UK Ministry Trip: Biblical Manhood

  
       People often ask me what I most miss about playing professional football and they are surprised when I don’t say “playing!” I had a long and blessed career and God has now placed a specific call on my life as a minister of the gospel ( I currently serve as Home Missionary Pastor at a church in Calgary). But there are two things that I tell people I miss. One is being super fit. The other is being with the guys in that dressing room. There is something special about men gathered together and playing for a greater cause where the cost is high and the reward is great. As a pastor I have a burning desire to build men for the body of Christ.

       When Adam and Eve sinned by taking the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God said, “Adam where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). He says to Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you” (Gen. 3:17). It doesn’t matter that Eve sinned first. Adam was held primarily responsible. Adam abdicated his responsibility to lead his wife when the serpent usurped the created order by first approaching her and not him. She bit, he was passive, they both fell and creation was fractured. The role of male and female, created equal in the image of God but different in role by design, is one of the crucial issues of our day. Where Satan has blurred the distinctions and subverted the roles we have a society, which cannot answer the question, what is it to be a man, and not a women, or what is it to be a woman and not a man.

       During my upcoming ministry trip to the UK I have been invited by Steve Timmis to speak to the men of the Crowded House Church in Sheffield on October 17th http://www.thecrowdedhouse.org/, to the men of Beacon Church London on October 20th by Owen Hylton http://beacon-church.org/,  and  to the men of Cornerstone Church Liverpool on October 30th by Steve Robinson http://www.cornerstonechurchliverpool.org/ .

This is one of the crucial issues of our day:

1. Because it relates to the character of the triune God  and to the very core of our personhood created in his image male and female, and 

2. Because it relates to the Gospel which is depicted in marriage between man and woman.

This is not a call to be macho but a call to lead and to love.  May God raise up a new generation of men in his church in the UK.