To Grow or Not To Grow (Up, That Is)

I found a link to this interesting (2002) NRO article, Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy, by Frederica Mathewes-Green at Boar’s Head Tavern, where they’re discussing singleness and marriage and saying that the evangelical church is way too hipped on marriage.
From Mathewes-Green’s article:

Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.

But we no longer think of children as adults-in-progress. Childhood is no longer a training ground but a playground, and because we love our children and feel nostalgia for our own childhoods, we want them to be able to linger there as long as possible. We cultivate the idea of idyllic, carefree childhood, and as the years for education have stretched so have the bounds of that playground, so that we expect even “kids” in their mid-to-late twenties to avoid settling down.

I was discussing this problem with a friend just last Friday. We know a whole group of young men, homeschooled, from Christian homes, professing Christian themselves, who have dropped out of college, are working at minimum wage-type jobs, and playing around with dating, planning to get married “someday.” They don’t seem to be preparing themselves financially for marriage; they don’t have any discernable long term goals. They aren’t preparing for or taking leadership positions in the church either. If this behaviour isn’t a refusal to grow up, I don’t know what to call it.
Then, there are the dozen or more young Christian women that I can name off the top of my head who have graduated from high school, finished college, learned to manage a household in addition to preparing educationally for a career, and who still aren’t married at age 20+ or 30+. I don’t think that for most of these young ladies their standards are too high; there just aren’t as many committed Christian men as there are women. So, any suggestions? What is the key to encouraging the Christian young men that are in our families and churches to grow up and commit themselves–to marriage, to career, to education, whatever the Lord is calling them to do?

By the way, all the discussion at BHT started with this address by Dr. Albert Mohler, Part 1 and Part 2
Then, iMonk wrote this essay asking, Have We Said Too Much (about marriage, that is)?
From there, you can go on to read all sorts of responses, both pro and con.
Put me in the same camp with Dr. Mohler. I see too much anecdotal evidence that young men, especially, are delaying adulthood in many areas, not just delaying marriage. I am praying that the Holy Spirit will bring revival, not so that everybody will get married, but rather so that that the church will have the strong male leadership that it needs to follow Christ in this century.

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