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Tuesday, August 19, 2008Worm Theology
Many believers have been given what’s called worm theology. The name comes from the Isaac Watts hymn “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed,” one line of which says, “Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” Those who adhere to this view of life contend that low self-worth means God is more likely to show mercy and compassion upon them. Worm theology convolutes low self-worth with humility.
Many were told as kids that they are worthless in and of themselves—that they possess no inherent value, even though the Bible says that all people are created in God’s image, endowing them with innate value and worth. Making matters worse is that people who come from tough childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect have what a counselor friend calls shame Velcro. They are actually attracted to systems of belief that demean them.
After speaking to an audience in
Worm theology pulls a child down, filling her with nagging insecurities about her value and significance. It’s as if parents, genuinely concerned that their children will grow up prideful and arrogant, want to make sure that this won’t happen, however, instead of helping their kids build self-respect and confidence in humility, their instruction and discipline ensure that life will pass them by, leading to bitterness and sometimes rage toward the Lord.
The apostle Paul wrote that we shouldn’t think more about ourselves than we ought; rather, we should use “sober judgment” in our self-assessment (Romans 12:3). Sober judgment means being realistic. It doesn’t mean we should pretend we don’t have gifts when we do, or that we should pretend we have talents, gifts, and abilities when we don’t. Paul is telling us to be honest and realistic, not to despise ourselves.
Telling children they’re worthless is the rhetoric of despair—especially during adolescence when worries of inferiority often hit their peak. And it’s especially damaging to children who already think they’re defective, that something is deeply wrong inside of them, not because they sin, but because they are “bad” and not as valuable as other kids. They won’t allow themselves to believe they’re good at anything; they will ward off compliments, and if people kick them around…well, isn’t that what happens to worthless objects?
One of the most common ways a child deals with feelings of worthlessness, writes Dr. Dobson, “is to surrender, completely and totally.”
[This person withdraws into a] shell of silence and loneliness, choosing to take no chances or assume unnecessary emotional risks. This person would never initiate a conversation, speak in a group, enter a contest, ask for a date, run for election, or even defend his honor when it is trampled…As comedian Jackie Vernon once said, “The meek shall inherit the earth, because they’ll be too timid to refuse it.”
Dale Ryan is CEO of Christian Recovery International, the parent organization of the National Association for Christian Recovery. Many of the people seeking help struggle with this understanding of God and are unable to live whole, God-glorifying lives. Ryan writes:
Does God avoid us because we are sinners? If you have any doubt, any hesitation, about the answer to this question, I urge you to go back to the Bible. Did God avoid us? Is it not just the opposite? Did not God come to us? When God saw our pain, our brokenness, our defects of character, our insanity, what did God do? God came. Here. To be with us. To save us. To make a new kind of life possible for us. God’s holiness is not the fragile kind that would be tainted by contact with broken, bent, damaged people. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who did not hide himself from our hopeless situation. God saw. God came—not to punish, not to nag, not to shame. Thank God that we were not worthless “worms” to God! We were, and are, precious, valuable. Wanted, a source of delight to God. That’s just basic Bible. It may take a long time for this truth to sink in, but it’s not really fancy theology. It’s Christianity 101…
We have learned very broken ways to think and feel about ourselves. In recovery we struggle not to just think better about ourselves, but to do an honest self-assessment…Part of this self-assessment involves doing a “fearless moral inventory.” The content of our inventory can be a pretty discouraging and disturbing list. But the process of doing our inventory is to be characterized by fearlessness. What does “fearless” mean? Certainly it means that we will be courageous while working on our inventory. But more specifically it means that we will seek to be so secure in God’s love for us that no matter what we find in our inventory, we will know that we are still loved, still valuable, still of infinite importance to our Higher Power. It is only love that can sustain us when we experience the fear that comes from shame, from rejection, from resentments and from guilt. We seek to do a fearless inventory because we want God to so fill us with love that little room remains for fear. May God grant you the grace this day to think and feel about yourself in ways that are consistent with how your loving and grace-full Father thinks and feels about you.
Jim, a talented artist, did not take a promotion at work that would have allowed his wife to stay home with their children, a dream of hers, because he didn’t think he was good enough for the job, even when multiple supervisors assured him he was. “I was told as a kid in my Christian home that I shouldn’t go around thinking I was better than other kids. But I was better at art than other kids. My teachers told me. But I pretended I wasn’t.”
Jim denied his gift instead of embracing it. Like so many Christian Nice Guys, Jim lives with one foot on the gas, the other on the brakes. He wastes tremendous amounts of energy trying to resolve inner dialogues that haunt him. He wants to be the best artist he can be, yet he thinks God doesn’t want him to be successful. He has the tools necessary to provide well for his family, but he’s waiting for God’s permission to thrive. He’s waiting for the green light, but his spiritual training says it’s going to stay red.
Such struggles were told that believing you’re good at something makes you “worldly.” I remember one preacher’s family that lived out this principle. When their son once told his ten-year-old sister, “I’m good at baseball,” she scolded, “You’re not supposed to say that—it’s bragging.”
Being a coach, that was especially sad for me to witness. As kids grow up and play at higher levels, they become pretty well physically matched and similarly skilled. What often makes the difference in an athlete is his belief in himself, which helps him approach his sport with confidence. This can spill into arrogance (as anyone who watches professional sports has seen), and arrogance isn’t good. But false humility isn’t good, either. Like arrogance, self-denigration is dishonesty about who we are, and it easily spills over into unfulfilled potential, leading to anguish and, if unchecked, bitterness.
This concern isn’t limited to athletics. For instance, I am continually grateful that Clive Staples Lewis did not grow up in the kind of “nice” Christian home that teaches children to pretend their gifts are merely average. The world may well have been deprived of the blessings wrought through his phenomenal talents had fake humility and false piety been foisted upon him; these fallacies sink so many believers from being agents of true redemption. C.S. Lewis did notice these distortions within Christian circles, and he opposed them:
We may be content to remain what we call “ordinary people”: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience.
More than a hundred biblical passages warn against pride, the sin of self-sufficiency. Yet we must take care to understand what we’re actually being warned against: haughtiness, contempt, arrogance, self-aggrandizement, the idea that we need nothing and no one. This is false belief about ourselves—belief that we’re something we’re not. And that’s pride.
Conversely, believing, affirming, and embracing who we truly are, who God made us to be, and how He has gifted us, is not pride. That is honesty, that is wisdom, and, as Lewis said, that is obedience.
Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying.
Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net
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Tuesday, August 5, 2008The Dangers of a "Nice" Christian Upbringing
The people to whom I provide individual instruction have noticeable talents and abilities. Many are more talented than they realize, more talented than they will allow themselves to admit. For example, one popular Christian speaker has a potent testimony about the power for forgiveness, but she’s unable to spread her life-changing message to more people because of her spiritual education. She was told throughout childhood that believers should shun accomplishment in order to remain humble and avoid becoming prideful. Her success in ministry is causing her great internal turmoil, the main reason she hasn’t been in public for some time now. Her well-meaning but naïve and destructive life-script has stopped her from sharing sparkling insights that set people free from hatred and bitterness.
Yes, these people have noticeable talents and abilities. But, of course, so do their peers. The fearful and the timid compete for jobs and spouses with one hand tied behind their back. They possess a self-handicap. They won’t allow themselves to live successfully, in large part because they don’t think God wants them to be successful.
These nice Christians who grew up as nice kids don’t finish last—that’s a common misconception that blurs the real problem. Nice Christians finish in life’s frustrated middle, never getting to abundance, filled with inner angst, always playing defense, and usually filling out divorce papers at least once (sometimes more) during their beleaguered lifetime. Some never get to marriage because they’re so nice as to be unattractive to potential spouses. Their passive approach toward life often leads them to the passive worlds of fantasy and pornography.
I’ve instructed attorneys, doctors, landscapers, even a Sunday school teacher whose students would not respect him. Each is thoughtful, considerate, and warm. Many possess abilities that others crave. Yet each has a soul controlled by timidity, fear, and anxiety.
They usually hadn’t much considered their backgrounds and experiences until their lives fell apart. They didn’t seek or find help before they fell in love, married, had children, a mortgage, ailing parents. There were warning signs, but they didn’t see them or, more commonly, refused to see them, until the amassed pressure they felt was so powerful they could nearly forge diamonds from it. In many ways, the foundation of their adulthood crash was laid, brick by well-meaning brick, by what they were told as children about God.
Take Lynn Hybels, who along with her husband, Bill, started Willow Creek Community Church in 1975, today one of the nation’s most innovative ministries. In her book Nice Girls Don’t Change the World, she describes a spiritual heritage that unintentionally makes children timid and passive, kids who do not make the world a better place. They are handicapped adults and ineffective Christians.
Hybels grew up in a small
Her training gave her “an uncanny ability to keep almost everybody happy almost all the time,” thought she didn’t truly seem happy herself. As a little girl, she was always smiling, though she doesn’t remember ever hearing herself laugh. No one would have ever accused her of being “wildly in love with life,” but she had “such a nice smile.” She remembers being a very caring person, “though in a passive sort of way.” She was “not the type to turn the world upside down.”
She always felt God was judging her and making her conform to a list of rules.
At age ten I traded my ballet slippers for a flute because I had been taught that dancing was a sin but making music was an acceptable form of worship…If there were rules to follow, I followed them. If there were pleasures to give up, I gave them up. If there was work to do, I did it. I was determined to earn God’s love.
She received the kind of education that derails adult life. She eventually grew despondent, exhausted, and depressed.
I was 39 years old when I walked into my counselor’s office and said, “I’ve been working so hard to keep everybody else happy, but I’m so miserable I want to die.” I spent the decade of my forties digging out of that hole. Now, nearly midway through my fifties, I’ve discovered that growing up is an ongoing process—I have no yet arrived. Still, I have learned some things on the journey to becoming a good woman.
Part of this spiritual journey was figuring out what her gifts were—and what they weren’t. She made halfhearted stabs to bring her life more in line with her gifts, but her training interfered with her ability to forge a more God-glorifying life. True to her nice Christian girl script, she didn’t ask for help and, though she was surrounded by insightful and helpful Christians, she made sure not to inconvenience others with her frustrations or doubts, and she felt obligated to do whatever others asked her to do—regardless of whether or not she could do it well.
Lynne Hybels, a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Nice Girl, spent decades ignoring, neglecting, and denying her true gifts and passions, which drained her of the very vitality to which her husband was first drawn. She felt “incompetent and insecure. So my husband didn’t win” either. Nor did her children. “They didn’t get a joyful mother. They didn’t get a fun mother. They didn’t get to see, up close and personal, a woman fully alive in God.”
Like so many believing adults with a similar upbringing, she knew what she should do but lacked the backbone to do it.
God gave me a unique perspective and worthy dreams. God gave me words and influence to use for good. But I didn’t use them. I didn’t show up. I might have been there physically, but my gifts—my soul—didn’t show up. I didn’t value what I had to offer enough to actually offer it.
She wasn’t showing up and she didn’t value her talents because she struggled mightily to overcome fear, as every person does when she receives her spiritual legacy. Fear lies to us, concealing the truth about who we are, the gifts we possess, and the goodwill of other people. Fear says we’re too dumb or too amateurish or too wimpy to carry out the good works God puts before us. Fear, Hybels says, told her she “might as well give up.”
Listen to her hard-won insights into the difference between a nice Christian girl and a good Christian woman:
Whereas a girl of any age lives out the script she learned as a child—a script too often grounded in powerlessness—a woman acknowledges and accepts her power to change, and grow, and be a force for good in the world.
Whereas a nice girl tends to live according to the will of others, a good woman has only one goal: to discern and live out the will of God.
A good woman knows that her ultimate calling in life is to be part of God’s plan for redeeming all things in this sin-touched world.
A good woman knows she cannot be all things to all people, and she may, in fact, displease those who think she should just be nice. She is not strident or petty or demanding, but she does live according to conviction. She knows that the Jesus she follows was a revolutionary who never tried to keep everyone happy.
That picture of a good woman made me want to be one. It made me want to grow up and trade the innocuous acceptability of niceness for the world-changing power and passion of true goodness.
Lynne Hybels went outside the advice many Christians receive at church, and it restored her life. After much grappling—which included realizing that for many years her children and husband had not gotten the kind of mother or wife she wished she was—she came out the other end of her training with a new approach toward life.
I’m happy for her, even though I also wish she didn’t have to go through her ordeal. She emerged on the other side wiser and stronger. But others with her spiritual heritage aren’t so fortunate. They struggle through a life that to them is serial disappointment and unending frustration. This is what can happen when someone receives that kind of “nice Christian upbringing.”
Next time: Worm Theology
Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying.
Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net
Visit
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Monday, July 21, 2008Protection From Sexual Abuse
When it comes to sexual abuse, keep the following truth in mind: Male family members can deliver your child and you from all kinds of harm, and they can deliver all kinds of harm as well.
No one who’s familiar with my body of writing can say I’m anti-guy. I think men get a bad rap in society, and there is a profound prejudice against them in church. Men are regularly marginalized, lied about, and lampooned with very little outcry. But the body of evidence in this area is simply overwhelming. Heterosexual men commit the vast majority of sexual abuse in
Some say it’s because of how all guys are wired. I contend that it’s the result of the lack of fathering and, with it, the lack of male integrity. The prison population bears this out: Approximately 85 percent of male inmates grew up without fathers. Boys need men to show them how to be men and to help keep them from going over the cliffs of life.
Gavin De Becker says,
[My greatest contribution] to solving the mystery of aberrant behavior is my refusal to call it a mystery. Rather, it is a puzzle; I have seen the pieces so often that I may recognize them sooner than some people, but my main job is just to get them on the table…Above all, I hope to leave you knowing that you never have to wait for all the pieces to be in place before you act.
This is particularly troublesome for parents and kids who think that first and foremost they must be nice (don’t make waves) instead of good (make the right kind of waves), that making a decision before you have all the information might mean hurting someone’s feelings, and that’s what we’re supposed to avoid.
I know people who, without knowing all the “pieces” regarding Y2K, made substantial changes to their financial assets. In hindsight, they overreacted. But they did what they thought was best at the time with something very valuable to them, and they owe no apology for making an important choice without knowing every fact.
For some reason that escapes my understanding many parents think it’s wrong for our children to behave this way or for us to behave this way on behalf of our children. What’s more valuable to us than our kids?! The fact is, if we protected our children the way we protect our assets, most would be better off most of the time. Do we really love money more than our children? No one wants to reach that conclusion, yet why are we willing to ruffle feathers over money and not over our precious boys and girls?
One in three girls and one in six boys will have sexual contact with an adult—usually a family member. About 20 percent of the time, the abuser is an adolescent. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the average molester of girls will have about fifty victims before being caught and convicted. The average molester of boys will have 150 victims before being caught and convicted. Most will have “plenty after being caught as well, some even victimizing as many as 30 children during their ‘careers.’”
More than 90 percent of the offenders are heterosexual males who gained access to and control of the child. They count on secrecy and nice manners—that is, that your child will do as she is told and not fight back. Sexual predators do more than assault children physically. They hack into their minds and tell them lies are true (“If your mother knew, she’d hate you”). They deliberately try to erode a child’s understanding of healthy boundaries and safety (“If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you”).
Many parents (myself included) have never experienced sexual abuse. That someone would behave so cruelly and diabolically is mind-boggling. But then I analyzed the malicious behavior I have experienced or witnessed in life, and you know what’s remarkable? In every premeditated, malicious act, once the victim talked, the predator attacked the victim’s comprehension of fairness, justice, and decency. Predators, sexual or otherwise do not, without force, admit to their cruelty and deception—they escalate their attack in order to maintain control.
The greatest line of defense against sexual abusers continuing their behavior is for children to know they can bring their problems and concerns to parents and other adults who care for them, and that they are not met with criticism or additional punishment. A child must know that his parents won’t be devastated by anything he tells them. The knowledge that parents are strong enough to deal with whatever happens is a gift millions of today’s adults didn’t grow up with—such that many still haven’t told their parents about abuse they suffered.
Note the words “strong enough.” In order to find the border-crossing between protection and overprotection, we parents need all the strength we can find within ourselves, imparted from others, or given to us from God. When we take action from a position of strength, our perspective is sound, and we are far less likely to underreact or overreact to provocation.
Also, consider signing up for the National Alert Registry to find out where registered sex offenders live in your area. Though this Web site is not foolproof (some sex offenders get away with not registering themselves), it can provide you with important information. Through www.registeredoffenderslist.org we discovered that one nearby neighborhood has a number of registered sex offenders. Our children don’t play there.
Telling a little girl that no one should touch her in the areas a bikini covers is better than nothing but far from sufficient. Some sexual predators don’t even want to touch kids—they want kids to touch them.
When we tell kids to beware of “sick people in the world,” some think predators are those who cough all the time and have runny noses. When we tell them “bad people” hurt kids, they have no reason to be cautious with family members. What kid thinks a family member is “bad?”
Euphemisms make life more dangerous for kids. They kick sand over the line we’re trying to find. Be straightforward. Tell your children that others should not:
~Put their hands down your pants or up your skirt
~Touch your private parts, even through clothes or pajamas
~Ask you to touch their private parts or ask you to remove their clothes
~Take off your clothes
~Take pictures of you with your clothes off
~Take off their clothes in front of you
~Show you pictures/movies of people doing sexual acts
~Talk about sexual behavior with you
Child predators bank upon our nice, non-assertive responses so common among “good” Christians. And since many are people we know, including family members, we give them all the education they need about us. They test our boundaries to see whether or not we possess a protective power. Do you?
Being a Christian doesn’t mean hovering above the ugliness of life. It means we are given the weapons necessary to face wickedness with the hope of creating something good in its place. Notice I didn’t use the euphemism tools, a common word for this work. Law enforcement doesn’t use tools to protect the peace. When weapons are required, parents shouldn’t use tools either.
Violence is a fact of life. You aren’t required to use violence in response to it. But if you want to be a truly good parent, you must use force and power when they’re needed. Being forbearing in the face of perversion victimizes you and those in your care.
Knowing that most sexual predators are male, I foster in my head a healthy skepticism about every male who comes into our home. I even monitor family members. I look for lives that are out-of-balance, remarks that are out of place and inappropriate. Stares that linger too long, eyes that appear calculating when everyone else’s aren’t. I look for two-faced living, someone who is nice to me but rude to someone else. And I rarely trust someone without a sense of humor.
I subscribe to the belief that lions keep leopards tame. For good or for bad, I’m the guy with the power in my home. I’m the heavy sometimes. When used well, that’s more powerful than actual weapons anyway. And actual weapons won’t stop the kind of abuse we’re combating. But keen perception and perseverance will.
Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying.
Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net
Visit
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008Spotting and Repelling Adult Predators
Nice people may not be interested in the defiled world of predators, but predators are interested in their children. Adult predators, sexual or otherwise, aim to separate children from their parents and/or from other adults who might stop them. Most kids are not separated at gunpoint or knifepoint; rather they are lured away by those who earn trust in dishonest ways.
Here’s how they earn our trust. (Gavin DeBecker broadly calls these “Survival Signals.”)
Forced Teaming: A predator uses the word we when we isn’t true or accurate. It establishes premature trust and makes a kid feel obligated to stay around this adult. He says things like, “We’re sure in a mess, aren’t we?” Teach your child to say to a stranger, or to someone they know but do not trust, “I didn’t ask for your help, and I don’t want it. Leave me alone.” This isn’t wrong. It’s wise.
Charm and Niceness: In order to deceive, you have to remain at least one step ahead of someone. Charm and niceness can hide intent and give a head start. People who take control of others almost always pretend to be nice in the beginning. Teach your children that “nice” is not the same as good. This is especially important for girls, who are generally expected to be warm and friendly toward adults.
Too Many Details: Con artists often use too many details to tell the story because they know that since it’s not true, the story must be sold. After a while, details can wear down a person’s defenses, as dishonest salespeople know well. Teach your child to consider context by asking herself, Why is this person talking to me in the first place, and why is he telling me so many things?
Typecasting: This involves a slight insult, initially one that’s easy to refute. “You’re one of those kids who’s too scared to disagree with your parents, aren’t you?” It’s designed to get a child on the defensive, breaking down resistance. Teach your child he does not have to answer every question put to him. In some cases, short answers like “Whatever” are appropriate.
Loan-Sharking: Predators will often give a child something (the common example is candy) to make her feel indebted. It can also be advice or sympathy: “Your parents don’t listen to you, do they? I’m glad to listen. I care about you even when others don’t.” Teach your kids not to accept gifts from people who want something in return. Otherwise it’s not a gift—it’s a debt installment.
The Unsolicited Promise: Someone promises to do something for a child who never asked for it but is getting it anyway. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” Promises are used to convince us of an intention, but they are not guarantees. Nor does such a person behave in a way that he will guarantee anything. If he did, it would expose his deceitful intent. When someone provides an unsolicited promise, teach your child to think, You’re right, I am hesitant to trust you. Thank you for making that clear.
Discounting No: Anyone who chooses not to hear the word no is trying to control your child. A frequent (and potentially dangerous) response in this situation is negotiation: “I really appreciate your offer, but let me try to do it on my own first.” Teach your child, instead, to say out loud what she’s really thinking. If that’s “Bug off,” she should say it. Teach her to look a person in the eyes with strength, to walk away, and to be loud if necessary. De Becker says, “You cannot turn a decent man into a violent one by being momentarily rude, but you can present yourself as an ideal target by appearing too timid” (and nice).
If your child never talked to strangers, then he would never talk to a police officer or a store clerk. Telling a kid that strangers are dangerous equates strangers with danger, which prevents kids from finding that line between protection and overprotection. Once again, most predatory behavior toward children involves someone they know; pinning danger on strangers is one of the best ways to destroy a child’s perception of and intuition about true danger. Instead, teach your children to evaluate behavior, specifically strangeness (not necessarily strangers). Teach them to pay attention to stares that last too long, a smile that’s not real, rapid looking away, and other signs of discomfort.
If a stranger talks to you and your child and doesn’t give off warning signs, talk with your child about why you felt safe around that man, and also what would have made you feel unsafe around him.
If your kid is lost in public, train him to ask a woman for help before asking a man. This does not contradict the fact that a mother is more likely than a father to physically abuse her child. This is not her kid, and, furthermore, it’s highly unlikely that she’s a sexual predator. According to De Becker, a woman is more likely to stay involved in a lost child’s trouble until it’s resolved; a man is more likely to let authorities handle the problem.
Kids should know that it’s okay to be “mean.” In fact, being good sometimes requires you to be “mean” to others. “Mean” in this context means conflict, which isn’t always mean. Children need our help understanding this, because they are wired to seek the approval of adults, even when adults don’t deserve it. Predators bank on that.
This is hard for Christian parents to accept if they believe it’s wrong to use verbal and physical force. But read just the first few chapters of Mark’s gospel and tell me Jesus didn’t believe in or enter into deliberate conflict. Saying that Jesus (and, by default, Christianity) denounces conflict is like saying Karl Marx was a capitalist.
When it comes to self-protection, conflict is good. It does not mean retaliation. It means telling your kid it’s okay to rebuff an adult and even injure one if needed. It’s okay to yell and to otherwise make a scene—teach your child to yell, if he or she is being grabbed, “This is not my father!” (or mother). That’s likely to get a bystander to step in, since most assume a child is being escorted by a parent.
Regarding authority, a child’s view toward it can be dangerous in two key areas. If he questions authority too much, he will be blackballed by adults, who will find him unnecessarily contentious, and his peers won’t like him much either. But if the child is too trusting of all authority, he sets himself up to become a naïve victim.
Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying.
Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net
Visit
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008Hardest Hit: Pastor's Sons
While offering individual instruction for the Christian Nice Guy problem throughout theLet that sink in for a moment. Think about its ramifications.
In No More Christian Nice Guy, I wrote about subtle and overt forms of spiritual neglect from the pulpit to the pews when we are encouraged to emulate a gentle Jesus meek and milk who really did not exist. Now I’m going to reveal one of the most damaging forms of spiritual abuse that comes from the pews to the pulpit. And like most spiritual abuse, it isn’t intention, though the result is sure real.
The pastor’s sons I work with are almost always separated, divorced, or on the verge of divorce. Their wives or ex-wives complain that they just don’t possess the kind of vigor or fire that they want from a husband. They sometimes complain that their husbands drain them of energy instead of invigorating them.
These men often have no definable self, a fact their wives point out, sometimes with disgust, when walking out the door. Our sermons encourage us to have self-control, but these men don’t have a self to control in the first place. They are anchorless and are often too easily influenced by others.
Because they’ve been trained to be pleasant to everyone, they often over-yes and under-no others. Many think that it’s simply wrong to tell others “no.” And when they do, they lose sleep at night. Being human, having boundaries, feels unnatural and sinful to them.
They are resentful of how people have treated them and their families, and because they don’t think they should experience or own negative feelings, they don’t know what to do with them. They often denounce them as unchristian as opposed to being honest and working through them. As a result of poor treatment from others, they do not trust others very well, including their wives.
They are known by many, but not knowable in part because they possess personas, an assumed identity, but not discernable personalities. They feel that they have been forced to play rolls in life, to wear masks (one of the original meanings of “persona”), which is exhausting and depletes them of integrity and healthy self-confidence. Integrity makes us conspicuous, and it is always painful. It’s important to realize that the word Jesus used for “hypocrite” while denouncing the Pharisees literally means “wearer of masks” (Matt. 23:13).
They know the right words to use in marriage—they know how to perform—but they don’t know how to deeply love another person. This is what personas do: they are like holograms and holograms by nature are all surface, no substance.
They think that never showing indignation (which includes as part of its original meaning “much to grieve”) or other forms of healthy anger toward anything or anyone and always remaining gentle are among the highest forms of spiritual maturity, even though Jesus wasn’t always gentle and pleasant. More so, their spiritual training has them believing that it’s wrong to not be gentle. But if this is true, then Jesus was wrong. Jesus sinned.
For example, one son of a pastor who asked me to help him overcome passivity in marriage told me how his mother’s “gentle spirit” made her the perfect Christian woman.
“She was always so gentle,” he said warmly. “She never got angry about anything. She was perfect!” he gushed like a child.
My inner Dr. Phil came out. “Perfect?!” I exclaimed. “In more than 25 years of ministry, she had to have seen wickedness and evil tearing people apart. She had to have seen divorce, adultery, child abuse, drug addiction, homicide and even suicide. And she never became indignant when she saw that kind of destruction, the way Jesus was indignant?!”
There is much to grieve in this life, and responding to life’s destructive forces gently instead of with indignant power may well make us accomplices to these destructive forces. For many, gentleness is a disguise for being dispassionate spectators of life and a hiding place for fear and passivity.
The pastor’s sons who ask for help are always expected to be happy, one of the most damaging myths in evangelicalism today. I call this the Happiness Mentality, and it needs to go away.
Here’s an example from my own life that I write about in my upcoming book, Unleashing Courageous Faith. I went to a funeral of someone I loved and the minister said that we should not shed tears because he was with Jesus now. “This is not a day of mourning, but of celebration!” he said, with a level of enthusiasm that appeared fake to me. He didn’t even seem to believe what he was saying. He spoke as if he was following a script.
“Celebration?!” I thought. “I loved this guy. I’m not going to celebrate his death, I’m going to weep his loss.”
True to the Happiness Mentality that we slavishly idolize, this talker of spiritual matters did not allow for the spectrum of human life, love, and longing because this spectrum is not considered “spiritual.” He didn’t allow for both weeping and celebration. True to his spiritual training, he axed the negative stuff and gave us a plateful of spiritual dessert.
And instead of leading us toward a more loving and compassionate orientation toward life as it really is, he encouraged a very selfish approach toward those closest to the family man. Why express your condolences to his 12-year-old daughter who just lost her father when the spiritual leader just told you there’s nothing really to cry about? She remains untouched and unloved. The Happiness Mentality in many ways is actually a cruel mentality.
This plastic world of our own making helps to make the Christian faith appear more and more irrelevant and ill.
Pastor’s sons who find No More Christian Nice Guy indispensable have not been allowed to exercise a real will of their own. Instead, their wants, needs, desires and dreams have been subjected to the will of others. As a result, they are pretty much the ideal Christian child because they are tremendously pleasant to be around, but they later flounder in adult life.
Ultimately, these pastor’s sons just don’t feel safe in life, and if you gave them a shot of sodium pentothal—truth serum—my guess is most of them would say that it’s sinful to be human.
A dear friend of our ministry in
Pray for the pastor’s sons and daughters who you know.
Treat their parents with dignity when you disagree with them.
A friend of mine, Nate Larkin, Founder of Samson Society (www.samsonsociety.com) and author of Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood, is a pastor’s son who knows the pressure they feel to live two very different lives. Here’s what he recommends: “Let the kid be a kid. He’s not a representative of the pastor, nor is he responsible for upholding his father’s reputation. Let him make his mistakes. Give him the same grace you’d give any other kid in the church.”
Second, “Don’t compete with the kid for his father’s attention. Too many pastor’s kids grow up feeling that the congregation comes first in their father’s affections. As a result, they become either resentful and rebellious or overly compliant and artificial in an effort to attract their father’s attention.”
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Let us know what you think. Email us at paul@christianniceguy.com.
Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying.
Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net
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