My friend Cynthia LaGrou contacted me about writing a short piece for a collection on this very topic.  The project is now out and available through Samizdat Creative.  The price is ridiculously cheap for such a great collection of voices.  Some of the authors are my friends and include:

Reimagining a Woman’s Role in the Church by Frank Viola

Coloring Outside the Christian Circle By Becky Garrison

Why We Need Mothers & Fathers & Sisters & Brothers & Daughters & Sons By Kathy Escobar

Leadership Lenses, Jungian Archetypes and Gender By Leonard Hjalmarson

Shoulders to Stand On: The role of men in restoring the woman’s voice By Jeff McQuilkin

My piece is an expanded version of my original post called The Courageous Imagination – A Call to Men

Abstract: Deep within the heart of a man is the desire to fight for something. Yet also embedded within a man is the destructive bent to rule over the woman. History is littered with the undeniable evidence of oppression towards women. What would happen if men took up the courageous call to address one of the deepest needs of the heart by restoring one of our deepest bents, to literally change the course of history and fight for women.

What if it is time to reimagine the slippery slope?

I was watching a video this morning of Dan Brennan and Spencer Burke talk about male female relationships.  It’s a great video and a really great topic that I hope finds traction.  How do men and women find wholistic relationships together in community?  (Brian McLaren also talks about the sex issue here and has some great points too.)

At 6:00 Dan states:

“We need powerful stories.  There are stories in Catholic spirituality spanning every century that are chaste, powerful, intimate friendships where sex was never in the picture.  And there are plenty of stories in our day, both in the secular realm and in the Christian realm where men and women are working close, side by side to each other, traveling with each other, spending time with each other…encouraging relationships…without ever falling down the slippery slope.”

That we engage a wholistic conversation around sexuality between men and women is deeply important.  But what caught my attention was the last part of the comment.  I wonder if we will ever be able to have a wholistic conversation around sexuality until we can deal with our response when someone does fall down the slippery slope.  Often we think God is found at the top of the slope, watching us fall into oblivion.  But the Gospel finds Jesus at the bottom of the slippery slope.

Can we as a humanity find the conversation of grace that completely re-informs the slippery slope in a way that virtually eliminates the fear behind it?  Do we really believe that Jesus is found at the bottom of the slippery slope?  Or are we kidding ourselves about the Gospel?

What do you think?

Is it just me or does this video from Lady GaGa seem like it was produced by Trent Reznor.

[RSS - See Embedded Video]

I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love)

I want your drama
The touch of your hand
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I want your love
Love-love-love
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love)

In many ways it reveals the interesting tension of the post modern age.  As we emerge from the modern story, which anchored itself rigidly in a Christendom story, one of fixed points and fine lines drawn, it means entering a liminal stage where there is little story.  The emerging church is leading the way in the space.  But the liminal space also means we have no present story to define us.  We have to emerge from the old to discover the new. And in the process, we’re struggling to make sense of ourselves in a world that has no connection to any story, to an identity or dignity.

And in the process we instinctively recognize our need for love, which unfortunately plays out at the lowest common denominator.  We prostitute ourselves with cheap sex meant to fill the void (no pun intended). We’d rather be dominated than avoided.  Lady Gaga seems to be expressing that artistically right now.  She is white hot because I think she expresses what everyone is feeling in that space, even if they don’t like it. Where Trent was the fringe, Lady Gaga is now mainstream.  I don’t think these expressions are new.  It’s just the barriers to expressing them have now come down in the Internet age.  The web is essentially forcing us to confront our own realities that were once conveniently hidden.

I do understand the fear, the conflict and the tension embedded in this period of time.  I liken this period to the downward spiral of drug abuse.  Sometimes the only way up is to find the bottom.  Sometimes the only way to discover the love of God is to reject it entirely.  Sometimes the only way to find the kingdom of God is first to create our own hell.

But isn’t that also the human story.  Isn’t that what the cross essentially is, a complete rejection of the God image amongst us.  Humanity is literally trying to kill God.  And it is in this space that God says, “Give me all of your hate, your anger, your abuse, your wounds, your junk, and your judgments.  Give it all to me.”  Because the reality is that God was the only one who could really handle it.  And in the end, when all was said and done, when humanity had done its worst, God said…

“See. I still love you.”

I’ve been meaning to write a post about sex for a long time and I’m still gonna do it.  But Matthew Paul Turner is doing such a great job right now of exploring it on his blog.  You should check it out.  In the meantime, I thought I’d share some thoughts about Matthew’s topic.

In this video he talks about sexual history and the story we bring to our relationships.  I am deeply grateful to say that I grew up with parents who were very open and honest about sex in a way that made it easy to talk about it.  I remember one time my soon to be wife came over to dinner and we started joking about an orgasm during dinner.  Suffice it to say, she was a little embarrassed.

I grew up in a family where sex was good.  It was whole.  It was meaningful and playful.  I got to see a deep and shared intimacy between my parents in a way that fostered that desire with my own wife.  I was in essence given a tremendous permission to have sex.  I remember the first time I saw the movie Private Benjamin and Goldie Hawn was having sex with her new husband in the bathroom, and she said, “I’m cumming.”  I turned to my mom in the theater and asked her what that meant.  And she just told me…right there in the theater.  It was great.  There was no shame.

There was tension though.  My church took the traditional perspective of no sex before marriage and shamed people who did.  I knew many friends who struggled deeply with the issue and had no recourse to even talk about it.  What was ironic about the culture was that our pastor ended up getting caught in an affair.  It just made me really question the culture that simply says, “No.”  It’s just not that easy.

One of the things my parents did was instill a sense of value about our own bodies and dignity.  We weren’t taught just to say, “No.”  We were taught that we were deeply valuable and we just didn’t give ourselves away to anyone.  Sadly, I lost that perspective in college.  My own brokenness allowed me to lose sight of  not just my own value but the women I had sex with.

So, what resonates with you?  Did you grow up with permission or shame?

I am making a call to men to step up to a level of fierce, sacrificial love for women.

Recently I’ve been listening to the great chasm between men and women that exists in culture. It’s not new but I have been exploring this divide in a deeper way in my own heart.  And I now believe it is time to respond in a tangible way.  In some ways, I fell like this is one of the most important posts I have or will write because it’s a call out of oppression.

My exploration essentially began in response to Julie Clawson’s article regarding women in leadership in Christianity Today’s blog.  Julies voice eloquently expressed the tension and divide that exists in both women and men.  It was both her courage and honesty that caught my attention.

And then my journey took me to New Mexico for the Emerging Church conference.  It was at this conference that I got to experience over and over the amazing voices that are women, and the profound balance they provide to the conversation.  It was in no way new, but it was fresh.  I would offer that the best voices at the conference were women.  But is was on woman in particular who sat next to me that I must mention.  During the after conference she chose to reveal to the room what reconciliation not only sounded like but looked like.  I wrote about that experience here, but I think Jeromy capture it much better in his post, “wounded image of God.”

And then Jeff McQuilkin stepped up and owned it too.  He followed in Jeromy’s footsteps and sought out the forgiveness of the lost and broken female voice that we men have oppressed.  It was both insightful, profound, and needed, especially because Jeff serves as a pastor. And unfortunately the church leads the way in oppressing women.

And then a friend of mine hit me with A Question of Fidelity. It was an exploration into the tension that is marriage.  But it was the comment of a female friend that literally stopped me dead in my tracks.  Peggy said,

I flinched a bit when you said: “The role of mother is virtually untouchable in our society, especially in a Christian context.” For so many Christian women, being a mother is the only thing that they are really empowered — overtly and covertly — to do. While that may not be the whole (actually, I’m confident it is not!) issue here, it is a part of it. If it is untouchable, the brother have to bear some of the responsibility for that, IMO.

Peggy had in no uncertain terms nailed it on the head.  In subjugating and oppressing women, in limiting them to certain exclusive roles, MEN have in essence driven women to a place of defending these territories, at the expense of relationship.  We are in essence creating a culture that deeply effects our own marriages, families, and social structures.

And the final straw came in Scripture.  I was updated the workbooks for Thrive and was working through Genesis again.  The creation account is interesting in that there is a moment when God allows Adam to first see life without the presence of Eve.  And the point is to call out what was MISSING.  “It is not good for man to be alone.”  And then God reveals that Eve is within Adam.  The whole of humanity is found in the both/and.  And it hit me in a very deep way. The whole of humanity is only found in both expressions of God’s image, in the male and the female.

And when we oppress women by cutting out their voices, their participation, and their calling to leadership we have in essence cut ourselves off from the whole picture of our own humanity. We have oppressed ourselves.  We are missing the half that is part of us. And again, none of this is new, but what these events did was unveil my eyes to the path to restoration and wholeness.

So today I want to call men out of their own oppression by refusing to oppress the other half of themselves: women.  And I’m talking flat out refuse.  This is not a call to think about it.  This is a call to step up and own it as a completely different way of living, one defined by grace, invitation, and permission, not shame, rejection, and fear.  The truth is we’re not even giving women permission.  We’re validating the permission that God has already given to them.  And this will mean owning our own history as the male half, even if we didn’t participate. It will mean seeking forgiveness with the women around us, reminding them that it is our part to redeem the oppression we have created.  And in some cases, it will also mean taking on the responsibility for our neighbor, who has not yet discovered his own courage.

For those in leadership of businesses, families and churches, and especially pastors, it means taking the risk and elevating women to leadership. It means restoring the other half of not only our own image but God’s voice in our midst.  And for some this is going to be a sacrificial move.  You might be putting your job at risk.  But I would offer you if you do it will become one of the most defining acts of your life.  It will be, as a friend says, “Your William Wallace moment.”  It will be the moment you stood up against oppression and said, “No more to oppression or tyranny.”  I love Wallace’s own words from the movie Braveheart:

“Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live… at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!”

Our freedom only comes when we first stop participating in the oppression of women.  It is time to remove our shame.  It is time to step into our own calling as men and be love in the fiercest way possible, and against the most oppressive of enemies.  And our enemy is not our neighbor standing near or afar, but the lie that lures us to oppress each other. For all of us, it is time to end this oppression against women so restore not for their sake but for ours as well.  And when we do we can rediscover the whole image of humanity and of God in our midst.

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If you would like to help spread this call to men, please repost and link back to this site.

Much love

Jonathan