Christian nice guys are abused part 2

A second part to Christian nice guys are abused.

One of my commentors has graciously provided his story, and I think we can learn a lot of takeaways from it.

A bit of background to start. My family life was fairly crappy in the emotional sense. My father was emotionally absent and wasn’t the “life lesson” dad we all hope for/need. My mother was batshit crazy and not fit for motherhood. Her only saving grace is that she was quite competent as a home maker. With that said she was/is a tyrannical nutjob who strove to break our wills and make us subservient to her every desire/demand/wish rather than equip us for adulthood.

I grew up going to church and was indifferent simply because church was boring. I became a Christian at the age of 17 after a “religious experience”. After said experience I believed that I had found the meaning/hope/fulfillment I was looking for as a teen. And so it began.

A brief outline of my christian life:

~ One year at the local church/ youth group where I was saved (17-18 yrs)
~ Three years at my para church ministry on my college campus (18-21)
~ Three years at a church post college graduation (21-24)
~ Three years at another church.(24-27)

Overall, seems to be fairly typical what what you would see in most non-Christian and Christian households now. The mother runs the family, and it seems to be some are worse than others on their children.

As far as the church experience goes, it sounds typical of what you’d expect after a conversion. A man finds faith, then goes off the college and is part of the ministries there, then graduates college and gets involved in another church and so on. Especially if he has had to move around a lot.

My involvement in each church/ministry consisted of an average of 10 hours a week of ministry. Typical ministry activities – midweek service and Sunday service (plus prep time for leaders (I.E. tear down or set up etc), leadership/prayer meetings, outreaches and special events, helping single moms move, neighborhood clean ups etc. Of course there were plenty of mission trips, conferences, retreats in between as well.

Again, this seems typical of what men are taught to do in most evangelical churches across the nation. I can verify this from my experience as well.

Note that assisting in these are not bad things. In fact, they are very good things, and the church does need this help to run effective ministry.

What is bad lies underneath, and what is underneath is the reasons that men are told that they should do these things. The rot in the bones so to speak.

I am trying to avoid being long winded so I’ll try to bullet point some major hi-lights of what I learned/strived for.

~ The elevation of church/christian activities as the things most worthy of our time[1]
~ The celebration/emphasis of men being involved in ministry[1]
~ The emphasis that women wanted to marry nice Christian men who were involved in church[2]
~ The constant praise/affirmation from church leaders/members that I was a great catch and would make a great husband some day.[2]
~ The attitude of primacy that permeates christian culture [which is] the attitude that Christians have the truth, and know the truth in regards to masculinity, femininity, marriage, and relationships.[2]
~ The emphasis of dying to ourselves, carrying our crosses, putting Jesus first, not being a lukewarm and/or mediocre christian, not being a hyprocrite, etc.[1]

So really I spent ten years thinking that I was on the right track as a follower of Christ. In fact, not only did I think I was on track as a Christian, but also as a man.

So how was I abused/led astray in this process? A few ways:

I was encouraged to be involved/serve because:

~ Serving/ministry/church were some of the most, if not the most important things I could be doing as a christian[1]
~ The level of my involvement directly correlated to my spiritual health/my level of commitment/my sincerity as a follower of Christ[1]
~ “Real men” “man up” and are involved at church[1]
~ Christian women desperately want to marry men who are “Nice Christian Guys™ who are active in church.[2]
~ I was lauded/encouraged/thanked for my service (which is what people pleasers do – they please people).[2]
~ Single people have more free time, so it only makes sense that they should serve more with that surplus of time[1]
~ There is always need for someone to do something regardless of the ministry, activity, church, etc.[1]
~ I was asked to not let self preservation/selfishness be the primary motivator in my life.[1]
~ I was given terrible advice in the context of women/relationships (typical blue pill stuff). The only redeeming factor was I learned how to state what I wanted and bail if a girl wasn’t interested. No beta orbiter stage at any point in my life .[2]
~ I was encouraged/told to “seek” and “trust” the Lord to meet my needs Instead of being proactive about meeting them on my own.[3]

Overall, you can break these down into three different categories. Two are very prominent, and the third and fourth are smaller. The first [1] of which is that service is everything to the church, and the second [2] is that it improves your standing with women.

[1] Christians do this. Period.

The first is actually a half truth. It is indeed good to be involved with church ministry even from behind scenes, it is good for men to be in the ministry, and it is good not to be lukewarm and to sacrifice.

However, what the church has gotten to the point — with the disappearance of many men because of the rot of feminism — of manipulating people to serve.

What the church essentially tells men is that “you’re not a Christian if you don’t help out with X, Y, and Z.”

As cliche as it is to say, humans need to have a purpose. If we don’t have a purpose then we wander aimlessly and stumble. The church is not a one-size-fits-all purpose, but there are many different roles and responsibilities within it. This is why the church is referred to as a body.

I’ve been to several different churches, and there are all vary degrees of this. The part I find most disheartening is that most churches have almost no regard for men’s gifts or talents. We’re all parts of the body, and we have these different gifts and talents. The church should be cultivating these gifts and talents. In some places it’s obvious such as with music. But in other places, men are just thrown into different positions without regard for what they are good at.

If the church could fit a man’s gifts and talents to particular serve in the church it would be much more rewarding to all involved instead of the con men to do these other things for the church that seems to be prevalent now.

This is why I continually tell men to pray about your mission and how you can help the church in context with that mission. It’s much more rewarding and easier to serve when you know this is something that God wants you to help out with as opposed to feeling like you were conned and manipulated into doing this because if you don’t then “you’re not a Christian.”

[2] The nature of men and women

This is quite an obvious point that the church lies, perhaps inadvertently and I hope not advertently, about the nature of women:

• The emphasis that women wanted to marry nice Christian men who were involved in church
• The constant praise/affirmation from church leaders/members that I was a great catch and would make a great husband some day.
• The attitude of primacy that permeates christian culture [which is] the attitude that Christians have the truth, and know the truth in regards to masculinity, femininity, marriage, and relationships.
• Christian women desperately want to marry men who are “Nice Christian Guys™ who are active in church.
• I was given terrible advice in the context of women/relationships (typical blue pill stuff). The only redeeming factor was I learned how to state what I wanted and bail if a girl wasn’t interested. No beta orbiter stage at any point in my life .

There’s a couple of major things that I see with the destruction of masculinity in the church and society.

1. The Scriptures never command men to be nice. In fact, there are absoultely zero references to “nice” in the Scriptures. How’s that for a con job? This is why we are to test everything against Scriptures.
2. The Scriptures never command anyone to be happy. All of the places where “happy” is used in the OT or NT are about joy — which is a supernatural revelation of emotional state from the grace and forgiveness that God has given us — or being blessed. Jesus says in John 13 when He washes the disciples feet that we are blessed if we follow his commands. We should be happy that we follow His commands, but we are not happy all of the time that we follow His commands. However, we are blessed all of the time we follow his commands. Happiness, like any other emotion, is transient.
3. The churches ignorance and/or failure to discuss masculinity. I have never once seen a sermon about what masculinity is aside from in context to women and manning up to serve women.
4. The truth about intersex relationships. I find the lack of discussion about attraction disturbing to say the least. One of my practical posts on what men and women can do to be attracted to each other on Boundless, like many others, were deleted by their moderation team. The attitude that “we don’t want to offend” or “we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings” is distinctly not Christian.

Anyway, you’d think pastors would start to realize the rot that feminism has infested in their churches when they see that the single men and women are not marrying, and that the divorce rates between married are the same as the rest of the non-Christian population. Maybe they know, maybe they don’t. Maybe they live in fear of the women in the congregation. Maybe they’re addicted to money that flows in and are scared it will dry out.

All I know is that they don’t know about or don’t care about the Truth. Nor are they willing to discuss it. And that is scary.

[3] The half truth of God meeting needs

This is a different beast altogether, which is why I pulled it out and will address it directly.

I was encouraged/told to “seek” and “trust” the Lord to meet my needs Instead of being proactive about meeting them on my own.

What we see in the Scriptures is that Jesus often retired from the multitudes to rest and especially pray. In fact, when Jesus was around the mount of Olives He does this at least 3 times — sometimes with His disciples and sometimes without — that were recorded in Scriptures.

Apparently, it was important for Jesus to go off many times throughout Scripture and recharge His batteries with God so to speak, but Christian men today are told that we are to have our needs met through service. This, like point one, is another subtle manipulation ploy to make men keep on serving.

It’s true that God will meet us when we serve Him, but the lack of concern for men individually and their walk with God and more concern on what they can do for the church is dumbfounding.

As I reflect, do I believe that my church leaders/mentors etc were malicously abusing me? No, but none of them truly understood how unsustainable my constant service was, and how I was neglecting the development of myself as a man by spending so much time serving. In sum, none of them really understood where I was at emotionally, because on the surface I had it together. I was responsible, hard working, stable, and involved at church. With that said I didn’t have much of a life outside of church and work, and all of the nice guy issues remained underneath the surface (anxiety, people pleasing, lack of direction, lack of passion for life, insecurity, etc etc.). We have shitty metrics for what we deem as a “healthy” believer/Christian but I digress.

My red pill awakening occurred when I completely crashed emotionally due to my unsustainable level of commitment/pressure I put on myself as a Christian. Swallowing the pill, I recognized few things. Namely that I’ve been living my life as a giant spineless people pleaser, and that I neglected my emotional/physical needs/desires/etc. I also recognized my deficiencies, and was utterly pissed of because I finally realized that all of the things I was told to neglect were the keys to my success with women. In fact, not only were they the keys to my success with women, they were the keys to my success at life. In sum the things of this world mattered very much so, and a lot of “Christians” that I was “Serving with” understood and lived this, while I was actively encouraged not to.

When you give a person an incomplete picture or lie to them of what it means to be a Christian in regard to service or women then you misguide them. This is very bad as stated in Isaiah 5:20 “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”

When you misguide men we tend to get extremely angry because we feel that there was nothing that we could do about it. However, this is actually incorrect.

I understand this mindset, but this is where I disagree with it.

As Christians know the Truth was there all along in the Scriptures, but we instead decided to take the Churchianity’s word for things instead of testing everything against Scriptures. We failed to see what God said about these topics and instead trusted those in Churchianity to guide us.

Don’t get me wrong. There is responsibility that will fall upon church leadership who espouse half truths and lies. But there is also responsibility that falls on all of us former Christian nice guys who didn’t read the Scriptures thoroughly and pray to God to help us understand these things.

Matthew 15:12 Then the disciples *came and *said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were [d]offended when they heard this statement?” 13 But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. 14 Let them alone; they are blind guides [e]of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

The current pastors of Churchianity may be blind men leading blind men, but we still stumbled into that pit by following the blind men.

This is why I thank God for the manosphere. We realized that God can use the things of this world to show us the Truth as much as His Word or prayer can. We must take responsibility for being sinners even if misguided.

This is why I started the series on the Masculinity of Jesus.

We must come to the point where we understand that we were in sin — fallen into the pit — because the Church incorrectly taught us to be Christian nice guys. There is more fault for those who guide men into the pit, but there is still fault for the man who walks into the pit at the guide of others.

We must repent of that sin and ask God for forgiveness. Then we must move forward into being masculine men of God who understand the full Truth of the Scriptures and aren’t afraid to talk about it.

Conclusions

Just a few short conclusions since this is already long enough:

• Pray to God about your mission in accordance with your gifts and talents if you don’t know what it is. This is what will help direct you in service with the church instead of them having you do everything and anything.
• Be a good steward of your time. Pray to God about what it is that He would have you to do. You cannot do everything, and there are many parts of the body. Men don’t have to be involved with all aspects of service.
• Study the Scriptures thoroughly to understand what God says about topics. Test everything you hear, especially that which is from churches, through the Word of God.
• Repent of the sins that you made while being a Christian nice guy. This requires a lot of humility because it may seem like it wasn’t your fault, but you still fell into the pit.
• Understand the nature of the roles and responsibilities of husbands and wives in the Scriptures. This will start to give you clearer understanding of interaction between the sexes.

I would like to encourage men on it is that God gave us the ability to have free will so we can change. Don’t keep living in a lie and believing in lies. We can step out of the darkness and into the light. We can speak the Truth and truth into situations as we become masculine men of God.

It’s hard, but one of the fruits of the Spirit is patience or longsuffering. God promised that life will be hard for Christians, but we will also be blessed by doing what is right and good.