Having two of my own this article on raising boys who read struck a nerve, and yes I have to admit that I fail the Wii test. We have one. The eldest boy plays all the time, and youngest boy watches eldest boy. And yes, there is no way a book will ever compete with the Wii. (Although I will give us credit, we did make them take the summer off of Wii).

The larger argument is one of how do we produce civilized people. Up until Freud, everybody everywhere realized that being and raising the people we’d like to be was tough and necessary. Socrates – “virtue is its own reward”; Aristotle – “We are not studying in order to know what virtue is, but to become good.”; Confucius – “The gentleman understands what is moral. The small man understands what is profitable.” Proverbs – “Their purpose is to teach people to live disciplined and successful lives, to help them do what is right, just and fair.” Sometime after Freud all this instruction in virtue was barbaric repression.

Freud was partially right, it is a repression. Luther would call it the “daily drowning of the old Adam such that the new man might come forth” in his small catechism explanation to baptism. The entire world is not wrong. Virtue, otherwise known as the law, is good and right. Which society would you rather live in? One where all boys grow up on Grand Theft Auto X or grow up on Treasure Island or Swiss Family Robinson? Which one would be more just? The process of civilization is tough. Especially for many of this generation who are themselves little more than barbarians having not been instructed in virtue as a child.

The world (outside of Freud) is not wrong on virtue, but it only has half the story. The struggle of virtue is not one we can win on our own. The Christian understanding is called sanctification. God has placed His Holy Spirit in us to will and to do that which is good (Phil 2:13). As we grow in faith, as we grow as free humans no longer bound to sin and satan, we practice virtue. Sanctification is the process of becoming what God intend – of becoming a fully free human being.

It would be nice if the larger culture would at least return to the secular notion of virtue. But my guess is that is too hard to fill 500 TV stations with content. But the culture’s abandonment of virtue, doesn’t give us leave to abandon our duty. It does mean we have to be more intentional about it. It does mean making choices that will mark us and our children out from the barbarian hoard.

This is from Rod Dreher and takes its jumping off point from an evangelical church that is holding mixed martial arts (MMA) viewing/fight nights. The Fight Club for Jesus title is kind of funny, but the larger point is not just to ridicule the impulse. Rod takes the efforts as good faith actions to address a perception.

The Lutheran emphasis is law and gospel. Law is the requirements of God that we can’t keep. Gospel is what God does for us in Jesus. We will even talk about active and passive righteousness. Active Righteousness is the outward keeping of the law, but that active righteousness does not earn you anything. Salvation, justification or absolution is a gift. We receive it passively through faith in Christ. Passive will never make anyone’s list of masculine virtues.

Yet Christ ordered us to pick up our cross and follow him. That is an odd mixture of active and passive. You get nailed to a cross. (Mel Gibson’s line in his current flick – you need to choose if you are the one on the cross or the one pounding the nails – comes to mind.) Yet especially in the Gospel of Luke which we are reading this year – Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). Jesus chose the cross. He put himself on the cross. And he tells Christians to do the same.

The world would like to tell us that religion is for wimps – all that talk about compassion and love and what-not. But scratch below the surface. The call of Christ is to be a full person. Don’t be conformed to the easy road of callousness and the whims of your body and mind. Instead, with the intervention of the Spirit, bend and shape yourself in the proper ways. Pick-up your cross and follow. Justification is passive, but the Christian life, especially in this world, is active. I don’t know if MMA for Jesus is really bending our wills in the proper direction, but recovering that dare I say it Wesleyan sense of active struggle for holiness is important. We co-operate in our sanctification and it is a daily activity. I am that sinful a person. The laws of God are good. Jesus came to fulfill them, not to abolish them. By fulfilling them he secured my salvation, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore them. They are still the task before us.

As an add on as part of the numbers that we track, I look at the male/female ratio in our worship. There are many different puts and takes, especially in an active and growing but smaller congregation a couple of people can make a big difference in the percentages. I’m not really sure what to make of this type of statistic if anything should be. Any thoughts?
Male/Female

Active Attendance Attendance
14586 Roster 2010 2009
Male 50.1% 44% 53.0% 45.4%
Female 49.9% 56% 47.0% 54.6%