Click through to the Resurgence if you can't see the video.

How should Christian couples approach family planning? Part 5 of Pastor Mark's interview with Randy Alcorn. See all the parts of this interview posted so far.

For more on how Christians should think about birth control, check out chapter 1 of Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions.

Religion Saves

Pastor Mark answers the top nine most-asked questions in Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions. Find out more.

Mars Hill Pastor Samuel Choi has a good post on what to learn and what to avoid from the life of George Whitefield. He writes:

When I was a student in college, I read about George Whitefield. I was in awe of his passion and works. There was nothing in his biography that I would have said anything negative about. Now as I re-read a biography on Whitefield as a husband, father, and pastor, there are some things in his life I do not want to repeat as a husband, father, and pastor.

Check it out on the Mars Hill blog.

Pastor Dad

Every dad is a pastor who must learn to care for his flock well. Pastor Mark Driscoll's free e-book teaches spiritual insights on fatherhood. Get it here.

Click through to the Resurgence if you can't see the video.

Is there a connection between birth control and abortion? Part 4 of Pastor Mark's interview with Randy Alcorn. See all the parts of this interview posted so far.

In this clip Alcorn refers to a couple of his books on the topic:

• Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments
• Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions?

Missional Ecclesiology

Re:Train professor Gregg Allison explains the missional church in his blog series on Missional Ecclesiology.

He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin

There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times (Interestingly each written by women). One of the major themes in this trend is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don't need them.

The entire article in The Atlantic is worth a read, but a few paragraphs are especially insightful:

"As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

"American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man [Emphasis mine]. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

"At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”

Here's the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a rare phenomenon, which is why we need to be familiar with it and them.

The Complications of Roles

This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:

• Sociological: the well-documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
• Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
• Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could've sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
• Economic: are cultures without America's vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?

The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.

The Omega Male and the Church

What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church.  Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church has been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In the large segments of the church that clumsily "embraced the arts" in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?

The Omega Male and the gender role confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6)—all activities that Omegas aren't prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.

For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.

Pastor Mark sits down with Wayne and Margaret Grudem to ask them about their marriage and family in this video interview.

Click through to the Resurgence if you can't see the video above.

How Do You Pastor Your Family?

How do you pastor your family? A practical article by an A29 pastor and dad. Read it here.

Pastor Scott Thomas, Director of Acts 29, recently wrote a post about six ways fathers pursue Christ in their fatherhood. Here are the six points:

Fathers pursuing Christ:

1. See their children as a blessing from God
2. Understand that their children are born with a bent toward evil
3. Believe the gospel is the good news for children
4. Train their children to honor and obey
5. Practice and demonstrate submission
6. Love their wives

You can read the whole post at the Acts 29 blog.

Doctrine Book

Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe is available now. Read a free chapter and find out more.

Please stop reading for a moment and think of one word that you would compare children to. Have you got it? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t come up with “arrows.” I mean, when you have to get out of bed at 2am to clean up your child’s vomit, few parents instinctively say, “Oh, you poor little arrow!” But Psalm 127 speaks of children as arrows in our hands.

Children, like arrows, need to be carefully made.

To turn a branch or plank into an arrow requires considerable time, care, and skill. Here’s a question: who is going to be the primary shaper of your kids? School friends? TV? Movies? Magazines? If you don’t shape them, someone else will.

Children, like arrows, are weapons of war.

God will use them as swift, penetrative, and offensive weapons to advance the gospel in the lives of many in the future and to unleash great damage on the kingdom of darkness.

Children, like arrows, can go where we can’t.

During the American presidential race that George W. Bush won to continue into his second term, the Harvard Business Review cited states voting for Bush (Republican) having a birth rate 12% higher than states voting for John Kerry (Democrat). Their conclusion was that the future would belong to the Republicans! The moral of the story: raise lots of godly kids. (Editor’s note: we are not aligning with any political party—merely pointing out a sociological fact that having kids changes culture.)

Children, like arrows, should obediently go in the direction that they are fired in.

Obedience is the primary biblical command to children (Eph 6:1-4) because it is the key to all other godly characteristics. Issues such as laziness and bad manners are actually rooted in disobedience, because if you train your children to be well-mannered then they will be, unless they are disobedient.

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Here are a few ways that we are trying to raise obedient children:

1. We are confident in our God-given parental authority.

God has set parents in place as the authority figures in the lives of children. Hebrews 12 speaks of how discipline is actually a privilege of being a son. Don’t fear that your child will resent your discipline. On the contrary, they will soon realise that it is a sign of your love for them.

2. We never count to three.

The counting-to-three routine undermines your authority and places your child in the driving seat. You are training them that, essentially, obedience is a negotiation and they can determine the timing of their obedience. Train them to think, “I must obey straight away.”

3. We model it ourselves to authority figures in our lives.

Several times a year there is a clash between what my “boss” is asking me to do and what my family and I would like to do. I always seize these opportunities to explain to my boys that I must obey my boss straight away and with a good attitude, and that although I would much rather spend Saturday morning with them, I must obey my “boss” and go to that meeting.

4. We try not to exasperate our children (Eph. 6:4).

Avoid petty rules. Pick your battles. Be merciful and compassionate. When you are in the wrong, say a sincere “sorry” to them. Also, make sure that you are giving them sufficient attention so that they are not compelled to rebel just to get some time and attention from you.

5. We use appropriate forms of punishment.

We discipline mostly for three D’s: disobedience, disrespect, and destruction (of property or your brother’s nose). Punishment must be proportional to the offense and also proportional to the child’s stage of life. If it is not then you will find that you exasperate a growing child. Also, the mode of punishment must be what will best help the child. Different parents have more “faith” in some forms of punishment than others, and different children respond differently to different forms of punishment. I acknowledge and respect that, although we have had continued success with the primary biblical form of disciplining children with a wooden spoon on their chubby bottoms.

6. We are convinced that it really is worth the effort.

The joy of parenting increases dramatically when you have obedient children, and most importantly, you are equipping your children with the vital life-skill of obedience, which will stand them in good stead in their obedience to God, life, at school, and in the workplace.

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Two Marriage Pillars

Loving headship by the husband and joyful submission by the wife are the top two keys that the Bible gives for marriage. Take a look:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22-25, 32).

Marriage stands for something huge. It models the essence of the gospel. God designed marriage as a living drama of how Christ and the church relate to each other. We have the privilege of fulfilling these roles of loving headship and joyful submission to reflect something glorious. Let’s take a closer look at these roles:

PJ on Ashleigh’s Submission:

Ashleigh expresses her submission to me through her inclination to support my leadership and initiatives within the constraints of obedience to Christ. Her submission is not the removal of her opinion and intelligence from our marriage, nor does it result in her playing a lesser role in our marriage. Here is a real-time example: last night I mishandled a situation with my 11-year-old son, Jack. As I was busy mishandling it, Ashleigh was giving me verbal and body language indicators to help me adjust my approach. But I thought I knew better.

Twenty minutes later she returned to chat to me and, with an attitude of deference, made a compelling case for Jack’s side of the argument, which resulted in me climbing down, apologizing, and modeling the art of apology to Jack! Do you see what had happened? Even when she disagreed with me she maintained an honouring demeanour, but her submissive bias was still potent in influencing me and shaping family life.

Ashleigh on PJ’s Servant Leadership:

PJ tries to lead me in a loving, serving, and confident manner—like Jesus loves the church. It is not about being authoritarian, autocratic, domineering, bossy, or abusive. It is simply Christ-like servant leadership, and it is a pleasure to submit to this type of leadership (mostly!) as I know that he has my best at heart. But more than that, I know that my submission honours God.

My biggest submission struggle in recent years was agreeing to relocate to Johannesburg to plant our church. To be honest, I felt the beaches of Mauritius needed a church more than Jo’burg, and I was willing, definitely willing, to lay down my life to take the gospel to that tropical island. But PJ felt it was Jo’burg, and so I needed to submit to his headship.

Submission is dead easy when you agree! We firmly believe with John Piper, who wrote:

When sin entered the world it ruined the harmony of marriage not because it brought headship and submission into existence, but because it twisted man's humble, loving headship into hostile domination in some men and lazy indifference in others. And it twisted woman's intelligent, willing submission into manipulative obsequiousness in some women and brazen insubordination in others. Sin didn't create headship and submission; it ruined them and distorted them and made them ugly and destructive.

Piper goes on to say that we are now involved “not in the dismantling of the original, created order of loving headship and willing submission, but a recovery of it from the ravages of sin.” What a privilege!

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We recently ran a very controversial article titled Pastor, You're Probably Fat." This post is to answer some of the questions that people had on Facebook.

Healthy doesn't equal holy

Jesus is the only one who can save us—not an Atkin's diet or a Crossfit exercise program.

The Spirit is the only one who sanctifies us—not Chuck Norris' newest infomercial workout machine or the latest Dr. Oz meme.

Jesus must be our comfort and our satisfaction—not food. Jesus is the one who makes us perfect—not tight abs or big muscles.

So should we stop caring about our health?

No! Absolutely not. Your health is important because you are a steward of the body God has given you. He created you—he built you to need x number of calories each day, to need exercise to keep your energy up, to eat healthy food, and to get a certain amount of sleep.

Health as worship

The lie of health is that it will make you closer to perfect. Many people buy into this lie and turn exercise into an idol. Some stop eating enough or throw up their food. Still more get depressed and turn to food as a comforter in hard times. If this is you friend, you're buying into the lie.

The truth of health is that God created you to worship and enjoy him. He's given you one body, mind, and spirit to worship with. Any pursuit of true health must be to be toward the glory of God.

Love your God

God calls you to worship and enjoy him above all else. When you worship him you realize that your body isn't your own kingdom, but a tool he's given you to worship with. Your health gives you energy to be joyful in him. A healthy diet keeps your mind sharp to study his Word. A solid sleep pattern keeps you alert to spend time in prayer. You wouldn't have much success chopping down a tree with a dull axe; you have to keep your axe sharp. In the same way, you should keep your health as sharp as possible.

Love your family

Many Christian leaders are deceived in thinking they are more holy because they spend all of their time in ministry and then squeeze in a little time with family. If you don't actively pursue exercise and a healthy diet, you're depriving your family of energy, years with you, and a healthy example.

Love your mission

God has given you a general mission to be a disciple who makes disciples, and he's given many of us a specific mission. Ministry is physically taxing. It takes energy to preach, it takes rest to not blow out your adrenal glands with the stress of messy situations, and you can't pig out on caffeine & carbs if you want to maintain a long ministry.

Some Scripture for meditation

Think about these verses and what they tell us about the way to view our bodies:

"Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself."
Philippians 3:19-21

"Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags."
Proverbs 23:20-21

5 Hard Truths for Planters

Acts 29 Pastor Dustin Neeley shares 5 challenging truths church planters will have to learn. View the series.