishmash of social theory, secular perspectives, and moral judgments which fail to produce definitive answers.&nbsp; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":3975,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[90,386,233,17,387],"class_list":["post-3974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ministry","tag-culture","tag-manhood","tag-men","tag-ministry","tag-work"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raincrossdev2.com\/gateway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}