It surprises me how folks named, “One of the Top 25 Evangelicals” seem to be dubbed as such for the size of their church, not the character of their pastors. I shouldn’t be surprised, it is the American way to equate church size with spirituality.

I’ve railed on the ICoC for being an insular subculture. Outside help has got to be more than another evangelist half way across the US or the world. It has to be outside the ICoC. Without outside perspective, we are only going to hear the same biases, the same assumptions, the same basic teaching we’ve always heard. Listening to the messages from the ILC demonstrates that – we need regional groups, we need to get back to discipling, we need to evangelize our way out of the so-called Firestorm.

However, this kind of insular behavior is not unique to the ICoC.

Mark Driscoll decided to weigh in on the Haggard situation by saying this:

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations
and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely
despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one
for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who
really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their
husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives
them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually
available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank
about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be
helping him either.

I don’t think that Mark hears what he is saying. You cannot say that it’s not the wife’s fault, but really it sorta-kinda is the wife’s fault. More than that, I believe that his idea of what goes on in a woman’s mind is pathetic. Where would he get these ideas from?

You don’t get to stand on Eph 5:22 without Eph 5:25-27. Yes, I think man and wife need to have frank sexual conversations. Yes, I think it is tempting for some spouses, men and women, to care less about their physical appearance after marriage. I’ll even give you that most men in a marriage desire a physically attractive wife and list it as their primary need. But if I commit adultery, I do not get to stand before the throne of God and say, “this wife you gave me didn’t help me by staying in shape.” Adam tried that defense with the forbidden fruit – it didn’t work for him and it doesn’t work for us.

Then again, I’ve been looking to outside-of-the-ICoC blogs and sermons for my own inspiration. It’s bound to happen that something comes along that really bothers me in a bad way. I’ve certainly had some thing bother me in a good way. More on those later.

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