Daily Archives: October 1, 2011

Solo Fathers are invisible in Church.

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The ongoing meat-grind that is the family courts continues. WF Price has just been through it, and I am about to go through it  Things happen. And most of the time the church does not care. The laws are unjust, and the church cannot get out from under them. BF commented over at Dalrocks on this, with painful accuracy.

I would like to know why trad-con women seem so unconcerned about the misandry that permeates within nearly all forms of modern Christianity. It’s just as bad as feminism, if not, worse. & Christianity certainly isn’t an adequate solution to any of the modern injustices against men. Praying really hard doesn’t change unfair laws.

 

According to modern Christianity, I’m supposed to just hand my boyfriend a long list of God-approved demands. I cannot do that to him. I genuinely love my boyfriend. I fell in love with him because he’s such a wonderful, kind, honest person. I refuse to use religion to pressure my future husband into providing me with a comfortable lifestyle. I already know he’d give me the world. The whole concept of women using religion to manipulate their significant other…it just seems so heartless. I feel like any woman who genuinely loves their significant other would find something insanely wrong with such behavior.

The question now, has to be why? There are a subset of women who are less traditional than radically Christian… who are trying to work out what it means to be Christian in this fallen age. Terri notes that many women will not withstand correction, and that there is a lack of examples for women — in how to be mothers, how to be wives.

But mainly, I just mourn the dearth of godly older women who have chosen service and sacrifice over self-fulfillment. Who would have stood against the need for a time when young women turn to technology for answers they should be getting from their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Or even their church mothers.  We live in a time where significant numbers of young men and women reach adulthood having never known what it is to see a man love his wife as Christ loves the church. Or a wife submit to her husband as unto the Lord. Someone has to be willing to offer support and godly counsel.

Now there may indeed be areas where godly families can live and raise large families without heading rapidly towards either bankruptcy or coercion from child protection agencies, but where I live the emphasis is still on Mothers. But I’m solo: one of my son’s best friends has just lost his mother, and (at least in NZ) about one in seven solo parents is male.

And there is no modern teaching on this. The classical advice to widowers (common in the early modern era — many women died in childbirth) was to remarry: John Bunyan and John Knox did: John Calvin (who did not have children) did not.

Remarriage, however, now is more difficult. Men have not changed that much: we are interested in exactly the same things we always have been. However, we now face the loss of our marriage (and in many countries, our children, our possessions and our future earnings) at the whim of a woman. The feminist paradigm now rules society.

There is very little written about divorce, and what there is, in Christian circles, is based around women. I’m aware that there are more women than men at church, and it may be that an undue fear is being placed upon the leaders that if the offend the women within the church that they will lose support.

But without men, the church loses something. Women are leaving too. The liberal and feminist perversion of the gospel is peculiarly unattractive.

The reality is that men are now left raising kids. Not just women. And, since men are different, the church needs to thing closely about advice: on how to raise your children correctly, how to have sexual integrity (which is harder, because you have been in a sexual relationship) and how to deal honestly with the pain and hurt you have and you have inflicted on you by the ex.

Ironically, the best site I can find on this is focus on the family — which tends to soften teaching here in a false attempt to be therapeutic. Men are looking for answers. Many are now listening to those who preach disengagement or being a player.

This is wrong. As a church, we need to measure our rate of divorce. By congregation. We need to have firm teaching and discipline for those who find themselves in this situation, with a sense of discernment about remarraige, no tolerance of living together, and a move to a more sensible and enforceable set of vows.

This is too big a problem. We have a duty, as a church, to preach on and oppose the evils of our time. And the current marriage laws are indeed evil.

Thanks to Sheila for the image

The church is catholic (or current circumstances are not sinful)

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I have just had to telephone two music teachers. Son number  two had a high fever yesterday, and son number one is coming down with it. We don’t want to share the current viral nasty — and the boy’s Mum, who is an emergency doctor, reminded me last night that not only is this viral thing in the community, but there has been a mini epidemic of meningitis. She gets the public health data — I don’t.

Now,in  yesterday’s comments. there were two conversations. The first was that there seem to be people in the church who are over sensitive, who take offence at anything, and that any confrontation or correction is not acceptable to them. The second is — on line and in real life — people condemn those who are struggling, with illness, with financial or family problems, with separation and with sin. I think both are blots on our fellowship.

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

1I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3and all ate the same spiritual food, 4and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. 5Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.6Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. 7Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” 8We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. 9We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. 10And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. 11These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. 12So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. 13No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

via Daily Lectionary Readings — Devotions and Readings — Mission and Ministry — GAMC.

The word “Catholic” means universal. And as a result there will be people in the church who are not of us, who will rebel. These people existed for Moses. They exist in our church now.

One of the issues that came up yesterday, however, I will briefly confront now. People are not to be blamed for their illness. When the disciples asked Jesus why a man was blind from birth, he said “to demonstrate the power of God” and healed him. But he did not heal everyone. The most positive commentator, the most cheerful in real life, recently has been BF, who is chronically ill. But she gets these pious people who think they have some form of super faith saying she would be healed it she had sufficient faith — which is clearly un-biblical.

Since the church is catholic (even the Romans accept that there has been separation, but the church remains one in Christ) we have flawed people within us. We must not be nice to the flaws which result from our individual and corporate sinfulness.  And we should not condemn that which is circumstance, and not sin.