Dudes - Part I

This Saturday we're having our first ever churchwide Men's Breakfast. So I'm making it a goal this week to post a few thoughts each day regarding issues and biblical insight surrounding being a dude and exercising one's dude-ishness. Of course, it's already Wednesday and there's a good chance this will be my last post...oh well.


I was talking today with a member of our congregation who is also on the police force. We talked about the absence of husbands and fathers in Cayman. I wondered out loud:

Isn't it strange that most women fear yielding leadership to men and most men fear taking it on (and are more than happy to give it up).

As a husband and then, by association, a father the admonition is clear about the form that leadership is to take and why it's so scary:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25).

Be honest guys: Was the scary part just then the vague spiritual responsibility or realizing Jesus while he lived in real flesh & in real time did everything to the point of death for the sake of the church (and then applying that to our marriages)?


John Benton calls men to be self-sacrificial initiative-takers in his helpful little book Gender Questions (and, No, as at least one of you has asked before the book is not for those questioning which gender they are...there are shorter & simpler illustrated books for that):

The word initiative could be linked to the word leadership. But I am unhappy about that word in some respects because it has become so debased by modern ideas of managers who 'sit up there and make decisions' and have nothing to do with what is happening 'on the ground'...Biblical leadership is more to do with the idea of a pioneer -- a person who says, "I go first, to take the risks, to make the way safe for others, to take the knocks."

Men, I suggest if we would make every effort, by the grace of God and clinging to Christ as both our help & our example, to be this type of leader, the women in our lives might be a little less afraid of yielding leadership and considerably more grateful that we are living out who we said we'd be when we uttered those wedding vows.