The brilliant and wonderful Rachel Held Evans asked for a few guys to respond to the growing trend of misogyny among evangelical leaders. There have been so many great posts with so much honesty and theology that I thought I would just ramble and see what happens.

Seriously, women.

What the heck?

You guys have had it pretty hard for a while. Two years ago more women had jobs than men for the first time, but when you look closer it was probably because women get paid less for the same work. Speaking of jobs, highly paid women are more likely to be a Kardashian than highly paid men and that’s not good for anyone.

Then there’s The Hills.

Yeah, women have it pretty hard.

Throw into the mix the fact that important - really necessary - medical care for women is constantly under attack. Planned Parenthood only uses 3% of PRIVATE funds for abortion services, but that’s apparently enough for people to fight tooth and nail to deny women cancer screenings and annual checkups. And people are still pissed off at the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act.

And that’s just in America. Around the world and throughout history, it’s just more hazardous to be a woman.

The good news for oppressed people is that the church is called to help. The curch is to be a haven for women, minorities and the poor.

Then Mark Driscoll pokes his fat, fauxhawked head into the mix.

In fairness, there have been (and are) many more and many worse misogynists in pulpits everywhere. He’s just the loudest. Try this from “Pastor” Jack Schaap:

“It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I get my theology from a woman”.

Right? It makes this Driscoll quote seem tame:

At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

Okay, that’s worse. Heinous, actually.

Wow. He said that?

We as a chruch owe so much to women, yet give them so little respect. We tell them it’s their responsibility to care for and teach children in their most formative years and then refuse them the right to preach to adults who are stubborn and set in their ways.

And beyond that, there’s a critically dangerous trend arising.

Uber-masculine Christianity

This bugs me because I’m that Worship Leader.

I wear TOMS when leading sometimes and have a paisly guitar strap. I don’t play Metallica riffs over hymns either. Which means this “pastor” probably wouldn’t like me either:

Yeah. Driscoll is the very tip of the douchebag iceberg.

I’m proud that my argyle socks match my shirt and I am physically incapable of actually wearing those offensively ugly Tapout shirts. I’ve watched a few UFC fights, but I had a better time seeing Jane Eyre with my wife last year. I get excited when I can try out a new recipe and I flat iron my calicky hair. I also didn’t watch the Super Bowl this year because I had a hard time finding something I care less about.

In these pastor’s eyes, this makes me womanly when in actuality they just have a pereverted (and unBiblical) view of masculinity.

In trying to appeal to the masses of guys who enjoy fart jokes and shop exclusively at either GNC or Gander Mountain, they wind up appealing ONLY to them. Mark Driscoll calls my Jesus a:

“Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ.” A “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that … would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.

Where in actuality my Jesus has grace for everyone, confronts sin for the sake of the broken, heals instead of hurts, is restoring all things to Himself, conquered hell and is more of a man than his projection of himself he calls christ could ever dream of being.

//AW

Bootstraps - Sleeping Giant

So…

How’ve you been?

Wow. Has it been 9 months?

A lot has happened in that time, but I’ll just give you the bullet points and the moral of the story. It starts with me in mid-December becoming jobless. There wasn’t any huge flame-out where I accidentally redirected a client site to GuysWearingJudyJetsonSkirtsWhilePeelingPotatoes.tumblr.com (fake site …for now. It would be a Tumblr site, though.). The split was caused by the same thing that’s separating thousands of others from ther jobs every month.

I just became one of the thousands.

What did I learn from being unemployed? hmmm…

1. I learned that if you’re around a holiday, you are usually given a box of food(-ish stuff) that you can use for lunches while looking for a job. So, I’d like to thank my uncle for not wanting that Cosco box of Christmas butter cookies. The jelly-filled ones were offensively bad-tasting, but I wasn’t hungry.

2. CRAIGSLIST!

   Wait. That came out wrong. Not like that. Craigslist for jobs.

   Jobs.

   I found the job categories I wanted and put the RSS feed in my Google Reader. Every time a new job was posted, I saw it on my phone. Then I had a stock email that I customized a few sentances in, attached my resume and sent off. I got to the point that I was sending out 20-30 resumes a day. It’s using this method that I got 3 jobs at the same time (More on that someday).

3. I’m going to teach my son how to make website things and do computer stuffs. I was able to replace my income with freelancing work while I was looking for a job. Decades ago, dads would hound their sons to learn a trade that they could fall back on. Same thing.

4. Feelancing is the greatest/worst thing ever. I get to watch a movie whenever I want! I have to find work. I get to make my own hours! I have to suck up to customers so they’ll pay me. I’m the boss! The customer controls everything. I get ALL the profits! I have to hound people to pay me.

   That. For 3-4 months.

5. Even if you DESPERATELY need the job, interview as if you dont care. Seriously. There have been news stories recently about employers not wanting to hire the chronically unemployed because of their “desperate vibe”. The guy asking you questions has no control over your life until he hires you, so don’t kiss up, bs or laugh at his unfunny jokes. It was only after I learned this that I started being taken seriously.

I guess those are the biggest things.Jeez. They’re all things I might use again one or twice in my life. If that. I found out that being unemployed leaves a giant black hole in the middle of your life that sucks in your time, relationships and (especially) money. And the hole doesn’t just disappear. It leaves behind a HUGE mess. That’s why I don’t get bent out of shape when politicians suggest extending unemployment insurance. I didn’t use it, but I could see how that small amount of money would help. I mean, if you can buy a week’s groceries with a $19 Target card you found in your wallet and the change from a junk drawer…

Not that I’ve done that…

I hate saying that God provided food for me, because so many go hungry. I don’t want to say God gave me my job, because other people interviewed for it and God doesn’t play favorites. It’s easy to say that God gave me my job, let my favorite football team the Allegheny Longshoremen (that’s a team, right?) win, gave me an awesome kid and gave me a car. In reality, I have that car because my dad worked hard to help me find a cheap car that has a hole in the bumper and smokes, but gets me and my family around safely. I have an awesome son because I have an amazing wife who, while I’m concerned with whether the episode of Hell’s Kitchen in our queue is the one we’ve already seen, spends her time pouring over parenting methods and what toys best develop Damien’s hand-eye coordination. I don’t have a favorite footbal team and I got the job because I’m specifically qualified for it. Seriously. I’m a perfect fit. I love it.

I found that God works that way, though. He lets us all participate in blessings. He doesn’t just magically send me a good son. He allows me to stumble my way forward and get things occasionally right so at the end of the day, Damien hugs ME and kisses MY neck (the non-scratchy part) and tells me he loves me. It’s just borrowed grace I’m passing along to get a borrowed blessing.

God is most hands-on when things are darkest. The times that I was too sick with anxiety to look at my bank account again and found that I inexplicably had enough to buy groceries. The times that I considered ending our support for Philetso, our South African World Vision child, just to come home to a letter his mom sent us (yes with picture to make me feel adequately crappy about myself). The times I got an email saying they had found someone else for the job and I got another freelance cient in the same day. I’m not necessarily saying God set that all up. I’m just saying God was aware of it and He was there. And being there is enough.

So I haven’t been blogging. I figured I had some better things to do than tell you what I ate for lunch.

But now that I’m working again, have you heard about this place called Roti?…

//AW

I’m working on it.

//AW

(Note: I’m doing confession for church this week and decided to write and post it here. I think better when typing out a blog than winging it in front of everyone.)

1 John 1:8-9

⁸ If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Reading this passage could give someone the false impression that confession is a transaction.

We see something we need and we exchange a service for it. We turn confession into a chore like grocery shopping.

We read that God is Just and we assume that means that He will demand a fair price for His forgiveness, but that’s not the case.

There is nothing less just than God’s justice.

Our incalculable debt is paid by someone who owed nothing.

We can’t earn that even through confession. So why confess?

We confess our sins because we can. We aren’t confessing to relive our mistakes and feel guilty in hopes of behaving better next time.

Sin is a burden that we get to unload. And we do that by confessing. We admit our weakness and get to trade it for a strength we did nothing to deserve.

If we are Christ’s, we are not condemned; so while confession may involve penitence, it isn’t about guilt.

Confession is a celebration of God’s grace.

Confession is a gift.

Confession is for our benefit.

Confession is to recognize the gift of Grace and bind us close to God’s Goodness. God knows we are prone to wander, but He is always faithful to bring us home.

//AW