Maybe I’m just being a hot-headed know-it-all young theological whippersnapper. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly my problem. But I’m having a really hard time finding really compelling books connecting my guyhood and my Christianity.
Back in the mid-90s I read “Seven Promises of a Promisekeeper” and Stu Weber’s “Tender Warrior”, and it was a mixed bag. A little bit of “stand up and fight” and a little bit of “play nice and don’t do anything mean” all muddled together and padded out with a few too many silk pillows. Then “Wild at Heart” came out, and I read it a few months before getting married, and for all of its strengths was still left scratching my head why books about and for men spend more time repenting for the sins of men past and condemning that which masculinity is not than they spend extolling masculine virtues and casting a compelling vision (rooted in a faithfully orthodox theolog) for the place of men and manhood in the local church. So next I read “Why Men Hate Going to Church”, which correctly points out some of the pathologies within the church that make such a vision unwelcome and unpalatable, but its pragmatic slant leaves it unsatisfying to the reflective leader, who comes away with a few highly context-specific examples of stuff that works but little more than “c’mon, guys, we need to do better!” as a theological platform for devising his own local strategy. So now I’m reading “No More Christian Nice Guy”, which is falling into some similar patterns — enumerating the countless vices of preferring “Nice” over “Good” without spending any contiguous set of pages on what being “Good” should look like (although some chapter titles near the end look promising). It’s also not particularly endearing watching the author speak of his own family-of-origin issues as having broad applicability to all “Christian Nice Guys” — some of us came to our niceness pathologies by completely unrelated paths, and I’m actually starting to worry that his solutions may be similarly bound up to a theory of niceness origins that doesn’t apply to me.
The closest things I’ve found to good “Men’s Books” for Christians have been Mark Driscoll’s two Reformission books — “The Radical Reformission” and “Confessions of a Reformission Rev”. They work for me because they pull no punches while fanatically obsessing on moving forward with the mission of Jesus to transform our families, cities, and nations by the redeeming power of the gospel. Men are not coddled, but neither are they inundated with the standard litanies of male evils; instead, they are invited to stone up, take their blows, and to press on in strength, courage, and integrity for the sakes of their families and their churches.
