No More Christian Nice Guy
CBN.com "Recovering nice guy" and author Paul Coughlin wants to challenge Christian men to think and live out their faith more passionately. In his new book No More Christian Nice Guy, he points the way for all men who yearn to live a life of boldness and conviction--like Jesus. But reader beware, Coughlin does not sugar coat Jesus' rugged side during the times that he showed anger and contempt toward authority figures.
Using humorous examples from his own life, powerful and poignant stories, and vivid examples from contemporary culture, Coughlin shows how he learned to say no to the "nice guy" syndrome. After all, Christian nice guys aren't always so nice. In the name of appearing Christian by being agreeable, they can lie, keep secrets, manipulate, duck responsibility, and much more. Using the biblical model of Christ as his example of a real man, Coughlin shows men how to become both gentle and bold.
The following is an excerpt from his book.
Unchained Son
It's h--- being a Christian Nice Guy until you embrace Christ's tough, courageous, protective, assertive personality, which invigorates real male sensibilities. These qualities are found on the more rugged end of the male spectrum, currently not well represented in the church, which overemphasizes Christ's gentler side at the expense of honest and healthy balance.
Here's a story that I hope will help to clarify. I call it the Parable of Jim.
Jim is a thirty-something teacher to whom people are drawn. But Jim breaks all kinds of rules. He's confrontational, opinionated, filled with willpower.
He threatens to fight scoundrels who are making money off of religion, even grabbing their TV camera, a tool for this sordid gain, and smashing it to the ground, creating one long commercial break.
He has called his students dumb and dull, asking how much longer he'll have to endure their company.
In order to stem his influence, his enemies play word games and devise interview scenarios in which to embarrass him; he's so cunning and shrewd that he constantly shows them up instead. No one has the guts to talk the way he does. Others talk like they understand God; Jim talks like he knows God. Jim forcefully disrupts the order of things and disregards convention. Jim's inappropriate.
He calls people bad names that "respectable men" never say. He verbally confronts one of his most powerful government officials. When Jim has faced an authority figure who, because of manufactured charges, could actually invoke the death penalty, Jim's slow-to-come responses have been obscure, searing, and disrespectful.
Jim doesn't mind his manners around important persons. Jim causes problems for society's respectable people. No wonder they want to pull him down.
In one public speech, to illustrate a profound spiritual truth, Jim has spoken of excrement going into a drain. He's colorful, but some think his language is too coarse for a spiritual leader, and the press has a field day: PREACHER OR POTTYMOUTH? YOU DECIDE.
He has told reporters that his mission isn't to discover or promote a lifetime of warm and cozy. Au contraire: "I bring division and conflict! Live as I say you should," he tells morning news shows over coffee and crumpets, and it may "tear your families apart!" Then he states the obvious: "Those who don't find me offensive will be blessed." Who booked this guy? Regis wonders, glancing at security, hoping they're keeping a sharp eye. Who in the world does he think he is? muse countless others.
Jim is sarcastic, sometimes bitingly so; he doesn't apologize. Jim goes to parties and hangs out with others who do. At least once he has supplied the wine, for free, during a wedding where children were likely present. Drinks are on him, even though he knows he'll be accused of corrupting others and touting sinfulness. The bureaucrats and government workers with whom he spends time are the ones everybody else hates. Jim doesn't even shun mentally imbalanced devotees or politically leprous radicals.
Many murmur and complain that they don't understand him. His own students sometimes won't ask him questions because they fear his response.
Most religious leaders enjoy the attention of large crowds, but Jim's wary: He doesn't trust them, and he doesn't hide his distrust. He actually confronts empty compliments during public gatherings—not a seeker-friendly ministry approach. Even though he still takes students, Jim's been unemployed for at least three years and doesn't even look for a job. He lives off handouts, owns no property, doesn't even have his own cardboard box to return to at night.
One choice that led to further attacks was Jim's allowing a prostitute—in public—to anoint him with rare and expensive oil that could have been used to feed the poor, support missionaries, or pay for part of a child's life-saving surgery. While his students and his opponents boiled with anger over this wasteful extravagance, Jim would not hear it denounced and had the audacity to say that whenever God's liberating message is preached, this one event will be mentioned favorably. The woman wiped Jim's feet with her own hair, a lure she has used to draw men to her bed, but he has no care for his reputation. The scandal of it all! Hear the good folk gossip! Film at eleven!
He warns his students that people will despise them. Some will even be brought to court by blackmailers with unfair charges. Jim tells them to pay off the blackmailer before it goes that far. He instructs one student to sell some clothing in order to buy a weapon.
Jim, who's loving, kind, and compassionate, is not owned or influenced by fear and shame. Still, he does all the above and more, which begs the question: Do you think Jim's a "good Christian man"? Is he a Nice Guy?
* * *
This is part of the life of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, but are you surprised by how foreign some of it looks? If we compare these actions of Jesus to the behavior expected of the average guy in most churches today—and, if we were honest—we'd say, absurdly, that Christ is not a "Christian." We wouldn't pray to him; we'd issue prayer requests for him.
Something doesn't add up.
I hope you are beginning to see how some men are isolated from the church not because they are "backsliders" but because of what they're told they must be in order to find peace and contentment. There are men to whom following Jesus means abandoning these common misconceptions about him. I know these men. They believe they have no choice. They have asked, as I have, if Jesus is pleased with how we, the church, presently portray him; they can't honestly say yes.
I constructed "Jim's story" to help us get past our extreme caricature of the Nice Nazarene. By now some well-read domesticated bird is staring down at the Parable of Jim, reading upside down and wondering why it's lining his cage. So be it. But for those who haven't yet torn up all or part of this book, realize that this characterization is concentrated toughness, and just as you don't want to consume a sludge of orange juice concentrate, neither do you want to run off with this caricature of Jesus: It's the other extreme, the inverse swing of the pendulum from our current banal portrayal of Jesus the Bearded Woman.
A Whole Other Gospel
It's a whole other gospel when your Nice Guy glasses are thrown in the garbage. Mark records more of Christ's rugged side than any other account, and with Mark at the wheel, you're in the passenger seat, white-knuckled, reminding yourself to breathe. There is no seat belt, and as Mark goes off road, you rejoice to realize that being nice isn't the point of Christianity.
Here are some of the words and phrases in just the first chapter of Mark that describe the world in which Jesus warred: shouting, wilderness, sins, camel hair, locusts, slave, split open, tempted, Satan, arrested, the time has come!, possessed, evil spirit, destroy, be quiet!, screamed, convulsed, amazement, high fever, victims, alone, leprosy, begging, moved with pity, be healed!, examine, secluded. And, according to the oldest and best manuscripts, Mark's gospel ends (in 16:8) with a word we all dread: afraid.
None of this is comfortable or pleasant. None of us, when under the spell of the fake virtue called niceness, says a loud "Amen" to this roughness. But wait till the hazy ethereal spell is broken: You'll hunger and thirst for more as the Good News takes on lungs, meat, and sinew. The gospel includes dirty feet, stinky hair, fish guts, bugs between its teeth, dirt under its nails—it's entrenched in life's day-to-day. Smell the adrenaline, feel your heart pound, taste the locust that lingers on your lips. God is on the loose. Hunting us down! Warring to liberate us from anything and everything that seeks to diminish who he made us to be.
Setting the Record Straight
Regardless of how hard we try, Jesus will not be domesticated. Consult the gospel facts: He is no comfortable Christ, no meek and mild Messiah.
Let's set the record straight.
Here's our popular Nice Guy misconception: Jesus didn't drink, swear, get angry, use sarcasm, confront, avoid questions, grow impatient, or complain. Conversely, the record shows he did all of the above, and the gospel includes no apology, confession, or repentance for any of them.
I remember chewing on one sermon that was especially hard to swallow. The minister said that Jesus didn't ingest wine because he would never consume something that had fermented or, as he put it, "putrefied." Really? If that's the case, then Jesus never ate meat either—butchered meat decomposes, even more so back then. Or do we think Jesus took bites out of living creatures?
His first recorded miracle was at a wedding in a Galilean town called Cana. He made one hundred and eighty gallons of wine for people who'd already been drinking; John tells us that "he thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him." If he did this today, many would say he could only be a "real" Christian—he's gotta be tame—if he made and consumed grape juice. (Somehow we manage to ignore that such an act wouldn't be a miracle but an embarrassing disappointment.) We still spin-~doctor to keep him in his Sunday best.
Passive Christian men must discard the belief that Jesus was perpetually mild and easy to get along with. Nice people don't call others a brood of vipers fit for hell ( ; 23:33) and "white-washed tombs" (23:27). Jesus used coarse language when being critical of authority figures. He was also irreverent and disrespectful, which are part of the definition of "profanity." We retain this caricature of Jesus being endlessly patient, yet he turned to his disciples, seemingly exasperated, and said, "How long must I be with you until you believe? How long must I put up with you?" (17:17 nlt). Jesus was not forever long-suffering (imagine the false agendas that would enslave him if he were—more on spotting false agendas later), and he doesn't expect his followers to be either, as seen in the parable of the fig tree ( –9). The clear teaching is that it's proper to wait for an unfruitful person or organization to produce, but that there's a limit to wise patience. Sometimes patience ceases to be a laudable virtue and becomes a naïve vice. Christian Nice Guys need to learn this. They would, if they saw the real Jesus.
* * *
Jesus also told us to be "wise" as serpents—some English versions render the word phronimos as "cunning" and others "shrewd" ( ). Shouldn't this make us cringe? That Christian men are supposed to be cunning and shrewd instead of nice is more proof that we just don't want to listen, or are afraid to listen, to Jesus.
Nice people don't use intense language; they're moderate in all they do and say. They'd never talk (literally or figuratively) about hacking off body parts that tempt a person to sin. Nice Guys don't exaggerate to prove a point. Jesus did.
Even if we begrudgingly acknowledge that he used strong words and exhibited unrefined behavior, we tend to think they must have been reserved for the corrupt and misguided religious leaders of his day. Untrue. No one, it seemed, was guaranteed safety from his ruggedness; for instance, on one occasion, his own disciples "didn't understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it" ( ). Nice Guys don't generate intimidating fear; Nice Guys generate head-scratching frustration. This insipid incarnation of our own making, a cultural icon and not the real thing, wouldn't make those close to Jesus wonder if he had lost his mind and thus desire to seize him to prevent his doing damage to himself and others (3:21).
Characterless people don't use sarcasm. Jesus did. (And I thank God for it.) In fact, refusing to acknowledge that he used what I call "blessed sarcasm" spins us off into heresy. Christ shakes us awake for our own good. He loves us enough to shock us, offend us, scandalize us.
The record of his tough side is there, right there, and has been for thousands of years; his momma did not raise a sweet little boy. Sadly, this reality has faded into near invisibility, becoming a lost testament of sorts, what some might call a common conspiracy. The real Jesus is taking a backseat to the contemporary cultural climate, what intellectuals call zeitgeist ("spirit of the times" or "spirit of the age"). Like car keys on the kitchen table, the actual Jesus is hiding in plain view—and so is the freedom of millions, the freedom of Christian Nice Guys and those who love them.
More information:
Read an interview with the author.
Visit the author's Web site.
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Excerpted from Chapter 2: Jesus the Bearded Woman found in No More Christian Nice Guyby Paul Coughlin, Copyright © 2005, published by Bethany House Publishers. Used by permission. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
