Samuel D James: " ... the age of the accountability group has been weighed and found wanting. It's past time for something better."

https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/why-christian-men-need-friendship

You might just have to be an evangelical Christian male in the United States to instantly recognize "accountability group". Samuel D James has written about accountability lately and:

...

The word “accountability” has become a keyword for a lot of evangelical men’s ministry. Go into a typical Bible-believing church and ask about men’s discipleship or small groups, and you’ll hear about accountability very quickly. Many times, the word translates as, “We’re going to ask each other if we’ve looked at any porn.” As a man in my mid 30s who has spent a lifetime in evangelical church culture, it’s difficult to remember the last time this word meant anything else.

...

There are also "retreats".  Circa 2004 to 2007, in my neck of the woods they were called "advances" because real men don't retreat. Someone I know joked that this was a sign of unfamiliarity with changing military jargon because over the last twenty years you don't even call it "retreat" (that's for Cobra Commander); instead you refer to "tactical repositioning".  Even at retreats there'd be small groups and break-out sessions so there'd be some overlap with the accountability group.  James' observation looking back on his life with such groups was that:

... Most of the accountability groups and relationships I have experienced have been less about encouragement toward deeper faith, and more about injecting the fear of having to confess into my daily fight against sin. There’s always been something manipulative about trying to motivate holiness through the dread of humiliation. In this sense, accountability can feel less like something that friends do out of love, and more like a preemptively punitive measure against someone who is untrustworthy

...

also:

... Men don’t fellowship; we “sharpen” each other. Men don’t need encouragement; we need “tough questions” and “honesty.” It’s been an unmistakable impression of my evangelical spirituality: When it comes to church groups, women need friendship, but men need accountability.

Part of this, of course, is the burden of leadership that complementarians believe husbands and church elders carry. But there’s a difference between weaving hard questions into the tapestry of friendship, and isolating “accountability” as an end-goal in itself. More importantly, men lose something profoundly valuable when churches pursue accountability apart from committed friendships and thick relationships. The wounds of a friend can be faithful (Proverbs 27:6), but the wounds of an “accountability partner” can reinforce patterns of shame and fear, giving the impression that life in Jesus’ family is less like a band of brothers and more like a bloodthirsty board of directors.

I am convinced that many evangelical churches get this wrong, not because they overvalue accountability, but because they under-value male friendship.  ...

Things come back to lust (the inevitable topic in the foreground) and to the roles Christian men have as husbands and fathers.  That, too, may be something of a topic.  A fellow at church told me a while back that he got the sense that it's as though American Christian teachers only seem to know how to get to "practical teaching" for marrieds with children.  Certainly a guy I met about twenty-five years ago comes across like that's one of the drums in his drum kit that he beats time on.

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1881364814338961835

Today marks the start of 4 years of unrestrained builder energy. Men, now is the time to start that company, add that service time, grab that piece of real estate. Don't miss your shot 👊

7:35 AM · Jan 20, 2025

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1902509138770546983

How to Be a Good Man

 

Whether or not you had a great dad, whether or not you've been a terrible man, there is always time to start being the man and the father God wants you to be, and to set your life up to finish well. https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1zqKVYardeAxB

4:55 PM · Mar 19, 2025

A man can be accountable in "those areas" of life and still turn out to be a short-tempered verbally and emotionally abusive man to all kinds of people but if he feels in his heart he has done right by his wife and kids his conscience is clean in his own sight, never mind what anyone else may have seen and known to the contrary.

One of the elephants in the room is that evangelicals will write about how David sinned with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed and, yes, obviously that's bad, but for all the Christians who never bothered to read 1 & 2 Chronicles the puzzle of how David was a man after God's own heart with his eight wives and ten concubines doesn't really get explained at all.  If you read, say, Jacob L Wright on Davidic power you might find that Nathan's confrontation with the king was about the misuse and abuse of royal power for personal aggrandizement and pleasure and the narrative telegraphs that this happened when the war was taken up, not just when the king was out on a stroll one night and saw a beautiful woman. 

How many men in accountability groups can wade into the textual and interpretive issues of how and why David was a man after God's own heart despite having eight wives and ten concubines, while Solomon proved a vanguard in idolatrous apostasy?  What's the difference between eighteen and hundreds? 

James' point about friendship is duly noted.  If anything, years away from Mars Hill have struck me with the realization that many of the friendships I thought were serious and lasting friendships were not necessarily anywhere near as serious or lasting as I had imagined them to be.  I can vaguely recall bids at accountability but I don't remember those as clearly as moments of friendship.  James' idea that Christians want "accountability" to accomplish what can probably only really be attained by actual friendship seems ... plausible. 

He concludes: 

...  friendship that never confesses or hears confession is fake, because sin is real. Genuine friendship will say, “I’m sorry, can you pray for me?” But the age of the accountability group has been weighed and found wanting. It’s past time for something better.

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain. 

a link for the weekend, pastor's kid Samuel D James makes a conservative Baptist case against homeschooling as a weapon in culture war (i.e. don't do this to your kids)

For those who have never read Samuel D. James before the TL:DR summary is "If you want your kids to become apostates the second they interact with anyone else's views but your own, for the love of God and your kids never even think about using homeschooling as an instrument in `culture war' because I've seen plenty of kids homeschooled that way abandon religious beliefs at the first opportunity".

If you want to read the whole thing for yourself (which is actually not that long), head over here.

https://samueldjames.substack.com/p/using-homeschooling-to-wage-culture

It reminded me of an old church I used to be part of called Mars Hill, if only in the sense that Mark Driscoll eventually seemed to cultivate an ethos within which faithful members who were not tagged as "potential leader" and even those who were seemed to get treated as ... well ... the best description I can think of is fire-and-forget human weapons in culture war politics.  That didn't seem to be the real goal circa 1996 to the 1998-2002 period I encountered but by 2007-2014 it seemed to be a paradigm and, well, as much as Mark Driscoll might want to shill a tale of how a lot of "unbiblical energy" led to the demise of Mars Hill the former Mars Hill leadership culture/cult could be likened to a gigantic homeschooling project in which the people who got free of it wanted to go anywhere as far and as fast as possible from "home" as possible.  

Mars Hill sought, as former pastor James Noriega put it, to create a cultural system within which nobody in it had to look to outside resources to help people, up to and including pastoral counseling for abuse victims.  It would turn out that the plagiarism scandal Mark Driscoll was embroiled in showed that he and Grace Driscoll made obvious use of work by Dan Allender, which Mike Cosper discussed recently.

You can homeschool your kids to be the most America-loving conservative Baptists you hope and pray they can be and they can still become progressive and/or secularists.  Eli's sons were terrible. Samuel's sons were so terrible they got compared to the sons of Eli.  King Saul was a corrupt and then crazy man whose son Jonathan turned out to be heroic. The Bible is replete with stories in which apples fall very, very far from the tree which you would think would be something homeschoolers would pay more attention to ... . 

But unmarried/never-married guys know absolutely nothing, as I semi-regularly heard during my years at Mars Hill. ;)

Ted Gioia has been publishing his new book at Substack, and I still disagree with the conspiratorial claim that musical inventors are "suppressed" from music history books

Ted Gioia has listed ten reasons why he has been publishing his newest book on Substack rather than through a more traditional book-publishing path. Samuel D James has written why he thinks you should not publish your book through Substack. 

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/10-reasons-why-im-publishing-my-next

https://samueldjames.substack.com/p/i-dont-think-you-should-publish-your

For those who don't recall how or why James ended up getting mentioned at Wenatchee The Hatchet you can poke around with the search engine for that. I would venture that Gioia is well-established enough he can publish via Substack to his heart's content. 

That said ... I still think Gioia tends to be speculative and tendentious outside his fields of expertise.

For instance, he's staying on the path he sketched out in Music: A Subversive History.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/why-is-the-oldest-book-in-europe

.... But, at a minimum, your achievement is removed from the history books. If you think I’m exaggerating, convene a group of music historians and ask them to name the inventor of the fugue, the sonata, the symphony, or any other towering achievement of musical culture, and note the looks of consternation that ensue, even before the arguments begin.

thoughts on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill by episode 9: it isn't really a history and responses to it have often fit what Samuel D James has described and exemplified in his responses as "the take trap"

The series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has hit Episode 9. 9https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

I am taking a break from listening to the series, however, to take stock of some of the reactions I’ve seen and the gamut I’ve seen so far suggests that reactions tend to be of a wagon-circling variety across doctrinal and political spectrums.