Mentoring Our Boys –

The Fellowship of Men

What if a boy is invited into the fellowship of men?  What if he is treated like a man?  He is expected to act like a man.  Not a brute or wimpy version, but Christ-like - courage, strength, and love all wrapped into one.  Can he live up to all this?  Absolutely.  He will still have plenty of moments acting like a child, so expect that and don’t overreact to it.  Just know this:  kids can live up to the expectations we set for them.

Let’s go to Robert Lewis’ Raising a Modern-Day Knight.  He emphasizes three critical elements for bestowing manhood; features that are typically absent today:

First, we have failed to deliver to our sons a clear, inspiring, biblically grounded definition of manhood.

Second, most fathers lack a directional process that calls their sons to embrace the manhood they should be able to define.

A third shortcoming involves the loss of ceremony.

 In the absence of this invitation, boys never become men.  They remain in a perpetual state of adolescence (in other words, somebody who has reached puberty but has never grown up).  In John Eldredge’s sequel to Wild at Heart, The Way of the Wild Heart, he draws the same conclusion:

You see, what we have now is a world of uninitiated men.  Partial men.  Boys, mostly, walking around in men’s bodies, with men’s jobs and families, finances, and responsibilities.  The passing on of masculinity was never completed, if it was begun at all.  The boy was never taken through the process of masculine initiation.  That’s why most of us are Unfinished Men.

We must invite our boys into manhood!

Posted on December 4th, 2007 by Jeff Purkiss
Filed under: Rite of Passage