Wolves Among the Flock

 
Men are either wolves or sheepdogs. We are not by nature sheep. We may follow a shepherd but we are wired up to confront danger and stand between our flock, our family and our community and that which would bring them harm. We all choose which we will be. Our church needs sheepdogs for there is evil among us. I was sickened today to read that a volunteer Adventist girl's basketball coach was arrested for filming the girls changing clothes in his office. He's been tossed out of Puget Sound Adventist Academy on his ear and arrested. The good thing is that he was no longer employed by the school and only served as a volunteer. The good thing is that the sheepdogs of the church rose up and put an end to his activities. The bad thing is that once again men in the church find themselves damned by gender and it's not fair. In fact, it's detrimental to our families and our children and young people.

Already, the church has had to resort to background checks and paperwork galore for everyone in the church who volunteers to do anything at all. It's little wonder that many church members hang back from taking on jobs with the church. It's a little scary to risk it, especially if you are a guy. I gave up worrying about it years ago. At first, I figured if God is in charge, I need not fear being falsely accused of some misdeed, especially if I did nothing wrong. Later I discovered that you might well be falsely accused, especially if you do right or speak out about wrongs being done by those who consider themselves superior to the rest of us.

Doing the right thing doesn't mean you won't lose your job or have to move somewhere far away to continue your career. The secret to doing your duty as a male church member is to always do the right thing and trust God to take care of you whatever happens. I've seen two wonderful pastors hurt though they were both doing what was right and doing it with vigor and energy. One was a conference president and a man I respected and admired. The other one served as the pastor of a college church and was a brilliant author and theologian. The conference president shared a plane ride with a woman on her way to New England for cancer treatments. She was frightened and he happened to be going the same way and her family didn't want her to travel alone. His enemies accused him of having an affair and made such a stink they forced him out. Years later, the same bunch set up our local pastor and accused him of sexual impropriety. Ironically, they were opposed to his emphasis on the idea of righteousness by faith. Somehow they decided that subterfuge, lying and character assassination were okay so long as they were attacking someone who wasn't doing what you were certain God wanted Him to do (which was usually what they wanted him to do) .

Ron Halvorsen Sr. was pastor of my church in Keene, Texas. Our head deacon approached him a couple of weeks after he preached his first sermon and told him a committee (The Laymen Actively Concerned) had been organized to get rid of him. Pastor Ron's response was a priceless and a courageously male one.

"Whew," he said wiping his brow. "I was worried there. Usually they have that committee organized by Sabbath afternoon after my first sermon!"  The next week he stood up in front of 1000 church members and said, "I understand that in this church we have some laymen who are actively concerned."

The congregation roared with laughter and the "committee" and the wolves who were its members were effectively defanged and had no further power. Actually, the church rallied behind Pastor Ron and we experienced a burst of church unity like no one had seen in decades. It was breath-taking and more than a little discouraging to our church's figurative graybeards in that it left them without the power of whispering behind back.

The greatest want of the church is, in point of fact, the want of men; men who will not be bought or sold; men who are as true as the needle to the pole. Sister White warned Adventist men that courage would be needed in these last days. We are the defenders of the church and our families and loved ones. We are sheepdogs. We must be vigilant, for the devil our adversary walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

It's time we men have to stand shoulder to shoulder to defend the flock. We need not fear those who claim power for their own. We need not fear the world. We serve Christ, not the head elder, not the Division president or the General Conference administration. One day soon the world will turn and wonder after the Beast. If we cannot stand now, when the stakes are small, what hope will there be that we will stand when the world turns against us.

God give us courage now to stand for the right.

© 2017 by Tom King

Fallen Warriors: Leroy J. Leiske

Leroy J. Leiske

I've recently lost several mentors from my early Christian experience - some to retirement and some have passed away. Leroy J. Leiske was one of those mentors. When I knew him he was President of Southwestern Union College during my freshman year at the college. I'm not sure how, but he knew my name by the end of the first week of classes. He knew everybody's name and we had some 600 kids or so.

We'd seen Elder Leiske with his sleeves rolled up all over campus that summer personally planting decorative shrubs and hedges, pouring concrete and generally sprucing up the campus. So our first chapel service, he got up front and described some of the improvements they'd been making in the campus. Then he told us that he believed that one of the key missions of Adventist colleges was to help create strong new Adventist families. In order to fulfill that mission, Elder Leiske explained that he had created new places on campus that were more secluded and that if we would stop by his office he would show us a map of where those places were. This brought down the house.

Elder Leiske was the only college president I ever saw who could get a standing ovation from students just for walking out on stage at a chapel service. The students thoroughly loved him. I wasn't aware at the time that he was coming off an attempt to completely integrate the Southern Union which got him canned after just 13 months.

In his tenure at SUC as development director and president, he built the college up, more than doubled the number of students, built new facilities and put the school on a solid financial foundation. We had new students every year, many of them conspicuously black. I'm sure he ruffled some serious feathers and I heard some negative comments about him, but people learned not to talk bad about Elder Leiske in front of students.

One of my favorite stories about Elder Leiske was this one, (click link) which demonstrated the challenges faced by Uncle Leroy as some of us called him, in coping with Keene culture. Leiske's drive and determination led to some interesting situations to say the least, but the man was fearless! He moved on from Keene to another Union presidency and ran Pacific Press for several years before "retiring" to Keene. My wife and I ran a day care center there in Keene and we had his grandson with us. Elder Leiske dropped by to pick him up often and I was always glad to see him.

From Elder Leiske I learned optimism and how to have a sense of humor in crisis. He was a lovely man and will be missed.

© 2016 by Tom King

My First Mentor Retires

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My Dad took a flyer when I was four leaving Mom with three little ones to care for and without visible means of support. Until I was in my teens, my male role models tended to be fictional ones from books. Through a series of providences, however, I wound up newly baptized and granted a summer job at Lone Star Camp as a $10 a week trash collector, janitor and shovel operator. God had his hand in it.

The camp director that summer was a lanky theology student and outdoorsman named Sam Miller. Sam was a revelation. I'd joined the church because God argued me into a corner where I had to give Him a chance despite my own misgivings. I'd grown up in a church town where, as Sam later told me, "Adventists are like manure. Spread 'em out over a space and the do a lot of good, but pile 'em up in one place and pretty soon it begins to stink!"

The first leader God sent to educate me was Sam. Most of what I've come to know about working with young people, I learned from Sam that first couple of summers. He taught me to be a lifeguard and put me on track to become a Water Safety Instructor Trainer for the Red Cross and eventually the camp's waterfront director.

Old Sam (we called him that because he seemed so much older than the rest of us for some reason) had an easy-going way with young hormonally-charged staff members. It is a tribute to Sam that no children were either drowned or created during the summer's he herded our motley crew. He once led our whole staff in hijacking a Six Flags war canoe and altering its course. We learned to ski, built pyramids, skied on canoe paddles and raided the kitchen. We also knew where the line was with Sam and we pretty much didn't cross it - at least not any farther than we could safely draw back for the most part. 

I learned how to lead by example rather than by bullying. I learned that a soft answer does turn away wrath and I learned that a leader is a human being too. Old Sam is retiring and I'm sure he will be missed by everyone he works with.  I'm also sure that some of our "leaders" never quite understood Sam either. I put leaders in quotes because those are the kind of leaders that Sam taught me not to become like.

For more stories about Sam check out my personal weblog about him. I hate to seek a good man go, but I'm pretty sure Old Sam will still be around making a difference in the lives of young people for a long time yet.

© 2016 by Tom King

God Gets My Attention

God's Teaching Tools?

The thing is, I used to have trouble not paying attention. I'd get busy with all the stuff you have to do to maintain a family, keep the lights on and food on the table and lose track of time so that God gets left out a lot. I still do that sometimes, I am ashamed to admit. The morning worship gets skipped a few days running. Life overwhelms us and I lose focus. Even now after 45 years as a Christian, it's still much too easy to drift.

In the event that I do, God who has a sense of humor as well as a powerful desire to make sure I do pay attention. He has a way of showing at those moments with some sort of attention-getting event. It always happens when I get too comfortable. My first experience with what I think of as "the hammer of God" happened back in the early 90s. It was a hot summer. I was working out of doors with kids doing sports-related things. I come from a long line of sweaty people. Allergens were everywhere. I was doing anti-histamines like a speed freak does meth and definitely not drinking nearly enough water to compensate for the concomitant dehydration.

The first hint that something was going very badly was a sharp stabbing pain to the gut. I went through the usual useless attempts to stop the pain. You guys know what those are, so I won't go through all that. Finally, in serious pain, I asked my wife to drive me to the hospital. As an indicator of pain, this was a biggie. My wife was suddenly very worried because I NEVER give up the driver's seat willingly and she doesn't like to drive. She hurriedly bundled me into the car and we were on the road. I don't know what happened to our kids that night. I never saw her call anyone to come stay with them. I never asked, which is also an indicator of my level of pain as we had two boys and a little girl who could hold her own with them back at home and there were things in our house that could be broken which are expensive to replace. I didn't care at that point. The house could have been reduced to a pile of rubble in my absence. I didn't care.

By the time we got to the Cleburne hospital someone had apparently inserted a knife into my lower abdomen and was twisting it slowly now and then , just to remind me that it was still there. We arrive at the chateau de' Cleburne ER. They had this comical sense of humor with regard to parking. Parking for drive-up patients was down hill in the lower parking lot. To get to the ER required you to scale a formidable set of stairs or hobble up an even more formidable circuitous ramp. This was before the Americans with Disabilities Act made them tear that ramp out and install and even longer one with flat places every so often where one might lie down to die without fear of rolling all the way back down to the bottom of the ramp.

Hobbling up that long ramp with a dagger in your lower intestines did not look like a whole lot of fun, let me tell you, so I opted for the stairs. Halfway up I decided the ramp might not be such a bad thing, but I was already committed. By now I was doing this Frankenstein-like shuffle step, periodically bending over, then taking a step accompanied by a deep groan, then a bend-over-stomach-clutch, then up again and moan. I looked like a scene from Zombie Attack III. I think I was wearing a ragged t-shirt I had been sleeping in. Moaning I staggered into the ER and stumbled up to the desk. The charge nurse didn't blink, apparently used to zombies walking into her ER.

If you have ever been to the emergency room, you know the drill. A grumpy nurse with a steely eye, an unsympathetic scowl, brandishing a pen asks you to sign in. She then hands you a clipboard and banishes you to the waiting room where you wait patiently with 20 or 30 other suffering humans for up to 8 hours or so. Then, when you reach the point where you don't think you can take it anymore, they send you to a little curtained off area and you wait another hour or two for the doctor to breeze through and pronounce judgment upon your condition. I was asked to rate my level of "discomfort", that was the term the charge nurse used, on a scale of one to ten. I gave it a 35. She was not amused.

Interesting Fact 1: When you do not amuse the charge nurse you move backward in the queue. By this point, I was in no condition to wait patiently for 4 hours for some doctor to come in, scratch his head and then go away to order some tests to be conducted by radiology in a couple of hours or so.

I'm a logical guy. I looked around and evaluated my fellow sufferers there in the waiting room and could see that no one else was suffering like me. A few were dripping blood or nursing an ice pack or throwing up into a little bag that Nurse Ratchet had provided, but I was pretty sure no one else had been stabbed with an invisible knife.

So, putting my great brain feverishly to work, I came up with a plan to get myself moved up in the queue. I had a little help as my invisible tormentor chose that moment to give the knife another sharp twist. I screamed. The reaction was all I could have hoped for. Nurse Ratchet raised her head from whatever romance novel she'd been reading and looked at me. Encouraged, I let loose with another scream; one I'm sure would have got me an "8", even from the Russian judges. 

Interesting Fact 2:  Screaming like a dying wildebeest on the Serengeti upsets the decorum of the ER waiting room. Squealing like a pig being slaughtered (what I call stage 2 screaming) moves you almost immediately to the top of the "next" list. The charge nurse punched a button somewhere and in moments I was loaded on a gurney and wheeled off to a barracks-like room where they put people who are going to die, but are not actually bleeding on the ER floor from a gunshot wound. 

By now I was screaming pretty much nonstop. I was doing a lot of praying of the "Please God make it stop variety." And here's where my religion got tested. Given the location of my pain and the intensity of it and also due to the fact that I was weeping, crying like a girl and remembering some words I used to use before I was a Christian, the nurse had already diagnosed my ailment - accurately as it turned out. She also chastised me for using uncouth words. I was alone on a gurney in an empty room full of gurneys mind you, but she felt a powerful need to correct my language for some reason.

Miserable as I was, and as out of my head with pain as I was, it worked. I grumbled a little at being admonished by this sanctimonious poor excuse for a Florence Nightingale. Here she is being all morally superior, I'd just like to see how she'd handle this much pain. Still, she did get my attention. I girded up my loins (all too literally) and I stopped cursing. I stopped in part because she made me feel guilty, me being an Adventist Christian and all, and in part because I was desperately hoping for some morphine for what my nurse guessed was a kidney stone. Shaking her head she muttered, "Men are such babies," on her way out the door.

Interesting Fact 3:  Even women, whom I believe routinely exaggerate the pain levels they experience in childbirth, say that passing a kidney stone is worse. This is obviously true. Women will willingly get pregnant again. Men will not willingly pass a kidney stone again. My urologist told me to drink lots of water to prevent the formation of stones. Since that day, I swill fluids like an Abrams Main Battle Tank swills diesel fuel. I now plan my travels through life so as to never be more than 3 minutes from a restroom. I WILL use the ladies room in a pinch. Waiting is not an option.

Interesting Fact 4:  Morphine does NOT kill the pain. The best it does is make it so you don't scream so loudly and you can resist the urge to use colorful sailor-words. Using colorful sailor-words is what got me my first dose of morphine. I did not intend for this to happen. The nurse, being a woman of delicate sensibilities and a powerful reluctance to issue narcotics to persons in pain, at first attempted to shame me into silence. It was, however, too late for that. I had just discovered that screaming like a girl made things happen.

I am not disparaging girls here. I describe my screaming that way because of the pitch of the scream, not anything gender-related or stereotypical weakness-wise. I can be as paternalistic as all git-out, but that is not it. What I found out by diligent experimentation that day was that a high-pitched shriek works better for getting attention than a deep-throated manly roar. Manly screaming apparently means to nurses that you are being tough and riding it out and therefore need no attention. When you no longer care about preserving the illusion of manliness and start shrieking like an over-heated teapot, some sort of internal switch gets tripped and someone trundles down the hall to wherever the doctor is taking a nap, wakes him up, and gets an authorization for some pain-killer. After another 30 minutes of this distinctly unmasculine behavior on my part and a call from admin three floors up, the doc gets up. Unable to sleep anyway, with all that unmanly noise emanating from corpse-storage where they'd left me, the doc, bleary eyed from being on the tail end of a 48 hour shift, comes wandering in, has a quick zombie-to-zombie consultation and sends me to radiology.

There they confirm that what I have is a kidney stone. They also apparently confirm the inadequacy of my company insurance and pump me full of morphine and wait for the stone to pass. Before it does, my insurance balks and they send me home with a plastic strainer and instructions to pee through that till the stone comes out.

Stone is something of a misnomer in my case. When it finally made a distinctly uncomfortable appearance in the strainer, even I, who had lived through the stone's passage through my more delicate tubules, blanched a little. The thing was the size of a goat-head. If you live in East Texas, you know what a goat-head is. It's an evil looking spiked seed from a pernicious weed that stabs you in the foot and cripples you for a couple of days at a time. This stone, like a goat-head, had horrible little barbs all over it. They analyzed it at the urologist's, told me to drink lots of water and sent me home.

The second one was bad and sent me to the ER, but I passed that one too. They gave me some potent pain killers which I used sparingly in case I needed them later. I later had a procedure where they tried to blow the stones up with sound waves. The first time they tried it I'd already passed it by the time they got around to doing the procedure and they let me go. The second time they tried it they had more success. For a while I was passing gravel. Then things got more interesting.

Since the first two kidney "boulders" and the lithotrypsy (the one with the sound waves), I've passed six more, including five kidney stones in one year - without another hospital visit. I passed the last five standing on my own two feet at home. I carefully nursed my supply of Hydrocodone and managed to make that one prescription last through the next year. I collected the pesky little rocks I passed that year in a little medicine bottle if you ever want to see them.  I take out the bottle once in a while, shake it so it rattles, and then drink a 20 ounce glass of water.

My attention was captured to say the least. God has a way of reminding you that you are still alive. My struggle with kidney stones, in an odd sort of way, reminded me that what we are doing with our lives is important. Going through that ordeal taught me how wonderful it is to feel good. Sore feet don't matter anymore. A tired back, aching muscles, the odd headache. Those are just reminders that we are still alive and we can still feel pain.

But it's not just physical pain I'm talking about. Life throws us a curve ever once in a while and beans us on the back of the head. We learn that we can survive whatever the devil throws at us (and believe me there is the stench of sulfur about a kidney stone, the death of a child, the loss of a home or job let me tell you). We may reach a point where we can pass a kidney stone or a life trial and remain standing up like a man and do it without screaming, wailing or gnashing of teeth. Sadly, it usually takes us a lot of repetition to reach that point, but reach it we do if we submit to God's training program.

God always finds a way to get our attention when we get sloppy and slack. He toughens us through trial, makes us strong through adversity, makes us compassionate and willing to bear up under whatever falls upon us. Will God need to get my attention again? At 62, I feel like a tired old war horse sometimes and wonder whether God is done with me yet. I hope so, but probably not.

And it'll probably hurt. At this point I'm all out of pain pills, so I'll just have to stand through it till it's over. I've been through the training and God's a pretty good drill sergeant. I 'spect I can take it.

© by Tom King

Fallen Warriors: Ron Halvorsen Sr.

Pastor Ron Halvorsen Sr. - Hairy-Chested Adventist Man

"Jesus ate fish." The simple statement by her pastor shocked the very rigid Adventist church lady of the sort Ray Stevens dubbed "Sister Bertha Better n' You" in his song "The Mississippi Squirrel Revival. Sister Bertha (not her real name) had been busily laying some harsh judgment on a fellow Adventist church member for his revelation that he had eaten some fish in his time. She turned to face Pastor Ron Halvorsen in some confusion, having expected, as such people do, to have won some vegetarian brownie points from her pastor for having schooled this obviously lapsed saint regarding his dietary duty. She had, after all, chosen a spot well within earshot of the pastor to deliver her judgments.

"Well Jesus didn't have the Spirit of Prophecy!" the lady sputtered aghast at her pastor's loosey-goosey attitude on the burning issue of dietary morality.

"JESUS IS THE SPIRIT OF PROPHECY you whitewashed SEPULCHRE!" he thundered silencing the good sister and sending her scurrying for cover.

Ron Halvorsen was one of those he-man, testosterone-filled warriors for the Lord who inspired me as a young person looking desparately for a strong male role model. My own father took a powder when I was five and my relationship with my stepfather was not terribly strong. I found my role models mostly in books - King Arthur, Captain Hornblower, Captain Blood, Captain Kirk; those sorts of guys. I had a few flesh and blood men I looked up to as well. Ed Burns and Sam Miller from summer camp both taught me a lot about what a man was supposed to be like and to do.

My first encounter with Ron Halvorsen was actually in the chow line at Lone Star Camp during a ministerial conference just after he came to Texas to take over the Keene, Church. I was doling out peanut butter and asked him if he wanted some.

He grinned at me broadly and said in his thick Brooklyn accent, "Sure. I love the stuff," he stuck out his plate. "I ate so much peanut butter as a kid that if they'd stuck me with a knife I probably would have bled peanut butter. I knew this was the right pastor for my hometown church. I'd grown up in Keene. My family helped build the town. I had a feeling he was going to shake things up in the Holy City.

I was right. Within a year, Pastor Ron had two services packed with more than 3000 people coming every Sabbath. He soon had more than 900 showing up for prayer meeting. Before he came they were meeting in the Youth Chapel and there were fewer than 40 showing up each week.

Under Pastor Ron, though, we soon had a fleet of school buses fanning out through the surrounding county picking up children and old people and bringing them to church. Volunteers like me rode along and played the guitar and filled the buses with the voices of children and elderly saints singing at the top of their lungs as we rumbled across the country-side.

Pastor Morris Venden

Needless to say, the "white-washed" sepulchres in Keene hated Pastor Ron too, but to the children of Christ in that church, he was like oxygen. God rest his soul.

Some people leave a terrible hole in the fabric of space and time when they are taken from us. It has been a privilege for me to know such people. Some of them like Pastor Ron and Pastor Morris Venden loom large and you cannot help but notice their absence when they go to their rest. With others, like my friend Dave Spenser and my beloved son Micah and the many stout-hearted, hard-working, God-fearing men with whom I have shared my church, you don't realize what a hole they have left behind in our lives, until they are gone. Only later do you begin to discover what awful gaps are left behind in our world without them.

May each of us live lives that, when we are taken to our rest, the world is rendered as full of holes as a Swiss cheese for the lack of us being in it.

The quote by Sister White in the sidebar is a clarion call for men of faith to arise and take their place in the front lines. Time is growing short and as warriors like Pastor Ron and the others I have mentioned fall, I pray that ten Adventist Christian men arise to take their places. God knows that we need them.

© 2015 by Tom King

Christian Manhood: Women are Lovely Creatures

Women are beautiful. I'm not talking physically, although there is that. I'm talking about their very nature, their instincts and drives. It's not politically correct to talk about the differences between men and women these days, unless, of course, you are a comedian. A lot of comedians make a good solid living pointing out that men and women are fundamentally different. They get laughs because people recognize the truth of what they are saying about our differences.

Women are not men and thank God for that. I was reading today in Matthew 8, starting with verse 14, the story of Simon Peter's mother-in-law. Jesus came by Peter's house to visit and found the poor woman in a terrible state. She was running a high fever and couldn't get out of bed.

It's interesting the words that Jesus used next. He didn't wave his hand and say "Be healed." He didn't mix up any mud or say "Your sins be forgiven thee." Matthew says he "rebuked" the fever. I can see that in my head. Jesus seeing this lovely elderly woman in distress, he tells the fever "Shame on you for bothering this lovely woman. Get out of here and don't come back!"

He rebuked a sickness.

I remember when my daughter was in about 8th grade, a young man approached her in the hallway of her school and began talking trashy to her. My daughter, who has all the self-confidence of a bull rhino, brushed him off, turned and stalked away in a huff. When the young man turned around, he came face to chest with Meghan's older brother, then a senior in the high school which shared the building with the junior high and elementary.

I say face to chest because Micah was about 6'3" or so at the time and weighed around 250 pounds, played basketball and ran track and had been recruited by several high school football coaches who wanted him rather badly. 

The young man looked up into Micah's face and his grin faded. Micah caught him by the front of his shirt and with one hand lifted him off the floor and brought his face level with Micah's own.

Then he rebuked him.

"You do NOT talk to my sister that way," Micah said in an eerily calm, albeit deadly serious voice. "Do you understand?"

The young man nodded. He was sweating bullets.

Micah lowered him to the ground. His feet were moving before they touched the floor.

One would hope he had learned his lesson.

That is how men should treat women. It's not because they are weak or helpless. Far from it. My daughter is one of the most capable young women I know. It is because women are capable and talented and capable of thinking in ways that we men are not that we should be protective of them. We are, after all, bigger than they are and I've always believed that if you are given the gift of great strength, you should use it to protect those weaker than yourself. I think that was the lesson God was trying to teach Samson, Saul and David.

The best part of the story of Peter's mother-in-law is what happened after Jesus healed her. A man would have thanked Jesus profusely and spent the next hour telling everyone about the experience he'd just had. Not Peter's mother-in-law. The first thing she does is get up and run off to the kitchen to fix some food and feed Jesus and everyone else who was a guest in her home.

Women do that kind of thing. Men would let you starve before the thought would occur to them to fix supper. We just don't think like that. Women bring an essential skill and a unique viewpoint to any enterprise we undertake. It is they who worry whether we're dressed warmly, have enough to eat or our bed is comfortable.

I'm like Jesus. If anyone or anything troubles a woman, my first instinct is to rebuke it. I think that's one of the instincts God put into us males.  Women take care of the children, the family, guests, the poor, the widows and the orphans. Men? We take care of our women. If we don't, who will?

Tom King
© 2014

Christian Manhood: A Man's Purpose

I live, I breathe, I exist by the grace of a God who has called me for a purpose. As my life winds down through it's latter half I find that in searching for that purpose, I may have accidentally accomplished it already.

God may not have had such lofty a purpose for me as I once supposed He did, nor so elevated a place among my fellow humans that I should complain if my accomplishments weren't as grand as I figured they should have been.

Perhaps my purpose was simply to plug up a hole or prop up a pillar at such a time as it was needed. If that's it, I am content that I was there when God required my hands or even, just that one finger!.

© 2014 by Tom King

Ministries: The Missing Ministry

Go through the web pages for most Adventist churches and you'll find a listing of church ministries.  You'll find a Youth Ministry and perhaps a Children's Ministry. You'll find a Women's Ministry and all too rarely anymore, a Dorcas Society which does ministry to the poor and supports disaster relief and sometimes a food bank. What you seldom see, however, is the third leg of the Women's/Children's ministry partnership -- the Men's Ministry.

We've always had ministry departments for children and youth. The women's ministry has become ubiquitous throughout SDA churches. They have their own conferences. They have their own objectives for ministering to the women of the church and the community. We have youth congresses, youth outreaches and youth programs.

What we don't have in anything like the breadth that we need is a ministry to meet the needs of men. There are conferences and churches which do offer men's ministries. Some are quite extensive in their outreach, others are kind of superficial to be honest. Some may question the need for a formal men's ministry program, especially at the local church level. Some might argue that everything else that happens in the church is the men's ministry - the preaching, the deacon's work, the financial management, the building committees and the like.  That could well have been the case a hundred years ago when male/female roles were more well-defined, but in the modern SDA movement, women have moved into all these areas and taken leadership roles as elders, church board members and even in the pulpit. My own home church in Keene, Texas recently hired a women as lead pastor, shattering a century-old history during which not a single female ordained pastor served in even a secondary pastoral role as far as I know. Things are changing and men are, I think, confused as to what happens next for us. In some ways the church is beginning to feel to some men like the church is becoming a club for women and children and that we're the dinosaurs in this extinction scenario.

We blithely assume that men know what they need to do and will just naturally take care of themselves. It seems that the church has subconsciously decided that men need no such
guidance; that new church members who are male will just naturally take their place within the body of the church and do whatever it is that men do without a lot of coaching.

I don't believe we can safely assume that men understand their role in the life of the church anymore. I've seen far too many men come to church on Sabbath with their wives on their arm and pretty much shadow them. They make no strong connections within the church with other males. They take on no jobs or duties unless asked. They are easily overlooked. Eventually, many of them, their social life existing almost entirely outside of the church, just give up and start dropping their wives and kids (for whom we have an active ministry) off at the door and picking them up at noon.

Because our roles are changing so rapidly in recent times, even though much of the change may actually be for the better, I think it's time to establish men's ministries in our churches. Here's why I believe that.

1. Many of our men are new to the faith and did no grow up with strong male role models. Many times our boys grow up with single moms or with fathers who don't attend church. They missed out on seeing their dads lead out in Pathfinders, helping repair the church, doing building projects, teaching and mentoring and developing friendships with other men. A men's ministry might provide strong male role models for guys unsure what they should do as a member of the SDA church. 
2. Men need socialization as much as women do, but they are not as good at forging those bonds in a social setting like women are. Men tend to forge friendships in work settings or where they are with other guys who are working toward a common purpose. Guys don't invite each other over for tea. They ask for help to hang a garage door or invite someone to go fishing. Adventist guys aren't even sure that fishing is moral given our stance on vegetarianism. Men's ministries could organize men's prayer breakfasts, men's recreational activities and men's conferences where we talk about doing guy things for the church.
3. Men can do things that women and children can't do as well. God made us bulkier and on the whole better able to cope with things electrical, mechanical and technical. Not to say women can't do some of this stuff too, but if we need to lift heavy plywood decking onto the top of a church roof, give me 4 burly guys any day. There are things the church needs that guys can do. There is no excuse for any church to go unmaintained if it's got 40 or 50 male church members who can help out.  A men's ministry could be responsible for asking its members to do stuff like that as part of their activities.
4. Men are traditionally the mentors of young people, particularly boys. Men's ministries could be responsible for making sure there are enough Master Guides to run a Pathfinder program. They could make sure youth activities leaders are properly trained in leadership techniques. They could help create special "rites of passage" for the boys in the church as they become old enough to assume adult responsibilities within the congregation.
5. Having a men's ministry gives men permission to do stuff in the church. The existence of a women's ministry is about empowering women to do stuff for the church. The existence of a youth ministry is about giving young people a sense of ownership of their church and about giving them a place within the church to express their love of God. In the same way, a men's ministry would be about acknowledging that men have a definite role in God's church and that as a church, we expect them to do their duty.

A lot of men tend to be on the taciturn side. They may not say much, but there's an energy there that only waits to be unleashed. They may not push for a place in church leadership. They may not even offer to help out without an invitation to do so, but God bless 'em, if you can get the men in your church rolling on some project or other, the results can be quite breath-taking. I heard a story once about a group of women who ran the annual Christmas pageant at their church every year.  They took care of everything right down to the cardboard backdrops and props that had to be rebuilt nearly every year. It was exhausting.

One of the mom's whose husband was a dab hand at carpentry offered to rope George into doing the scenery of the play that year. She asked him if he could get some of the guys together and build them a nice set. She was vague about the specs of the thing, just gave him an overall idea of what she wanted.

When the sawdust settled, George and two other guys he knew from work who weren't even Adventist, a deacon and a couple of other husbands whose wives were trying to get them involved in the church had built a stunningly lifelike stable, manger, inn and a variety of stand-alone wooden animals including a rather convincing camel. They hinged everything so it folded flat and hung on hooks against the wall in a tool shed the church had out back. They also cleaned and organized the tool shed while they were at it. The trick the ladies learned, was to avoid micro-managing the guys. Just turn them loose with something to do and the results can be quite surprising.

The trick we as a church need to learn is to tap into the powerful resource represented by the men in the church. Guys would rather do something than talk about doing something. I recently went to a men's prayer breakfast one Sunday morning. It was a lot of fun. The pastor gave a short message and we prayed round the circle. Then we broke up and headed by groups down the street to the fairgrounds where they were having a gun show.

Following up a prayer breakfast with a gun show only seems strange if you are not a guy. It could have been a car show or a boat show. The point is that the prayer breakfast got a bunch of guys together to do guy stuff with other guys from the church. That's how you build bonds that will pay back to the church many times over. We're doers, we men.  

The message of a men's ministries conference won't be "What is our place in the church?" or "How does the church make us feel?"  The message will be "What can we do next for our church and our God?"  

That is as it should be. That is, after all, how God made us. When we quit doing stuff and regress to merely talking about stuff and jockeying for position, it's kind of all downhill from there.


Just sayin'

© 2014 by Tom King

Christian Manhood: Making One Plus One Equal Wonderful

 

“Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”  

  - Martin Luther

There is a little trick I have learned over the years that has made a huge difference in the quality of my relationship with my beloved wife. It is the pause and the quiet breath before speaking. In that moment, whatever is happening, being said or done, I try to think before I speak. What is really going on? What is she really trying to say. What does she need. It's merely an application of the Golden Rule - Treat others as you want to be treated. But it is more than that. It's putting yourself in her place and trying to understand what need I can fulfill. Sometimes it's not exactly the one being requested or the situation is not as it seems. If you are confused or do not understand, even if you are hurt or offended, stop and think about her first. Take that long quiet breath - careful, it's not a sigh you're going for. It's oxygen to the brain.

She does this for me all the time - thinks of me over her own needs. It is why we've lasted 39 years. It's wonderful to be loved so much, but what is even more wonderful is to love so much. In this way, 1 plus 1 equals wonderful.

© by Tom King

Christian Manhood: Oh, Brother Who Art Thou?

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” - C.S. Lewis

One of the things we don't do particularly well in the Advent Movement is build strong male circles of friends.  Perhaps it's because we are a movement and don't settle long enough in one place to build strong friendships.  I imagine being a pastor is a pretty lonely business.  I know teaching in SDA schools certainly was. It's hard to build friendships with co-workers anyway.  You try to build friendships with your kids, but they all hit that age between 15 and 25 during which you lose dozens of IQ points to become as Mark Twain once described his own father "the stupidest man in the world".

If you persevere and are patient, you do get those IQ points back when the kid gets his own family going, but too often the friendship gets lost in the process. Brotherly love is a mysterious process and one that, I think is being attacked in the final days of Earth's history.  Too often these days, friendships between guys gets dismissed as a "bro-mance" or hints are made that there is something unseemly about two guys who hang out and do stuff together. The specter of being charged with having homosexual feelings is always there in a world where everything worthwhile is being reduced to some sort of hidden sexual urge by the pop psychologists that seem to spring up everywhere.

C.S. Lewis, noted 20th century Christian apologist, faced the same problem himself.  He had a close-knit circle of friends that included fellow author J.R.R. Tolkien.  Lewis was, himself, not a Christian, when The Inklings (the name the group gave itself) formed for informal talk sessions in Lewis' chambers at Oxford.  They were just a bunch of Oxford dons, writers, a physician, the odd philosopher and Lewis' brother who all got together to read each others' manuscripts and talk away a Thursday evening.  It was Tolkien and fellow Inkling Hugo Dyson who influenced Lewis' conversion to Christianity.

I wonder sometimes whether we Adventist men don't tend avoid some natural friendships with men who are not Adventist for fear that awkward situations will develop or that we might be tempted to some sin or other.  If so, it would be a shame, because becoming friends with nonbelievers is the surest way I know of to bring them, if not into the church, at least into sympathy with Adventists.

Saving souls is not some sort of baseball game with the score being totted up on a heavenly scoreboard.  Introducing a human soul to Christ is not a pitching duel. Too often we pride ourselves on our skill at out-debating the Philistines and only succeed at making them more entrenched enemies in the process. There's an expression development officers in nonprofit organizations, schools and churches use.  "It's not fund-raising," they say, "but friend-raising." The same could be said of soul winning.  Perhaps it's not soul-winning, but friend-winning we should focus on.  Perhaps we should introduce Christ first and let Him win the soul.


We could all take a lesson from Andrew, Peter's brother.  Almost every time you see Andrew in the Bible, he's bringing someone to Christ to introduce them to Him.  In fact, it was Andrew that introduced his brother to Jesus in the first place. You don't see Andrew doing a lot of speeches. You do see him telling people, "Come and see." 

There is no more effective way to bring a soul to Christ than through the witness of your own life. I once had a neighbor comment that my wife and I were the nicest, most Christian people he had ever known.  I was stunned.  I'd made no effort to impress him with our Christianity or to argue theological points with him. I'd been a friend to him in the only way I knew how.  I helped him with projects he was working on. We sat out on his porch on many a summer evening just shooting the breeze.  I even helped him work on his house a few times when he was building it.  We did talk about God some, shared opinions.  No flaming debates. No calls to repentance.  Just two friends talking.  I think we both became better Christians because of it.

I've long thought that men in our church should work a bit harder on making friendships themselves.  Often it is our wives who make the initial contact with others and the husbands get thrown together by default.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it shouldn't be the only way we form friendships. We shouldn't wait for our wives to get together with some other guy's wife.  Simply invite a potential friend to go fishing, canoeing, sailing or golfing with you. Ask him to join a church league softball team. Invite him to a backyard barbecue.  Don't worry about the food.  You won't go to hell if a few of the hot dogs are beef.

Brotherly love is an important element of the Christian life.  In C.S. Lewis' lecture series, "The Four Loves" he describes it this way.  “In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others....In a perfect Friendship … each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest… each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others.”

If you are blessed with friendships, by all means nurture them, for in true friendships we may find the strength to survive and thrive in a world which is doing it's best to divide us and piecemeal to conquer us.

Tom King (c) 2013

Men Who Will Stand for the Right: Ben Carson

 by Tom King

Dr. Ben Carson

We were told more than a hundred years ago that we would stand before kings and princes to speak the truth.  Yesterday I saw an Adventist man do one of the gutsiest things I've ever seen.  He will likely get a lot of hate mail from it. He risked his career by saying it, but what he said had the unmistakable ring of truth.

Ben Carson, Adventist Doctor, head of pediatric neurology at Johns Hopkins University and gifted surgeon stood five feet from the president of the United States yesterday morning and with grace and tact challenged that president at virtually every point of his agenda for America. 

He spoke for education as it should be done.  He spoke out against our nation's debt.  He offered a workable health care plan that would actually work.  He defended Christian values and spoke out against the stultification of thought that is the fruit of our obsession with political correctness.

The video of his speech has gone viral. Millions of Americans have cheered his speech and said, "Finally, someone who will speak truth to power when it really matters."  We stand on the brink of the end of the world. As Adventists we are often tempted to stand aside and let it happen.  But we are not allowed that option as believers.  We are, as Ellen White counseled, "to stand for the right though the heavens fall."

Watch the full video here.  It is beginning. The last stages will be rapid ones.

On the Practice of Decisive Christianity

"The cause of God demands men who can see quickly and act instantaneously at the right time and with power.  - E.G. White (Gospel Workers, p. 133)

David Gates & Bob Norton with AMA mission plane.

I just finished a book called "Mission Pilot: The David Gates Story" by Eileen E. Lantry.  One of the things that struck me about the book was the utter courage with which Gates faces the challenge of being a mission pilot in remote areas of the South American jungle.

People don't appreciate how brave missionaries are. To do what they do, day after day in the wild places of the world would stretch the nerves of most of us living here in the civilized bits of the United States. What I particularly like about missionaries is that those who work on the front lines of Adventism have that rare ability to decide what needs to be done and then to go out and do it.

A preacher friend of mine once told me, "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission."

I have found this to be true. A decisive personality, however, gets one into a lot of trouble and not just with local witch doctors and drug runners. One of the sure signs that you are doing something God wants you to do is when some church member calls you up before the church board or a conference committee.

If you purpose in your heart to do right and to go where God leads, someone will inevitably question your motives. I can't tell you how many times someone has poked a finger in my chest and demanded to know why I was doing something on my own time, with my own money for some cause that I was not going to make any money on that they could see.  "What's in it for you?" they always demanded.

Sinful mankind cannot imagine why anyone would do anything decent and good without having an ulterior motive. After all, they themselves wouldn't, so why would you?  Mark Twain, a keen observer of the human condition once quipped, "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

If you have a son or you are a mentor to young men, teach them to be decisive. Prepare them to think clearly in an emergency. Train them for the mission fields, even if they never go outside their home county. Skills like first-aid, CPR, camp cooking, knot-tying and simple carpentry are handy to possess in an emergency when everyone else is losing their heads. Learning man-skills helps a boy learn to make decisions based on evidence and logic. And we certainly need those skills in today's world.

My wife and I were reading in our little devotional book today and came upon this text:  "If they serve Him obediently, they will end their days in prosperity and their years in happiness."  Job 36:11 

I smelled a rat and looked it up. Sure enough, the text was quoted from Elihu's speech to Job telling him why he must have committed some sin or other and that's why God was punishing him.  In the story, Elihu was wrong.  If Job teaches us anything, it's that being a good guy can get you into as much trouble as being a bad guy.  The devil doesn't like good guys and makes it his special work to attack them at every opportunity. 

Jesus warned us that things would get rough.  "Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of Me.  Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you."  Matt. 5: 11-12
 
We need to prepare our sons for that sort of challenge. We need to provide them with life experiences that train them in body, mind and spirit to be ready so that when God lights their way, they have the strength of character and the decisiveness to act quickly and with power. We are soldiers in God's Army. When we are called to stand in the breach, we should recognize the threat or the opportunity and step forward as Samuel, Deborah, Joshua and Isaiah did and say, "Here am I, send me."

If there were more Adventist men of that character, board meetings would be a whole lot shorter and far less miserable for our pastors. Adventist men, rightly trained should press forward whenever there is a call for someone to help so that there are more hands than are needed. When there is a need or an opportunity, there should be more than enough to help. The pastor and the nominating committee should have to pick and choose, not dig and scrape.

Our women-folk should not have to drag us out of our easy chairs to get us to do the work of the church. I was reminded of that yesterday when I was asked to take, not one, but three jobs at church by the nominating committee. My truck is in Texas and I have to walk or bum rides until I can save up enough to go get it. I almost turned down the call because of I lack transportation.  God kept poking at me while I was on the phone, nagging me to take the jobs.  So, I did.

I read David Gates' story today and realized something. In my weariness (the devil has been waging a fierce round of infernal guerrilla warfare against me lately), I'd almost forgotten who I'm working for. 

This is all God's work. My job is just to show up when called and use the tools He has given me to do the job He wants to get done. God will handle the logistics. If I need transport, He will provide it.

In the meantime, I think I'll go do some stuff to really aggravate the devil. 

Tom 

Rootin' Tootin' Straight Shootin' Christianity



Joseph Bates - Sea Captain/Adventist Pioneer

Adventist men are not as wimpy as one might expect practitioners of the Golden Rule, regular church-goer's and devoted family men to be. After all, we Adventist men marry Adventist women, who are, on the whole, rather more formidable creatures. Marrying an Adventist gal is not a sport for the faint of heart!

I recently moved across the country and joined a local SDA church where a fledgling men's group has recently formed. Today, during our second meeting, it was suggested we think of ideas as to what we could do as a group. One fellow with a pair of sons in tow caught me afterward. I could tell by the way he spoke that his primary concern was about what kind of men his sons would become. Having raised 3 kids of my own, and been active in youth ministries all my life, I share his concern.

It seems to me that one of Satan's primary avenues of attack against the Adventist church (and Christianity as a whole for that matter) is the un-manning of the men of the church. Even in Ellen White's time, this was becoming an issue. Her quote about men (top right), is spot-on today.



Dr. Harry Miller / Missionary,
Physician and Pirate Fighter

It's time we get our collective act together as men of God. Unlike women, men tend to be poor networkers outside of their jobs. We are a little embarrassed to admit we need male companionship and support. It feels a little girly to actually go looking for male friends, even when our wives are practically kicking us out the house and nagging us to make some men friends.

I came up with the idea for this weblog while I was out walking the dog later. I thought it might be helpful to talk about what Adventist manliness looks like and possibly, by initiating such a dialogue, to build some friendships and alliances among Adventist men.

The point of this website is fourfold.

1. To share stories about the gutsy bunch of males who populate Adventist history. They are a fascinating bunch with as much nerve and testosterone as men of any culture, heritage, race or creed. We're not always as familiar with their exploits as we ought to be. Sometimes our pastors and storytellers seem to be a little embarrassed to tell their stories. I was, however, fortunate enough to hear the stories told and meet some of the rich characters that were the subject of these stories. I think the stories should be told whether its missionaries fighting off river pirates, wrestling anacondas or parachuting into the Amazon Jungle. Our young men need to know what their fathers did in the service of the Carpenter who taught us what it means to be a man in the first place.
2. To share the often odd skills set that Adventist men need in order to serve in the Lord's Army. As a young Adventist man, I was fortunate to have some amazing men as mentors. I learned how to do things like use an ax properly, safely carry and maintain a pocket knife, make vege-corndogs for Pathfinder fund-raisers or stop bleeding with a bandana and a stick. In an age where communication is lightning fast and can be delivered in-depth with pictures and video, there's no excuse for our young men to be unfamiliar with the man skills many of us old guys take for granted.
3. To exchange ideas about how to be full-blooded Adventist men. Men's groups in SDA churches all over the country are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to serve our churches and our communities. Where we find a good idea, we should tell about it so others may reproduce these good ideas in their own churches.  



Clyde Peters / Jungle Pilot,
Skydiving First Responder

4. To mentor the coming generation of Adventist men. We do that by filling in the gaps in our own education so that we may recapture and hone those skills that made Adventist men skilled woodsmen, wood-workers, builders, craftsmen, speakers, youth leaders and teachers.

The blog is just a beginning. At some point I hope to add some social networking capability, forums, calendars and such. The tools are out there and they aren't expensive. We'll see if this grows to the point that it's feasible. Till then, I'll be tossing out a blog or two a week with useful information, some fun stories and features for and about Adventist guys.

If you'd like to contribute a story or column, please contact me at twayneking@gmail.com.  Also please add a comment if you'd like. It helps me know what sorts of things are valuable to my readers.

Your fellow soldier for Christ,

Tom King - Puyallup, Washington