6-Step Dating Method for Christian Men
I recently received an email from a young guy in our church and in our twenties ministry requesting my help in developing more ways for the singles in our ministry to get to know each other and potentially develop dating relationships.
In replying to the email, I first reminded my friend how most single twentysomething Christian men would be envious of his position: being part of a church that God has kindly “stocked” (ladies, don’t take offense, I use the term in good jest and in line with the metaphor you will see below) with a huge number of godly, beautiful, single and available women in their twenties. Second, I explained why I will not start a program to facilitate Christian dating. Third, I shared a simplified 6-step approach for getting more young men to the altar. I’ll copy that part of the email below. You may want to share it with single men in your church.
1. Keep it as your first priority to be walking tightly with Jesus, to be growing in manly godliness. This includes have other godly men/friendships in your life.
2. If you’re maturing in Christ, you know yourself pretty well, and you don’t think God has given you the gift of singleness, move on to step 3.
3. Pray daily that God would bring into your life a godly woman who you can have a great marriage with, all the while working on the bait (that’s you) that you’re putting on the dating fishing hook.
4. Meet a lady who is a Christian, who is breathing, who is over the age of 18, and who you feel some level of the hots for, then move on to step 5.
5. Step up and ask the lady out on a date, then see what happens. If things don’t go well (if you get rejected, etc.), re-evaluate steps 1-3, especially examining the quality of the bait, then get working on step 4 again. If things go well (and if those who know you best and who you’re in community with here at the church also think things are going well), move on to step 6.
6. Buy a ring, get married, start making babies, and love your bride like Christ loved the church until death do you part.
A Sovereign and Personal God
I think you would benefit from reading chapter 9 of D.A. Carson’s, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers. Chapter 9, A Sovereign and Personal God, is the best short treatment I have read on the intersection of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.
Time Wasting Efficiency
David Powlison on how he manages his time:
cultural ideal of tightly scheduled efficiency. For me, effective and
productive often operate in ways that seem quite “inefficient.” I’m
more “third-world” in my use of time: event-oriented and
person-oriented, rather than time-conscious and to-do-list-conscious. I
operate with an inner gyroscope tuned to whether or not any particular
experience or interaction is complete – not to how long it
takes or whether it fits the schedule. I’m attuned to whether or not
any particular thought is actually finished thinking, rather than
whether the product is done on time. So I tend to take the time it
takes to get something right—whether that “something” is the close
attentiveness of getting fully engaged in this conversation of
consequence, or how to craft this sentence and paragraph, or whether
I’m stopping and actually noticing the hawk flying overhead right now.
Read the whole piece.
Post-Literacy
The latest issue of World contains a good article by Janie B. Cheaney examining a few dynamics of the “post-literacy” culture we’re finding ourselves in.
From the article:
At the dawn of the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo pioneered a new type
of literature: the psychological memoir. His Confessions is the anatomy
of a human soul that lost, then found, its way. Perhaps for that very
reason it is incomprehensible to Professor Bertonneau’s students.
Subject to an educational system—and a parental style—that flatters
their esteem but neglects their souls, they don’t have the capacity for
honest soul-searching. Encouraged to be self-absorbed, they are
anything but self-aware.”
Read the whole thing.
Galaxies, Dinosaurs, Cigars, and God’s Sovereign Plan
“Every atom in the quadrillion-mile universe and every ‘chance’ event in its trillion-year history is deliberated and perfectly planned and controlled by God for the ultimate end of our good, our heavenly joy. Galaxies revolve and dinosaurs breed and rain falls and people fall in love and uncles smoke cheap cigars and people lose their jobs and we all die—all for our good, the finished product, God’s work of art, the kingdom of Heaven.” -Peter Kreeft
The Welcome Wagon
This cd kicks apples. The past three days I’ve been listening to The Welcome Wagon over and over. The Welcome Wagon is pastor Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique laying down some sweet gospel music. I’m into it.
The Welcome Wagon is a married couple, the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto
and his wife Monique, who execute a genre of gospel music that is
refreshingly plain. Their hymns are modest and melodic takes on a vast
history of sacred song traditions, delivered with the simple desire to
know their Maker—and to know each other—more intimately.
Vito
was born in Tecumseh, Michigan, and attended Western Michigan
University where he developed a love for writing poetry. His first
book of poems, Self-Portrait as Jerry Quarry,
was published by New Issues Press in 2002. A self-described agnostic,
Vito experienced a spiritual conversion at the age of 20 and soon after
enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary to study theology and
prepare for ordained ministry. Currently he is the senior pastor of
Resurrection Presbyterian Church, a church he planted in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, NY, in 2005.
Raised on a farm, by a gentleman farmer
father and choir teacher mother, in the same small town as Vito,
Monique moved to New York City after high school to study art, first at
the Cooper Union (BFA), then Columbia University (MFA). Since then she
has worked as a pre-school teacher, craftmaker for Martha Stewart, and
as a mother. She also serves as the Welcome Wagon’s resident visual
artist.
The Welcome Wagon began as husband and wife singing in
the privacy of their home. Having little to no previous musical
experience or training, Vito purchased a guitar with the desire to sing
hymns with his family. With Monique accompanying on toy glockenspiel
or harmonica, the two would amble through old hymnals, psalters and
prayerbooks. Their inability to read music was no big issue; Vito
simply made up new tunes to old words.
While their most
familiar venue was (and is) their living room, the Welcome Wagon have
been periodically coaxed to small stages at bars, parties, and
seminaries throughout the New York City area, often joined by friends
on upright bass, drums, piano, and banjo. These intimate arrangements
preserve the delicate nature of the Welcome Wagon’s identity.
But
there is another Welcome Wagon, the one that can be heard on their
debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon. This version of the band
retains the heart and soul of pastor and his wife singing together, but
dresses them up in the transcendent musical vestments of Sufjan
Stevens, who produced and helped arrange the record.
The collaboration between Stevens and The Welcome Wagon began in 2001 with their appearance on the Asthmatic Kitty compilation To Spirit Back the Mews
(2001), debuting the first song they ever wrote and recorded, “There is
a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Since that time they have been patiently
recording an album of hymns, pop covers, and folksy originals with
their friend and Brooklyn neighbor. But it was the nativity of that
first song which established their pattern of work together: husband
and wife write and arrange songs with the architecture of a country
chapel, while Stevens (as latter-day Christopher Wren) designs and
attaches flying buttresses, soaring spires and reliquaries, gargoyles,
gryphons and cherubs dotting the façade. Somehow this unlikely
partnership has produced a sublime addition to that genre called
“church music”.
Admittedly, for a gospel duo, there’s far less
soul than sweet sincerity in the casual songs of the Welcome Wagon.
Vito and his wife are unabashedly Midwestern, ordinary and uncool. But
this is precisely what sets them apart from the standard fare of
contemporary liturgical music. It doesn’t feign emotion; it doesn’t
pander to stylistic pretensions; it doesn’t pretend to be anything
other than what it is: the result of countless, informal social
exchanges between friends. A home-cooked meal followed by a few
microphones taped to folding chairs. A family gathering, a summary of
happy noises, and a room crowded with familiar faces. Sure, there are
showy guitar riffs and piano codas and harmonica solos, a rowdy chorus,
an imposing flourish of brass instruments like wartime canons. But at
the heart of it—if you really listen carefully—there’s just a pastor
and his wife tentatively singing in the quiet privacy of their own home.
Growing Gospel
Great words from John Piper:
Here is a simple exhortation that I have been trying to implement in our family:
Seek to see and feel the gospel as bigger as years go by rather than smaller.
Our temptation is to think that the gospel is for beginners and then we
go on to greater things. But the real challenge is to see the gospel as
the greatest thing—and getting greater all the time.
The Gospel gets bigger when, in your heart,
- grace gets bigger;
- Christ gets greater;
- his death gets more wonderful;
- his resurrection gets more astonishing;
- the work of the Spirit gets mightier;
- the power of the gospel gets more pervasive;
- its global extent gets wider;
- your own sin gets uglier;
- the devil gets more evil;
- the gospel’s roots in eternity go deeper;
- its connections with everything in the Bible and in the world get stronger;
- and the magnitude of its celebration in eternity gets louder.
So keep this in mind: Never let the gospel get smaller in your heart.
Pray that it won’t. Read solid books on it. Sing about it. Tell someone about it who is ignorant or unsure about it.
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel….
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that
he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with
the Scriptures. (1 Corinthians 15:1-4)
Love & Reform
“Don’t reform what you don’t love”
Stuck in Stress
“The way you choose to cope with stress can change not only how you feel, but also how it transforms the brain. If you react passively or if there is simply no way out, stress can become damaging. Like most psychiatric issues [it's also a spiritual issue!], chronic stress results from the brain getting locked into the same pattern, typically one marked by pessimism, fear, and retreat.”
SPARK, p. 60
