Years ago I came across a great book written by Douglas Hyde entitled Dedication and Leadership. Hyde was a former Communist turned Roman
Catholic who wondered why his Communist comrades had uniformly displayed deeper levels of commitment to world revolution than the typical Christian had for the gospel of Christ.
One of his suggestions for explaining this disparity focused on the church’s lack of anything resembling Bolshevik self-criticism. Recognizing that Communism required a complete reconstruction of the way people think about and interpret their world, the movement gathered members together into small groups for discussion and “self-criticism.”
Together these Communist study groups held each other accountable to purging old ways of thinking and behaving, while assembling, piece by piece, the renewed mind of a faithful, Communist ideologue.
Hyde laments that it is a rare church indeed that invests any deliberate effort into helping its members cultivate disciplines of healthy spiritual introspection, self-examination, and Christ-like self-criticism. Yet, this is precisely what Paul expects every Christian to be doing as a part of their daily discipleship. In Romans 12:2 the apostle says,
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is…
Fallen, sinful minds like ours (you will understand, dear reader, that I assume you too are a guilty sinner like me) do not renew themselves automatically. Yes, every Christian has the Holy Spirit to turn the impossible into the actual, but personal effort is the required fuel for all personal transformation.
Thus, far too many folks who call themselves Christians fail to think or to behave like people directed by the mind of God.
I was reminded of this personally a while back when talking with a friend 
about my time visiting my youngest daughter as she worked in the Kenyan slums surrounding Nairobi. I was struck by the near universal happiness regularly on display in the lives of these people living in the most squalid poverty imaginable.
I couldn’t get over the beautiful smiles and the hearty laughter that I saw spontaneously erupting from the poor and destitute.
My friend listened to me and then quietly asked – with a beautiful smile on his face – David, why is it surprising that the poor would be happy?
That sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. Good question, I said to myself. Why indeed?
I suddenly realized, with the help of a friend exercising some good Christian/Bolshevik self-criticism, that I harbored an unrecognized prejudice.
I had spent my entire life in Christian ministry teaching people that money cannot buy happiness; that the love of money is the root of great evil; yet burrowed deep inside my brain remained this hidden assumption that people who lack money certainly can’t be truly happy and content.
Figuratively speaking (I hate it when people say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”), this moment of critical self-awareness blew my mind.
It also reminded me that cultivating the mind of Christ is a life-time process that demands daily self-criticism as well as good friends who are in the habit of similarly criticizing themselves.
Only such genuine disciples can make other disciples.
Getting together in small groups to socialize and hang out together is all well and good, but in and of itself, socialization it is a not an effective recipe for growing serious followers of Jesus.
I was thinking about this particular problem as I attended a Saturday morning men’s breakfast at a nearby church.
The speaker began by deriding what he believed were secular society’s efforts at emasculating, even feminizing, modern men. The church needed to help men to proudly reassert their masculinity. Or so we were told.
(I found this a very strange thing to be saying in the age of the #MeToo movement. But evangelicals have lived in a cultural ghetto for a long time.)
To facilitate the growth of masculine, godly men, the speaker announced that he was starting a new men’s Bible study for the church. A handy video played on a big screen up front introduced the study’s content.
The 300 or so men present in the auditorium with me were all treated to a 5-minute action movie showing Navy SEALS fully armed, wading through
water, jumping out of helicopters, and firing their weapons at (and undoubtedly killing) unseen enemies. A very masculine sounding narrator described how this new study (now available nation-wide) would teach us vital principles for godly manhood from the Navy SEALS handbook.
I groaned audibly and nearly regurgitated my breakfast.
I had spent my entire life thinking that Jesus of Nazareth was our perfect model for godliness. Silly me!
Worse yet, I now discovered that my personal Bible study needed to be directed by a military training manual. Rats!
Those of you who know me will not be surprised to learn that it took all the self-control I could muster to remain seated. Every fiber of my being wanted to stand up and loudly denounce the secular, unthinking, anti-Christian rubbish being shoveled out from the stage.
Sadly, I was witnessing another instance of American evangelicalism’s cultural captivity to the godless forces of social conformity. Political conservatism, militarism, patriotism, the myth of American exceptionalism, and gross nationalism had all conspired to trample the gospel of Jesus Christ into the ground, buried beneath the spit-polish black boots worn by “Christian soldiers” LITERALLY marching off to war.
And THAT is godly manhood?
We had been divided into groups of 10 sitting at circular tables. As the meeting drew to a close, we were encouraged to talk among ourselves about the morning’s lessons.
I believed that it would be irresponsible of me to say nothing. I had to speak my mind, fully convinced that I was speaking with the mind of Christ.
So, I grabbed the moment and told the other men at my table that this was a horrible example of un-Christian, anti-Biblical thinking infiltrating the church. I will spare you all the details of my little speech condemning everything we had just been subjected to, but I will mention the response of a young man sitting opposite me at the table.
This young man in his 20s had accompanied his father to the breakfast. As I spoke, his head began to nod heartily in agreement. As I finished, he said that he was glad I had spoken up. He told us all about how difficult it had been to grow up in Montana where everything in the surrounding society insisted that he become a tough guy, a macho-man, a fighter.
Not even the church provided any refuge from the cultural conditioning of a male dominated society where rugged individualism depended on a daily overdose of testosterone.
This young man, quite rightly, wanted to become more and more like Jesus, not a Navy SEAL. He finds words of life in the holy Scriptures, not in a military training handbook.
He was fighting against his church’s cultural captivity, not surrender to it.
So, why was the “men’s pastor” employed by the church promoting a program developed by a nationally known evangelical media organization that will teach men to conform to American culture rather than stand against it?
