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Although I shouldn't give any time to prooftexting dirtbags, I was shocked at an Internet rabbit trail discovery this week and just had to share/vent. So, : A friend posted this note about the Mars Hill megachurch's pastor promising to make changes in his life. This time, he has to make changes because his publisher might have bought a ton of copies of his latest book in order to manipulate bestseller lists. I say that to distinguish from an earlier plagiarism scandal. Needless to say, this beefy pastor is a real peach. Anyway, in trying to find out more about this dishonest dude, I found myself watching this treatise on Stay-at-Home Dads:
Here, we find Father Frat and his lady wife telling us that a stay-at-home dad is "worse than an unbeliever". Mrs. D. tells us that it's "hard to respect a man who won't provide for his family". (As I typed that I couldn't help but think of this: "All the pain inside amplified by the fact/That I can't get by with my 9 to 5/And I can't provide the right type of life for my family", but that was written by a brilliant person.) Then we get a nice dose of "Men can't raise children. Silly. Ha ha!" But then it gets really specious. On the face of it, what she says next might not be that ridiculous. But wrapped in a spiritual church leader patina, it's flat out dangerous. "As women, we're built to be home with our kids." What I hate is that she makes this blanket declaration in the midst of talking about scripture, which makes it sound like she's saying Biblical. Of course, she doesn't point to a verse that says "And God made the woman specially to stay at home while the man earned an honest wage for an honest day's pay." One reason she doesn't is that THERE ISN'T ONE!
I can't really go through every point without boring you and making myself unduly angry, but Father Frat's bombshell at 4:00 is that if a man in his congregation stayed at home with kids while his wife worked, unless there were "extreme, extenuating circumstances", it would be a matter for church discipline. Note to self: don't become a member of a church led by batshit crazy people. They base their whole argument on I Timothy 5:8, a verse for which I checked a few translations. I'm not a Biblical scholar at all, but In two mainstream translations (the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version), the pronouns are all gender neutral. The New American Standard, I uses male possessive words in a way that feels very generic, but the subject of the sentence is "anyone". It's not "a man" or "he". It's "anyone who does not provide for his family...". The NIV, which is used most commonly renders it this way: "Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." While this is grammatically incorrect, it's emphatically gender-neutral, which makes it a poor verse on which to base a far-reaching gender-based argument.
That's the problem with this clip. Mark Driscoll and his wife wrap a personal interpretation of a verse of scripture in a whole mess of unsubstantiated opinion. The other thing Father Frat repeatedly says is that "statistics show" kids need mom barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen raising them. It's only credible to cite statistics if one also cites their source. They treat the Bible as though it were written at the dawn of the streetcar era when suburban work/life divides became possible. Or possibly in the 1950s when good roads and a postwar urban housing crisis kicked suburban development up ten notches. Then they say that it's our perverted culture that leads men to make these horrible decisions that harm their families. it's all very genderist.
It's hard enough to make a counter-cultural choice that we in our family feel is the best thing for everyone - mom, dad and kids. It's harder still when celebrity pastors pump out BS like this. Several people have called Newt Gingrich "a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like". I fear that Mark Driscoll can hoodwink thousands of people by being a stupid person's idea of what a holy man sounds like.
Last weekend marked 20 years since my second championship in a church Bible memorization competition called "Bible Bowl". Ironically, on Sunday as a lay reader at church, I ended up reading a passage from Acts 2 that I had memorized one of those years that I competed. "Parthians, Medes and Elamites...". The connection made me a little nostalgic for this quirky chapter in my life, and I thought I'd share some memories of it with you, dear readers.
As a pastors' kid who moved around all the time, I wasn't very involved in school activities. Church activities dominated my schedule, and it turns out that my gifts lent themselves to the bloodsport of memorizing scripture and then reciting it or answering quiz questions about it. Bible Bowl was a speed game with three teams of four players each competing to buzz in and answer questions read by the quizmaster.
When I started as an eighth or ninth grader, our teams muddled along and always lost at Regionals to this team lead by a guy named Glen Wendt. Spectators tossed around the word "genius" during his reign of terror. I always thought machine suited him better. He was to Bible Bowl what Pete Sampras was to tennis in their respective primes. The answers came out, but there was little emotion. Sweater vests? Yes. Gold-framed glasses? Yes. Emotion? No.
The summer before junior year of high school, I moved from Pittsburgh to New Jersey. I had few friends and a new crop of competition for Bible Bowl. We were in a different region, and the Wendt Machine had either aged out of Bible Bowl, or at least we wouldn't face him until Territorials (the big championship). I lost track of the dude because I never really knew him, and I honestly don't know if I ever faced him in those later years.
What I did do - lacking a social life - was get very good at Bible Bowl. All of the standard questions and bonus verse memorization questions came from a designated book or a few 
books of the Bible per year. On a team of four, we'd then divide the designated book(s) among us, memorizing verses and drilling on questions. I read my sections every morning at breakfast, reading as far as I could while I ate my cereal and then picking up the loop where I'd stopped the next day. I quickly became the anchor for my team and - cockily - started memorizing some of the bonus verses in my teammates' sections. (The author is on the right, braced for competition in the photo).
This would make a better story if I could remember specific competitions that year, especially the important ones at regionals and territorials. I can't remember enough details for that, but I can offer a few vignettes. We always did a "systems check" before competition to ensure that everyone's buzzer was working properly. One time, bored with the proceedings, I brought a realistic looking water gun (when one could still buy one), pointed the gun in the air and conducted the systems check with the point of the barrel. In intense anxiety situations, I always puked in my youth. Before the first Territorial championship that I won, I did have to bolt out a side door and find an out-of-the-way spot across the parking lot to empty my nervous guts. My coach came and found me and inquired as to my health. I honestly said that I was fine and felt much better. Also, I skipped prom to compete in the Territorial championships, twice. There wasn't definitely a girl who would have gone with me had I asked, so it kind of solved a problem for me to have "something better to do" on those nights. My brother - better with the ladies but worse at bonus questions than I - drove from the second championship to the tail end of senior prom, where he relieved his date's older brother of stand-in date duty.
Finally, I remember the delirious joy of winning at something I'd worked so hard at with my teammates. Accomplishing the ultimate goal after working hard and focusing on it for months at a time provided an awesome feeling of satisfaction.
