Where did all the men trying to look like Jesus go?

Where did all the men trying to look like Jesus go?

No, I’m not talking about the beards and man-buns of 2012, though I guess I miss those in some way too. I’m talking about the leaders in my church, across children’s, youth, and young adults ministries, who just wanted to be, brace yourselves for the cringe, souled out for Jesus. We do cringe at that phrase now, right? I used to; not anymore. I want those guys and their embarrassing evangelistic talk to come home. I’m filing a missing person’s report with the church.

I messaged one of those leaders the other day. I mean, this guy… He and his friends were the most influential leaders in my young Christian life. He loved William Wilberforce. He started learning Arabic so that he could evangelise to the Muslim immigrants who had opened up small businesses at the shopping mall next to church. He interned with the church for so little financial support that he had to eat less, take up night-fill work, and switch his car to gas. I’m not saying that’s how churches should treat their interns (at all), but such was his commitment to Christian ministry. When kids so rough they were probably concealing weapons hung around the mall next to church, he went out there to talk to them. And the thing is… this kind of stuff wasn’t abnormal. It’s what every young Christian man was trying to do – walk like Jesus walked. They led the way in ethical consuming, asking the world to think about what we were wearing and clicking on. They cared about cultural injustice, mision, and Bible translation work. Not caring about how strong they presented, or how much money they had in their savings, or what the world said about them. They were counting the cost and putting their treasure with Jesus.
The man that messaged me back wasn’t the same guy.

Sometime around 2011, our church leadership imploded. We were taken over by a very different church. Fashion and popularity took the stage, and the church tried to look as much like what the world wants while still technically being Christian in order to entice them through the doors. The Jesus-wannabes left to go elsewhere. The youth didn’t have that option. We were stuck there, absorbing the new church culture around us. Little by little, we started looking more like the pastor or the pastor’s wife than Jesus. Our leaders were sold out, but it wasn’t obvious anymore if that was to Jesus or something else. For a little while I still kept in touch with the ones who had left. Eventually those lines fell silent. By the time I finished high school and could pack my church bags up, I looked around and realised, I didn’t know where the Jesus freaks were. I couldn’t see them anymore, and the ones I did manage to find… they were different. Hurt. Angry. Some guy in America called them restless, because that sounds more righteous, I guess. But surely the others were still out there.

The last thing they had pointed me towards before they disappeared was Bible College. So, I went to seminary thinking I would find them there. We needed to reconvene this whole, look-like-Jesus thing soon, the church was looking sick. But by the time I got to seminary… Well, either Jesus changed, or the thing that young Christians were modelling themselves after did.

I remember watching my brothers gorge themselves on Jordan B. Peterson YouTube videos when he first started becoming popular, back when I was a teenager. I remember hearing whispers about this guy called Driscoll. Whether the anger came first or these new not-Jesuses did, I don’t know. But I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Then when I entered young-adulthood ready to start looking like Jesus, like all my youth leaders had modelled, Jesus was gone. Jordan B. Peterson had taken his place. The Beatitudes had been crumpled up and left by the wayside, and political flyers and sarcastic debate had been taped over the hole that was left. It was chaos. We were talking less about Jesus and more about the Father, as though Jesus wasn’t the exact representation of Him. Father and Son were being forced apart by this new narrative, and men were being convinced that to look like Jesus was to be too woke and feminine; that they were denying their God-given anger and power in masculinity. They had to look like the Father; they had to call the shots; they had to assert authority. You can’t look like Jesus and assert your power at the same time… Jesus is the antithesis of that (Phil 2:5—11).

I prayed for that youth leader last night. Not a big, fasting-intercession. It was a small, sad whisper to the Jesus I rarely see kicking around anymore. I prayed that He might revive his heart for the true gospel; that bitterness or self-preservation, or fear for the future, or whatever it is that I can see progressively hardening his heart might drop away like dead flesh. I prayed that Christian men would start wanting to look like Him again.

I have a morbid fascination with The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Every few years I listen through it again, and I can’t really pinpoint the exact reason why it speaks to me so deeply. I think a big part of it is that it’s not just the story of a church or its wayward leader; it’s the story of my church and the leaders who lost their way, the story of a generation of Christians and the youth they left in the dregs. It’s a story of the loss I still feel when I look around church today. I was a kid when Mars Hill grew to popularity. And as a teenager, the most impressionable my faith would ever be, I saw the ripple effect of anger, pride, dominance, and fear, wrapped up in a package labelled, ‘Christian Masculinity,’ change the men I had looked up to who had been looking up to Jesus. Suddenly the focus shifted. And it wasn’t just Mark Driscoll or his church that caused this drift from the Jesus of the Bible. I actually think in many ways, Driscoll was simply a product of something much larger; a worldly attachment to power and dominance. The very thing Jesus turned upside down on the cross.

At around ten years old I read my Dad’s copy of Run Baby Run. In his defence, The Cross and the Switchblade was on the highest shelf and I couldn’t have reached it even if I saw it. But I’m so thankful I read that story so young. That was my first insight outside of my church and family into what Christian masculinity looked like: Davie Wilkerson, gentle, skinny, afraid, ready to accept an attack if it meant being able to reach out to hurting kids with the gospel. Nicky Cruz, renouncing his power over others, to follow in Wilkerson’s footsteps who was following in Jesus’ footsteps.
When my old youth leader used to speak of William Wilberforce, I pictured him as a giant, swashbuckling leader who paved the way for abolition, following in Jesus’ footsteps. Now as an adult I read that, actually, Wilberforce was not tall, nor muscular, nor domineering; and I know now that, actually, his frailty is a much clearer mirroring of Jesus. When I was about fifteen years old my Dad bought me Brother Andrew’s God Smuggler. Yet another example of Godly masculinity. When I was sixteen, before my church imploded, a leader of the church asked me to pass on a book to my brother. Then he paused, looked at me, and tapped the book in my hand saying, “Actually, you should read it too.” It was The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. The first time I volunteered for a Beach Mission, one of the guys suggested I should read Radical by David Platt.
The pattern had been clearly set in my mind. Yet, I saw those Jesus Freaks less and less.

I’m not excluding myself from having lost the Way. It feels like we all drank the Kool-Aid of the world and got duped by its narrative. Christian men and women fighting, Christian conservatives and progressive fighting, older Christian generations and younger Christian generations fighting. And there are things that we should care about and put energy into… but not at the cost of putting energy into the gospel. Not at the cost of looking like Jesus.

I prayed my little whisper-prayer last night, and I don’t know what happened. I know that I woke up this morning spiritually hungry and invigorated in a way I haven’t felt for far too long. At the same time, a dull and heavy sadness seemed to hang from my soul: is it too late to find the leaders who were trying to look like Jesus? Is it too late for me to try and look like Jesus? Am I too old now, too set in my ways, too caught up in what’s normal, too worried about finances and careers and the future… Is it too late to look for the missing persons? Or is it possible, if I sit by the still waters of the gospel and wait for the ripples to clear, to see Jesus, and to lay myself aside?