I haven’t read the book, but it sounds good. It seems to me that most Christian teaching on marriage and 99% of sermons on Eph. 5:25 undermine the husband’s discipleship of his wife.
yes, absolutely; and I would go so far as to say it’s intentional
For comment and possible disagreement.
In the early years of Baylyblog, I can recall someone observing that couples in the NYC metro area “live in Manhattan, if they do not have children; Brooklyn, if they have one; Long Island, if they have two, and New Jersey if they have more than two”. Have I remembered correctly?
At any rate, this possibly explains why a church in Manhattan will have in its ranks a high proportion of singles. But this environment will attract other Christian singles who do want to marry, and who figure that in being in a large church like that, will make it easier to find someone. As as they meet, marry and have families … they will then shift into family churches in the suburbs.
I have seen this process at work in a far smaller church than Redeemer. It was planted with a relatively large number of singles, and then attracted more, but the happy result was a good number of covenant marriages and families.
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Oh my yes. In No Trump, doubled and redoubled.
“Discipleship of his wife” is the KEY message of Eph. 5:22ff for a husband, and it is the one idea which you will see suppressed, ignored, and discounted in every exposition you pick up if it was published after the feminist conquest of Christian publishing back in the 1980s.
Sheesh! You can’t find this idea even in ostensibly complementarian publications at … say, CBMW. Or in the published inventory of Crossway. Who wants to be pilloried, tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail for endorsing such an idea that a husband has a responsibility laid on him by our Lord to disciple his wife??
And, yes, ask me when I’m not in a hurry (like now) and I’ll tell you what I REALLY think.
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Another issue.
- Our evangelism with adult women, single or married, does seem to connect more than our evangelism with adult men, single or married. (The latter does need prioritising, but I am preaching to the choir on that one).
- This then has the effect that in the singles’ community, there is a surplus of women to men; it is certainly clear once all concerned are in their thirties. If we had a surplus of single men to single women, and that has never happened, many of the issues thrown up by “women in careers” would not be there, because marriage would be the realistic option.
- My take on things is that many Christian single women who would like to marry ‘if the right man came along’, take a look at what is available and figure that they are better off staying as they are. This approach to things could be challenged more?
Paul Maxwell speaking to this point just yesterday:
https://selfwire.org/article/beautiful-women-evangelical-company-men
Intentional because the preacher isn’t discipling his wife and so wants to build a church where this is accepted so he is safe. And intentional because of the cost he will have to pay for teaching such preposterous silliness that is plainly seen in Scripture.
Ross above says that there are more single women than single men in his church, something that I have often read about but not something I have ever personally seen in multiple churches across 30 years of adult life. In every church I’ve been in, there have always been at least as many single men as women, if not more, and all the single men I’ve talked to in church report the same. So I’ve always regarded the “surplus of single women” to be a myth, at least according to my personal experience. So if Ross has personally seen churches with more single women than men, I would be very curious to hear about that.
I should say that I have always chosen to attend Reformed churches with solid preaching and theology and non-vapid worship songs, and that seems to attract more men than women. So my hypothesis is that if a church finds it has more single women than men, it may indicate deficient theology and practice at that church rather than that women are more more interested in Christ than men. Perhaps Ross could refute or affirm?
Here’s an anecdote to illustrate my point above. When I was in my mid-20s, the pastor at my church left to take another call. There was a teaching elder regularly attending our church who had a counseling ministry rather than pastoring a church, and he was asked to fill the pulpit while the search for a new pastor was ongoing. This man had always given off an effeminate vibe to me, and while I don’t recall the content of his inaugural sermon, I remember that it was oriented around feelings and that I found it very off-putting. As I went to coffee-hour afterwards thinking to myself that it was the worst sermon I had ever heard, I was astonished to overhear several mid-30s and mid-40s women in the church gushing over how great the sermon was and how it was a “breath of fresh air”.
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Joel, thanks, and very quickly:
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I would put the gender gap overall, down to deficiencies in how we do our evangelism, much more than women “being more interested in Christ”. I’m not from a Reformed background, but the churches I have been in have generally been pretty enthusiastic about evangelism and home mission.
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Where I come from (I’m not an American) does not have much of a specifically Reformed witness. If I use conservative Baptist churches as a guide to more robust theology, I would think that there are somewhat more men, relatively, but hardly a surplus. That view is based on observation
Also - where I am now (the UK) has a fairly fluid church culture, where people can and do chop and change between churches, never mind the label on the door. So the situation you describe should be self-correcting, especially with the Internet! 
While it is altogether wrong, the thing I appreciate about MGTOW is that it counteracts the tendency to think of women too highly. And by that I do not mean “to love women too much.” I don’t think lying about a thing’s place is love. Love is probably more like accepting a thing’s place and loving it right there. There are a lot of ways in which the modern man thinks too highly of a woman: her capacity to vote well, her ability to lead a family, her tendency to evaluate well and come to reasoned conclusions about complicated matters of justice. Chesterton: “There are only three things a woman does not understand: liberty, equality, and fraternity.” I have added more to his list, but his observation stands.
In secular America, women are thought of as a goddess of sex whose blessing of sex on your life will infinitely complete it, until you get bored of that particular shape and find another. In Christian circles, they are thought of as holier, better, naturally superior.
I think any measure of deceiving yourself is unproductive. This is no different. MGTOW highlights this fact, but in the end will not keep men away from women, since as has been said before, women are beautiful. More importantly though, women can give you children, can keep a house for you, and can make you a home. No amount of porn or sex bots will give you those things. I think the affect of MGTOW will be to temporarily separate women from men, and since women need male value deeply, they will learn to be truly valuable again. It reminds me of a freudian slip that feminist had on twitter about a year ago when sex bots started being talked about a lot. She said, “silly men, you think a sex bot can cook, clean, do your laundry for you, keep your house, and have your kids? Passing phase.” She deleted it quickly when she and the rest of twitter realized what she had just admitted, but not before a lot of well-shared screen shots.
So yes, MGTOW won’t last long, but I think it’ll have a nice balancing effect before it goes out.
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Realistically, I think housekeeping bots will come long before sexbots.
Other than that quibble, agree agree agree.
Especially the danger of the Christian tendency (today anyway) to treat women as more holy and also take away their moral agency.
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You’re almost certainly correct; and there can also be natal technology that will allow having children without a woman, and you can hire an interior designer. In fact there is a good section of MGTOW that focuses on those technological developments. However, I doubt the technological version will ever eclipse the benefits bestowed by the Proverbs 31 woman. It will almost certainly eclipse the modern woman. And the affect of that, I hope, will be that the modern woman is forced to become more like the Proverbs 31 woman to stay competitive.
Precisely. Homemaker > housekeeper.
It’s the same problem men (workers) are about to face with automation, according to many. (Including programmers, especially if General AI is ever created.)