i have been wanting to post on this topic for awhile. i just never had enough to say. so i wanted to find and show this video. well, it wasn’t on the internet, so i had to find my copy of the video and get it uploaded. this is joe ehrmann, a former nfl player and now coach. he has a unique way and perspective on how we poorly build boys into men. this is well worth your time to catch a glimpse of a different way of raising men.

it reminds me that rethinking youth ministry highlighted this "hard as nails" ministry. in watching that i was taken back to some further thoughts. the idea being, what kind of men are we making for the kingdom.

months back i was intrigued in hearing about coach rush propst, the former head football coach from hoover high school (star of mtv’s two a days), resigning (read between the lines, fired) from his position mid-season.

i had an interest in the show partly because hoover high school, wasn’t created at the time, but would be my high school alma mater if our family stayed in birmingham. i would have actually graduated from berry high school, which is now one of the hoover middle schools. i would have been part of one of the final graduating classes from berry, before people moved into hoover.

watching two-a-days, i didn’t like coach propst, i thought the methods of getting a winning team and the way he treated parents and kids was just awful. so i wasn’t upset to see him go, but i wondered, why do we have so many "men" who are allowed to treat boys in such ways under the guise of "making them men?".. this cannot be good for the kingdom. being a man is not about being macho, unlike what mark driscoll dressed in his metro-sexual stylings would like you to know. being a man is not about being tough stuff.

Christ never put down, beat up, demeaned, yelled at, forced participation, or threatened in order to share the vision of the kingdom. why do we put up with people who go against those practices so actively? is it because we spend money on travel teams or our youth’s sports? we hope our child to grow up and be successful professional athlete? we live out our real dreams through our children and this person is considered a ‘gatekeeper’… i just don’t know..

note: this is a trimmed version. a full version with bryant gumbel’s reactions, which are good, can be found here.