Seeing the Forest… from the trees

‘Our culture doesn’t have a framework for masculine benevolence anymore’

Carolyn McCulley has an interesting reflection on romantic comedies in the age of the ‘self-confident’ woman.

Expressions of care and mutual dependence are far from signs of weakness but part of how we are designed to live together.

The question is, are we prepared to show our weakness for the sake of allowing others to serve?

Our societies obsession with youth and fear of age, responsibility and … healthy relationships can be seen in the phenomenon of TWITS (teenage women in their thirties), this is by no means restricted to women. Read about it here in the Herald Sun.

It strikes me that in this context that developing Christian Maturity is not something we can assume will just happen. Rather it is something that we must be more and more intentional about.

Here is an interesting and profoundly worrying article in The Age,

Happiness a casualty of meeting demands of me, myself and I, by Madeleine Bunting

The statistics here are daunting in many ways. To my mind what it emphasises is that there are differences in the way men and women perceive themselves. The increase in problems among women seems to indicate that their expectations of what life will bring are increasingly unrealistic.

It seems to me that these problems will continue to fuel the debates on the difference between men and women, and in that men and women’s roles in churches. It seems to me that we are better to get away from extreme individualist assumptions and think through how we function together. After all life as a materialist competition seems to be leading more and more people to despair.

Last Sunday I had the chance to preach on Genesis 2 (find it here) and raised a number of controversial issues in doing so. 

One of these was that men and women are equal but distinctive. In my sermon I deliberately attempted to avoid outlining a set position on how the differences are to work in practice, rather my goal was to show that this both equality and distinctiveness begin at the creation and are seen in a number of texts in the Bible. 

This is an old debate and Mary Kassian has some good reflections on it this week here: One in Christ

It is always interesting to see how far people will go to make God contextually appropriate. Here we have a feminist Jesus. I don’t think I need to comment any further. Mary Kassian does well enough. Check it out:

Re-imaging God in the Shack