Therapist Jim Brillon on “Mother and Son Enmeshment.” You’ll never hear a church leader discuss this. We talk too much about “father wounds” but lots of young men fail to launch because of their mothers. This is a huge trend in the South. “If mama ain’t happy, no one is…” I’ve had male college students over the years who had moms that required their sons to talk them every night. True story. These were Christian moms from conservative churches. Many moms look to their sons to get the emotional support they need & don’t have from their husbands.

Thoughts? Can we stop whining about young Christian guys following Peterson, Rogan, Tate, etc. These men aren’t a problem. Neither is YouTube. The problem is that the other men in the lives of teens aren’t compelling. Youth group/Christian schools infantilize boys with moralism. Also, the problem is that many of their own fathers aren’t speaking greatness into the core issues in their son’s lives. Fathers aren’t empowered or encouraged because, for some silly reason, we think teens need to listen to a 24-year-old who is “cool” and “fun.”🤦🏽‍♂️

I *almost* approached a dad in a restaurant yesterday to ask him for an interview about being a dad. The way he was interacting with his three sons, esp. his teen son, was really beautiful. I actually choked up. I debated approaching but I didn’t want to interrupt what I saw.😂🤷🏾‍♂️ The reason I choked up is that his teenage son is probably clueless about how rare it is for a dad to be *that* engaged (eye-contact), affectionate, & joyful with sons in public. Read the data! When they got up to leave, the teen was beaming with self-confidence!!

If church men are policing women about being “immodest,” women should started telling guys to stop looking like slobs. I recently had to tell a young guy to stop wearing hoodies & jeans everywhere. I pointed him in the direction below and 3 things happened: 1) ⬆️self-confidence

2) girls started saying “yes” when he asked them out. 3) He walked into a job interview and nailed it. He noticed that people automatically treated him differently with greater respect when his shirt was tucked in and he looked like a professional.

I've changed my mind, I used to think that conservative evangelicals valued the role of fathers. I no longer believe that. A 30-year study shows that the most important determinant of faith persistence in kids is the *relational* warmth of fathers, then grandfathers. I cannot name a single pastor or church in America, that structures children & youth programming around this fact. Conservative churches wrongly focus on fathers as "spiritual heads" when fathers as relational & affection heads matters 100x more than leading a family devotion.

My advice to churches searching for their next pastor: hire the guy who is a no-name, has no social media presence, whose sermons are faithful to the Text but doesn't "wow," is faithful to the Lord, his wife, his kids, and loves all of those people *more* than the church. You want someone who will not "put your church on the map" because he's too busy doing home visits and sending elders into hospitals. You want the guy who does not speak at conferences and does not write articles & blog on ministry websites.

“It’s the pastors.” This is the source of the problem. I realized this yesterday. US pastors don’t believe in a father’s influence at home. Most really don’t. They may preached about it but they don’t staff their churches accordingly. If they believed it, here’s what you’d see:

https://twitter.com/drantbradley/status/1726565326492733662

A dedicated ministry to fathers and support specifically for fathers. The data is so clear that faith persistence for children into adulthood is driven by great dads. So, what do US pastors do instead of staffing to build great dads: they build a youth & family ministry. 🤦🏽‍♂️Wrong!

Today the men of Alpha Tau Omega at Grand Valley State U. brought me to campus to talk to them about being men of unwavering virtue. One lad’s basic response, “I felt like running through a wall after you spoke. So pumped!” They we’re so grateful! After the event, I went back to their fraternity house and we talked for two more hours. College guys need adults who believe in them. They’ve been beat down about being male their whole lives. So sad. Fraternity men want to be great men but America has given up on them.

Conservative Protestantism is a factory of celebrity narcissism: Narcissistic men(NM) surrounding themselves by self-effacing, subordinate men with father wounds. With “local church authority,” narcissists build ministries around themselves. Subordinates want their confidence. The Narcissist: extremely winsome, charismatic, gives appearance of confidence; needs to be admired; indiscriminate adoration of strength and contempt for weakness; belief in the omnipotence of intelligence and reason; invites people to debate; extreme value placed on foresight;

Divorce + abandonment destroys kids. I sobbed through this. His son became a murderer & the reasons are textbook: childhood trauma. Parents divorced(at 7), mom moved states with boyfriend(at 10), & severs contact with her kids. Her son murders a teacher. courttv.com/title/jeremy-g… Hurt boys, hurt others. I’ll be talking about this case for years. A church could’ve possibly saved this family & prevented a teenager from becoming a murderer. This kid was a star athlete, was nearly an honors student at a $20K/year private school, etc., but was deeply troubled.

I saw this ad and it made me sad. It’s a men’s only center in Bali for ambitious men to rest, train, eat well, & recover in a supportive community of other ambitious men (while working on their businesses). US Christianity has shamed ambitious men conflating ambition with pride. As a result, ambitious men, which is perfectly good and virtuous, walk in many churches & encounter a Christianity that breeds self-effacing shame. Or *only* celebrate spiritualized ambition (Matt 28:18-20). How sad is this? So ambitious guys go here. balitimechamber.com

Parents are CJOs (Chief Joy Officers): I’ve been in circles where the parental instruction was primarily about “discipline,” fathers as stoic philosophers, drilling the gospel, but not joy (Neh 8:10). Don’t expect kids to persist in the gospel without “joy” as a synonym for “my parents.”
Kids dance too what dad dances to (2 Sam 6:14-22). This is the Grimwade Family. Imagine what kids would be like if this type of joy was the way their family functioned. Joy is the birthplace of obedience. I wish parenting books taught the importance of joy!

The West naively listened to its own philosophers and convinced elites that religion was passé, irrelevant, and doesn’t need to be studied. Religion was even purged as a required college course. Now American leaders are tragically impotent to broker peace anywhere in the world. Today, we’re calling on religiously learned leaders to help figure out what to do about so many of world’s conflicts today which are almost all centered on the intersection of religion & land. Why major in religion in college? To become a world leader who might prevent genocide.

Most in the PCA really want to be Southern Baptist instead of Presbyterian. The LCMS wants to be Lutheran. That’s the difference. As a result, many PCA churches focus identity in other things: “faith & work,” “missional,” “racial reconciliation,” being “evangelical first,” etc.

https://twitter.com/jeffreyhwalton/status/1700220105177620813

LCMS leaders don’t lust for public fame, recognition, or social status. PCAers will lead with mentioning all of the famous/influential folks in the denom. The PCA lusts after being “culturally relevant” & being seated at the table. They start “Study Centers” adjacent to colleges.

I'm on a flight listening to a non-denom pastor of multi-site, mega-church *sell* his church to someone. She's already a Christian and he's basically trying to talk her into leaving her existing church to attend his. He said, "a growing church is a dead church." Hers is small. What set him off is that she attended his church for a while then stopped. He gave a long church-growth illustration (that I'm sure he learned at a conference) about why church-growth churches are the best ones.

American conservatives lost their moral majority in the late 1960s when they resisted racial integration & allowed the Southern wing to sabotage the conservative movement. It never recovered. Buckley later tried to move conservatives beyond this resistance but he failed. Most Americans, of all ethnicities, hold to conservative moral & social values (as do extremely wealthy families in practice) but in the 1970s, conservatism was conflated with bigotry. And many were. Buckley tried to purge them. I don’t know why conservatives supported Jim Crow.

In my experience, those working in youth ministry are the most pridefully resistant to change based on current psych data re: what today’s teens need. They are the least innovative & creative. And to make it worse, they tend to not read real psych data on the world of teens. For ex, (1) the data on teens, social media, & depression is pretty clear yet your church’s youth ministry will be among the biggest defenders of teens continuing to use social media/smartphones. It’s simply arrogance. healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/202…

I feel bad for Josh Butler. He was failed by his publisher & TGC. In academic publishing, our books are pre-reviewed by scholars to look for problems. Had Butler’s book been sent to theologians at Westminster, RTS, Wheaton, Taylor, etc. they would’ve caught any errors & fixed it. So, yes, @WaterBrookPress dropped the ball on Josh and left him hanging by not getting enough expert eyes by theologians on the book. This often happens when you work with literary agents who want to pump out overly provocative books “that will sell!” Money over content fails.

The stress that children are under today is pretty extraordinary. Here's why: kids in the past had adults to help them self-regulate when adversity entered their lives. Most US kids don't have that today b/c adulthood has disintegrated. When boys alleviate stress, harm ensues.

https://twitter.com/mrjasonowilson/status/1632092838530826240

Read this (modern adults are a mess and kids are paying the price): amazon.com/Neurosis-Human…

Parents, are you a source of #cortisol & #catecholamines for your kids or #dopamine, #oxytocin, and #serotonin? If it’s the former, then don’t call their teenage years “rebellion” when they struggle with drug/alcohol abuse, addictions to food/porn/tech, etc. & are never home. The data on the neurobiology & neurochemistry of parenting is clear. I’ve been in the religious world my entire life & I’ve never heard leaders teach about effects of parenting on a child’s brain. I have heard legalistic emphasis, however, on “obedience.” a.co/d/fW46H5f

"Between the 17th and 19th centuries, enslaved African Americans began cooking fried chicken based on the recipes provided by #Scottish slaveholders." Black Americans took the Scottish recipe & perfected it. BTW, the Scots-Irish settled in KY, hence KFC! bbc.com/travel/article… “…as well as an adeptness at seasoning and frying, African American cooks caused fried chicken to lose its Scottish identity and it became as quintessentially “Southern” as black-eyed peas, cornbread, collard greens, macaroni and cheese and sweet potato pie.”