Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses how ministry leaders can understand the cultural forces shaping boys, young men, and fathers today. He unpacks key themes and then applies these insights to both parenting at home and discipling boys through church-based ministry.
Creators and Guests
What is Lead On Podcast?
Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.
From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.
Put these principles into practice and Lead On!
Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Today, I wanna do two things. I wanna, first of all, talk conceptually about an issue that I think is important for ministry leaders. And then after briefly doing that, I wanna dive into the theme or the subject of the day.
Jeff Iorg:Before we dive into the subject, I wanna talk about how we got there how we get there today. I wanna ask this question. Should ministry leaders read and use secular books to help them do their work? I mean, really, there's so much wrong with our culture and there's so much that's pumped out that is so anti Christian and so anti ministry. Is there any reason then to be paying attention to and reading what people are saying about important issues in our culture and trying to draw from that in ways that will help us do our work more effectively?
Jeff Iorg:I think the
Jeff Iorg:answer is yes. I've recently been reading a particular book that has been very meaningful to me.
Jeff Iorg:It's helped reinforce some convictions I had as a father. It's helped shape my understanding of what I need to do as a grandfather, and it's given me some perspectives on youth ministry that I think are very important, and I've been able to share recently with a group of youth pastors some of these insights and get their reflection with me on them. In reading a secular book though, you have to be careful. First of all, you don't have that much time for reading. So you have to be careful to select things that are really going to make a difference and it'd be helpful to you.
Jeff Iorg:And then you also have to be mature enough to read a secular material with discernment and to ferret out that part of it, which is helpful, and to dismiss that which is not. Now, it's important, I think, to read this kind of material because it does give you a perspective on the culture. It helps you understand what people are thinking and why. It also helps you to understand the way people are addressing some of the same problems we're addressing in church and family ministry and helps you to understand maybe some commonalities that you may have. And that's one of the reasons why I think reading secular material is helpful, and that is it does help you to find this common ground and to use it.
Jeff Iorg:It's always encouraging to me when I'm reading something from a secular source that lays out a solution or a set of recommendations or even a perspective that is very much aligned with what I believe the Christian faith would teach. It reinforces to me, for example, that a lot of what we believe and teach as Christians really is in alignment with what is true and right and good, not just for us but for all of society. So with that little background in mind, let me just say one more thing about reading secular sources, that is if you read one and you use something from it, it doesn't mean you have to endorse or accept everything that's a part of it. And that's what I wanna do today. A few weeks ago, a friend I trust suggested that I read a book called The Boy Crisis.
Jeff Iorg:It's by two guys, Warren Farrell and John Gray. The Boy Crisis. It's an attempt to understand what's going on with boys, young men, and frankly, dads in our culture, and to see if there couldn't be some recommendations that could be made of how we could turn the tide of what's happening among boys in a much more positive direction. I found this book to be very, very insightful. Now what made it most startling to me is that one of the authors was one of the first men, if not the first man, to ever be elected to the board of the National Organization of Women.
Jeff Iorg:He has his entire professional adult life been an advocate for women and girls. And so he's not a person that is writing from some perspective that says that, you know, men are more valuable or men are more important or some kind of weird toxic manhood thing. He That's not his perspective at all. In fact, he spent most of his life professionally, saying the opposite, that women and girls are valuable and and need every opportunity and all the things that go along with the feminist movement. So for a person like that to then take a step back and write a book about men and boys, wow, it really got my attention.
Jeff Iorg:So this book is about what's going on in the culture, what we can do about it so that we
Jeff Iorg:can turn boys into a more positive direction, and that we can have boys become men who make a positive difference in our world. Now, the book has several highlights and I wanna just hit a few of them today. The first thing is it has an appendix with 55, what authors call headline conclusions about boys in our culture today and particularly also about young men. These 55 conclusions are based on hundreds of studies done by colleges, universities, and other established organizations over the past, say, twenty years about what's going on with boys and young men and men in our culture. And drawing out of all of that resource, they draw conclusions about, divorce and its impact.
Jeff Iorg:They draw conclusions about education and how it can be done more effectively. They draw conclusions about, legal issues related to boys and men and how they can be resolved. They draw all kinds of, conclusions about incarceration, about crime rates, about all kinds of issues and trace it back to what's going on with boys and how we're raising them or failing to do it well in our culture. So if you wanna skip the whole book and just read the appendix, that's worth it because it lays out these remarkable headlines, if you will, that you can draw out of all the studies upon which the book is written. But then moving into the content of
Jeff Iorg:the book itself, one of the things
Jeff Iorg:that was very striking was that it identifies some things that we're no longer communicating effectively to boys, that boys seem to have an intuitive need to have guidance on in their lives and to be challenged on in their lives. And the authors really highlight these things. The first one is this, the power of purpose for a boy. The power of purpose. Meaning that boys long to have a reason, a reason for what they're doing, a a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of autonomy, if you will, a sense of intentionality.
Jeff Iorg:They long for that sense of purpose. I used to say it this way when I was a father, I would say, I've learned that boys are like trucks. They handle best when under a little bit of a load. And that is certainly the case. Boys handle best.
Jeff Iorg:They they act best. They they perform best when they've got a little bit of a load, when they have a purpose, a meaning, an intent, a reason for what they're doing or what they're being asked to do and bigger than that for life itself. The second thing they talk a good bit about in the book is promoting what they call a provider protector goal, a provider protector model as a goal for manhood. Now, when you first hear that phrase, provider protector, you might react negatively and say, oh, you're just putting down women, you know, they can provide, they can protect. No.
Jeff Iorg:I'm not putting down anyone. What I'm saying is that boys seem to have something within them that makes them want to be provider protectors, and that's the goal that we have to shape them toward in order for them to become men. Now, the authors make this key point and that is being a provider protector is not about amassing things or eliminating others and sharing that load. It's about taking the focus off self. Taking the focus off self.
Jeff Iorg:A provider sees himself as doing his work so that he can take care of others, whether it's a spouse or whether it's children or whether it's a community. It's provider. I do what I do so that I can take care of others. And then protector, I do what I do so that I can protect others. Provide for their well-being, make their life better so that I can give them opportunity.
Jeff Iorg:I'm a provider protector. And what these authors say is that boys have a need to be shaped as provider protectors, meaning they get their focus off themselves and on others and on caring for others, and they see that as a huge rite of passage into manhood. So there's nothing toxic about this kind of manhood. Can you imagine if all men in our culture saw themselves as provider protectors, meaning that they were no longer focused so much on themselves, but were asking themselves, how can I be what I am so that I can benefit others? Man, that even sounds like something out of the Bible, doesn't it?
Jeff Iorg:And then a third thing they talk about is helping your son or your or helping a boy find what they call his hero story. Now, again, they talk a lot about why boys are drawn to the military and to firefighting officers and EMTs and other kinds of things because these are, in our culture, almost direct routes to quote a hero story. But by the phrase hero story, they don't mean doing something, dramatic or life saving. What they mean is doing something that makes a difference so that a boy comes to see that his life can matter, can make a difference in the lives of other people, that he can do something that really does make a contribution. Well, when I look at these three things, power of purpose, promoting a provider protector model, and finding helping boys find their hero story, I find a lot of parallels with what the Bible says about what boys are supposed to be like as they become men.
Jeff Iorg:Men are supposed to have a purpose, and that purpose is building themselves, their families, and their communities. They're supposed to be provider protectors, meaning that they don't have their focus on themselves, but that they focus on others and the well-being and the welfare of others. And they have their hero story, meaning that they found the place where they can make a difference, where they are looked to with respect as someone who does something that matters. Now, this is just one section of their philosophy, if you will, of what has to be accomplished in helping boys in our culture today. So I want you to think about those things and I want you to think about them in two ways.
Jeff Iorg:First of all, how would you apply these in your home if you're the parent of a boy? But second, I wanna challenge you to think about how to apply these things in ministry as you try to reach boys with the gospel. Now let me tell you a
Jeff Iorg:little story. My oldest son became very frustrated as a middle schooler with youth camp. He came
Jeff Iorg:home from one and said, dad, I've been going to these camps since I was a kid, and frankly, I I just don't wanna do it anymore. It's just a bunch of nonsense, just silly games and and just kind of doing stuff that doesn't make any difference, and I just I just don't
Jeff Iorg:really like doing that anymore. This was from
Jeff Iorg:like a 13 or 14 year old. Well, that next year, our church did something that turned out to be a providential blessing for our family. Our church moved its youth ministry in the into doing something called Impact Northwest. Now if you're old enough to remember the program called World Changers that the old home mission board used to have, Impact Northwest was a part of that, a subset of it, if you will, that focused on the Pacific Northwest. Impact Northwest is pulling together teenagers, now get this, who bring a sleeping bag and sleep on a gymnasium floor for a week, Get up every morning at 6AM, have a hearty breakfast and a devotion, and are on the job site by no later than 07:15, 07:30.
Jeff Iorg:Then put in an eight to ten hour day, finish around 04:00 in the afternoon, come back, showers, big meal, worship service, and then back into those sleeping bags on those hard floors and back up the next morning at 6AM. And you did that for six days. My son loved it. He went the first year and came home and said, dad, that that was the
Jeff Iorg:best thing I've ever done in church in my lifetime. He said, we roofed a house for a family that just couldn't make it on their own. And I said, really?
Jeff Iorg:And you slept on the floor? Yeah.
Jeff Iorg:It was great. And, dad, the food was great. We're so hungry, we
Jeff Iorg:just ate as much of it as we could get every night. I'm like, okay. I watched my son over the next few years. He went from a middle schooler on a crew to then helping guide a crew, and then by the time
Jeff Iorg:he was in high school, he was a crew leader. He had
Jeff Iorg:a group of younger teenagers that were under his leadership. He had an adult that would come in and train them how
Jeff Iorg:to do it. And then when my
Jeff Iorg:son got to be in high school, I think it was his junior year, he had a team that was assigned to build a fence on the property that they were rehabbing for this older couple. And they spent the first morning, you know, working on the fence and and then the supervisors, which were some men from our church showed up and they said to my son, this is unacceptable. This is not how we taught you to do it and it's not aligned and it's not up to the quality of what we expect, so let's tear it down. And they spent the lunch hour tearing down all the work they had done that morning. And they said to my son, now you get your crew together and you get
Jeff Iorg:this done right. And my son realized in that day, in that experience, wow, there's a standard here. I gotta hit it.
Jeff Iorg:And he did. Their crew built that fence and it was awesome by the end of the week when they got it done because it was right. He had a great sense of pride in having done that. Well, that's been twenty plus years ago, and my son will still tell you that that experience of what was called the Impact Northwest was a formative experience in his life because, now get this, it gave him a sense of purpose. It enabled him to be a provider protector,
Jeff Iorg:and it helped him find his hero story. Listen.
Jeff Iorg:Coddling boys and trying to reach out and entertain them is not an effective way to connect them with the gospel or with ministry. They will respond much better when you find ways like I've just described to involve them, to let them invest in what's happening, and to become a part of the process rather than just a recipient of it. I was talking with a youth minister about this recently and he said, yeah. How would we do that? And he was telling me about an activity that his church was putting on for teenagers.
Jeff Iorg:And I said, well, don't cancel the activity. That's not a bad thing. But I
Jeff Iorg:said, instead of you doing all the work to put it together, why don't you find two high school guys and say to them, hey, look, we wanna do this activity, but for it to happen, I need you to come an hour and a half before, and I'm gonna give you a checklist that you need to work through, and you need to get all this work done to get it lined out so that 50 kids can come and do this tonight. That's what I'm talking about. Those two guys, the guys you're training, the guys you're leading, the guys you're facilitating, the guys you're trying to bring into the kind of Christian commitment that you want them to have, help them to do that and not just be entertained by what's gonna happen that night. That's just a simple example of what I'm talking about, of how this has application not only
Jeff Iorg:in families, but also in ministry. Then another part of
Jeff Iorg:the book that really intrigued me was they have a chapter on things that dads do differently in parenting that boys really need. Now, again, they're not denigrating moms. In fact, they talk a lot about how the healthiest families have a mom and a dad who who are, compatible with each other and who, balance each other, and so there's a need for all of that. But quite frankly, in our culture today, the missing component is the dad in most situations, and so their book is about how do we bring this dad component back into the parenting mix and recognize that there are some things that dads do that boys particularly, and girls, but boys particularly really need. They have seven of these.
Jeff Iorg:The first one
Jeff Iorg:is what they call boundary enforcement. And that is, dads are not afraid to
Jeff Iorg:say these are the boundaries and that's what you gotta meet. And if you don't, we'll tear your fence down and make you do it over again. And then a second one is taking risks, by exploring nature or putting children or boys in natural environments where they have to take some chances. A third one, very interesting, rough housing. I remember when I was a younger dad and I had little boys that they seemed to crawl all over me every night.
Jeff Iorg:We were constantly playing football on our knees in the den or inventing games with rolled up socks that we had to bat across a room or blowing up a balloon and turning it into a kind of a a volleyball contest where we were moving around the room on our knees and you could only bang it with your head or only bang it with one arm or all other kind of rules we made up. Now my daughter's My daughter participated in these things too, but the boys seem to thrive on it. Okay? Now I've got a grand I've got two grandsons. And fortunately, they have a father who's also very active with them.
Jeff Iorg:I'm astounded because when I'm with them, it's constant physical play with their dad, rough housing. Then another thing they point out in the book is that dads are more likely to allow what they call pain for gain. And that is where they'll say, go ahead and try it. Now, if you fail, that's gonna hurt. Or if you do that and outside of what I've told you, it's gonna be painful.
Jeff Iorg:But go ahead. We don't mind pain for gain. Another thing that dads tend to do well is challenging kids' limits. Saying, can you go a little higher? Can you go a little faster?
Jeff Iorg:Let's time you and see how you do. I've got a particular one of my grandsons who loves to time everything, and he'll say, time me, grandpa, time me. See how fast I can do it. He's wanting me to push him a little bit, so I'll say, Well, here's how you did it this way. Hey, try this and see if you can go a little bit faster.
Jeff Iorg:Always helping him to challenge his limits. Then another thing that dads do really well is just what they call hangout time. And that is that dads are just good at just hanging out, where there's just not a lot to be said or a lot to be done, but you're just in the presence of your of your dad or in the presence of a dad, and that is an important part. And then the last one, and this is one that's been really hard in our family because my wife is totally anathema to who she is and how she grew up, and that is teasing.
Jeff Iorg:Teasing. Men tease each other, and sometimes it can be a
Jeff Iorg:little rough. But the authors have multiple psychological studies that they quote and show that men teasing boys and boys learning to deal with that environment is a primary way they develop emotional intelligence about how to handle conflict, what's real conflict and what's not, what's sarcasm and what's real, what needs to be overlooked and what needs to be confronted. That's learned through these teasing moments. Now, I'm not trying to give you a whole seminar on parenting here, but I'm trying to point out that this book says that dads bring something to the parenting equation that's desperately needed by boys. Boundary enforcement, taking risks, rough housing, pain for gain, challenging limits, hangout time, and teasing, these are things that dads seem to do almost naturally with their children.
Jeff Iorg:Rather than say that's not important or don't do that or you're being too rough or you're not being kind or you're gonna get somebody hurt, recognize that these are vital parts of what it means for boys to test themselves and learn how to become men. Well, one more thing, and this may be the biggest takeaway for me for this book. And that is that they said, when we've distilled these hundreds of studies that we've looked at, when we've written this two, two hundred and fifty page book, when we've looked at everything that goes on in the life of a boy that becomes a healthy young man and grows into healthy manhood, what is the one common denominator,
Jeff Iorg:the one thing that these two authors say needs to be present, it's this one thing, family dinner together. Yeah, I know. You were expecting something a lot more dramatic, so was I. When I got to this part
Jeff Iorg:of the book, I thought, oh, that's interesting. Well, what's gonna be what's gonna be on the next page? I turned the next page and it's more explanation of family dinner night. Now, here's what they say.
Jeff Iorg:They say that studies have shown that if a boy eats dinner with his family, including a father and mother present, and these things are involved,
Jeff Iorg:it makes a huge difference in his growing up into an adult man that is healthy emotionally and functioning well. Here they are. Number one, it needs to happen at least two nights a week. More is better, two is the minimum. Second, no electronics.
Jeff Iorg:No TV, no radio, no stereo, no phones, nothing. No electronics. Third, rotation of topics. It's not just what'd you do today. It's like, hey, Did anybody see what's happening in the country of Ukraine?
Jeff Iorg:There's a war going on over there. Is anybody talking about that in your school? Or local issues like, hey. It's kind of exciting what happened out the high school that that they won the basketball championship. What do you think about that?
Jeff Iorg:Do you know anybody on that team or anybody brother and sister on that team? A rotation of topics. And then number four, discussion without taboos, meaning nothing's off the table. And the fifth thing is close to that, and that is everyone gets to be heard, no judgments. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone's right and that there doesn't have to be some argument or confrontation or even conversation about it, but it means everybody gets to tell their story and have their say and give their opinion.
Jeff Iorg:Now, why is this so important? This is what fascinated me. It's like, okay, what family dinner night. What what are we doing here? I mean, okay, I get it.
Jeff Iorg:Two two or more times a week, no electronics, rotate the topics, no taboos, no judgments, everybody gets a say, okay. Fine. What difference does that really make? Well, here's what it does. Many benefits, I'll highlight just five, they talk about in one part
Jeff Iorg:of the book. Number one, this is
Jeff Iorg:where boys learn social skills. They watch how an adult man talks to an adult woman. They watch how adults talk to children. They learn how children talk to adults. They learn how to talk to their peers in a respectful and right kind of way.
Jeff Iorg:This is where boys learn social skills. Know, boys today don't know how to date. They they don't know how to approach women. There's this whole movement of boys who've who are without capacity, it seems, to engage in any kind of meaningful social conversation. Well, perhaps they didn't learn it at the dinner table.
Jeff Iorg:Here's another one. At the dinner table, you learn respect for others, especially respect for women. You you see a woman expressing herself and men listening and interacting with her appropriately, and you see men and women arguing or debating about a topic, and you learn how to do that and how to do it well and respectfully without anger and without violence, certainly. Third thing is conversation skills. You just learn how to talk about something.
Jeff Iorg:You learn how to give and take. You learn how to pick up on the nuances. You learn how to read the the the, nonverbals. You you just learn conversation skills. And then along with that, conflict skills.
Jeff Iorg:These conversations are going to raise some issues that people are not gonna agree about, and you learn how to talk with someone and to express yourself and to listen to what they say and to disagree agreeably. And then finally, they say, this is a place where you learn how to laugh together and laugh at each other and laugh at silly things that are sad and learn to laugh without making fun, at the same time, learning to make fun of each other and to realize it's safe to do that here because we're family and we're okay together. When I read this, I thought, man, that is so insightful. So much happens when a boy sits down at a table for fifteen to thirty minutes each night with his family, with a dad and a mom, with some other siblings, and has this kind of interaction. Now you might be thinking, dude, you're living in the nineteen fifties.
Jeff Iorg:No, I'm not. We did it in our family with our children growing up, and let me tell you how we did it. When we were younger parents, my wife wanted our family to have this kind of meal together every evening. It was hard. I mean, I'm a busy leader.
Jeff Iorg:My wife was involved in so many things in church and schools and other ways in our community. Our three kids were all athletes, and so they're always on some kind of team. They're also involved in every other kind of thing imaginable, speech contests, you know, art shows, every kind of thing you can think of that kids do from school. We seemed like we were involved in it. And yet, we wanted to come together in the evening and have this time together.
Jeff Iorg:It was really hard, especially when we were involved in sports. When we would come home, blood sugar would be low, everybody's fatigued, a lot of frustration while we're waiting on the meal to be prepared, you get the idea. And then my wife discovered the secret to family dinner night, the crock pot.
Jeff Iorg:Yep. The crock pot. Some of you who are listening to
Jeff Iorg:this podcast have been in our home before and you've seen that we have a collection of these. In fact, I think we have five. We have the little one and they all and they go at various sizes up to the really big one. And my wife learned how to cook almost every meal that we ate in some form in a crock pot. And so in the morning, she'd send everybody off to school, and then she'd put the meal together in the Crock Pot and turn it on, and out the door she'd go.
Jeff Iorg:And then we'd come home from that busy day of activities, and we'd all converge, and she'd say, hey, we're gonna eat in five minutes. And within five minutes from the time we walked in the door, it would be on our plates and we'd be sitting around and debriefing the day, talking about different issues, carrying on like a family does. My wife made that happen because she was determined it was gonna work with this simple thing, the Crock Pot. A slow cooker that made it possible for us to
Jeff Iorg:have family meals together. Well, I wanna
Jeff Iorg:go back to the beginning now. I've been talking today about a secular book. I think secular reading like this can be very helpful to us. You have to be discerning. Even if you use part of what you read, you don't have to take everything that a secular author says about every subject.
Jeff Iorg:This book I've been referring to, The Boy Crisis, there's some parts of it that I just shake my head and say, no, that is not true or nope, I can't go there. But about 95 of it is astounding because basically, it lines up with all the things that Christians believe about what the family ought to look like, how men ought to act, how men ought to treat their families, and how boys ought to be enculturated by and help to grow into young men by what happens in a healthy family unit. This book also talks about what we're gonna have to do as a culture to overcome the absence of men in so many families. And it talks about the importance of churches, religious organizations, boys organizations, and places that men can impact boys and make a difference in their lives. So I want to challenge you today, boys in our country and our culture are in a crisis.
Jeff Iorg:We still see that the vast majority of people that are incarcerated are men, who commit crimes are men, who are doing violent things are men. We see young men that are dysfunctional in their relationships, unable to launch from their families of origin, captivated by electronics and more focused on their video game than even having a conversation with another human being. It is a crisis and we can do something about it. We can do something about it on the micro level by doing something about it in our own homes. We can do something about it on the macro level by designing ministries based on sound principles that really will reach men and especially reach young men with the gospel.
Jeff Iorg:We can turn the tide, but we're gonna have to take a fresh look at what's happening in our culture with boys and understand how to address the boy crisis. I still think the Bible's the best book. I think what it teaches is far more important than any secular book. But every now and then one comes along that just speaks to me and says, hey, this has got some insight in it and I hope it's helped you today on the podcast. Boys are
Jeff Iorg:in
Jeff Iorg:crisis. We can make a difference as we lead on.