*Our new baby arrived last week postponing this article. Gratefully, he and his mother are doing great and we’re all enjoying another little face around the house.*
Recently, a fellow Sicilian-descended writer, Joel Carini, invited me on to his Evangelical-oriented podcast to discuss community. You can listen to our conversation at the link below, where Joel also posted his takeaways.
I want to highlight that we spent a few minutes talking about the lay ministry of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and how this arrangement differs from most of the rest of Christendom. For within our church the pastor or the Bishop, is not the end all, be all. LDS wards only function if dozens of people do their part and their part frequently changes. I’ve seen men teach a Sunday School class for a couple of years, then be called as a Bishop, leading the entire congregation for half a decade and when that assignment was done, be asked to give out snacks in the nursery to toddlers.
It can be odd and it can be demanding, but it also offers a sense of contributing and belonging that is rare today.
Anyway, I left the podcast thinking mainly about the difference between opportunities for church service, which lay ministry offers LDS men in abundance and church friendship, which LDS men seem to struggle with just as much as anyone else.
What Latter-day Saint Men Do
One of the first memes I ever related to:
Latter-day Saint men do an incredible amount of service both within the church and without. An hour before I took my wife to the hospital for the birth of our child last week, my oldest son and I were helping to mow a handicapped neighbor’s lawn. (And we each got a cookie out of it.) I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, but as a boring example of things guys from church are doing every single day. You can bet the farm that on any given day of the week, some LDS guy you know is doing much needed physical and/or spiritual service for the widow and the fatherless or someone else in need. It’s our sincerely professed Christian beliefs and principles made manifest.
After decades of witnessing countless acts of service, I’ve come to believe LDS men can band together to do anything in the world, EXCEPT build friendships.
There are many good reasons for this. The first is the way we talk about male friendship: that is to say, we don’t talk about it hardly at all. There is no language for it among good Christian men of any faith. Generally the priority for male members of my church is:
Family
Job
Church Calling/Assignment
There’s no 4th or 5th or even 10th slot for friends. And so friendship can unintentionally1 feel like a man is deserting his post. Here’s an excerpt from “Only The Weird Will Survive” on this:
“And when faced with an invitation to do something outside of his home and his work hours, a dutiful man may see it as frivolous and feel conflicted about indulging (a movie night with the guys); he might not understand what he is supposed to do or what qualifies as success (ministering to a family from Church with no obvious needs “Uh, is there anything I can do for you?”); or he’ll see an invitation as sacrilege and counterproductive to his roles inside the home.
And in choosing to do [something with friends] he faces the possible resentment of his wife who is desperate for relief from the duties of isolating motherhood. The story modern man has unintentionally learned is that anything he could do outside of his home is a potential conflict with his duties of Protect, Provide and Preside.”
And so, as I mentioned in the last post, I sometimes find myself in the odd position of having to make the case to other men that, yeah, you should have close friends. Not only is it good for you in every measurable way, but it’s good for your kids to have their father be a part of meaningful fraternity.
Meaningful is key. Often, the only acceptable male space is a real or metaphorical “man-cave”: the unserious, child-like places and topics over which men have complete control even as they exercise no real power. If the only place men have friendship is during the game or while scarfing down fries or while defeating digital bad guys, then we can expect no serious results from their association. And such contexts will always feel, perhaps rightly, like a waste of time to the family minded man.
But When? How? What Will We Do?
Another reason we struggle to form close friendships is time. It takes time and we feel like we don’t have it. Not devoting time to making and maintaining friendships is akin to not making time to eat healthy, exercise or get enough sleep.
Here’s a highly scientific look at how the average family man approaches his daily life, aka the “Why I Don’t Have Friends” schedule.
The good news is it doesn’t take much of a shift to make a profound difference. If you want friends, the key is to do the presiding, the providing and the protecting as much as possible with other guys and their families from your church.
That is the definition of a community: fathers expanding and overlapping their responsibilities.
Sometimes we think community is what the church should offer us; that we should walk in the doors on Sunday and find it there waiting for us, just the way we like it. But in reality, community is what we bring to church: the relationships, the connections and the strong bonds of love and friendship that we put the time and effort into forging after the hymns and prayers are done. The church is merely God’s chosen maximizer of those efforts.
Here are some rather simple examples of the kind of relational investments we can be putting into church people, outside of church:
Having other families over for meals, often.
Ask for help when you need it. And you always need it.
Do lunches with men from church during the workday.
Instead of defaulting to isolating and optimized screen time, or having a schedule full of practices and activities on nights and weekends, spend leisure time with others. (I know, I know, this is mind-blowing, reality bending stuff here.)
Occasionally, take time away from family to work on yourself with other men, be it working out, hiking, learning a skill, whatever. Initiate your sons into this as they get older.
Enjoy the Italian tradition of “passeggiata”, an evening stroll with your friends after meals.
Here are some more examples, which require more commitment:
Meet with the parents of your kid’s friends and peers. Establish common rules, standards and traditions. Ask them what you can do to help parent and guide their kids. Tell them what you’d like help with.
Move and maybe change jobs so you can live closer to friends and extended family.
Find ways to do the providing with other men. Who can you hire or be hired by? Who can you go into business with?
How can your older children learn from or be a help to other families?
If you homeschool, form co-ops and apprenticeship opportunities. Make sure there are male teachers in the co-op, especially for older kids.
The power unlocked in the above actions should make it clear to us that male friendship is the skeleton key to community. Women and children do not have as difficult a time relating, working, playing and just being together. Without the men, they will get together and do play dates, and book clubs, organize this and that event. And the men will be invited along as an after thought, to help move the chairs or shuttle the kids. But without the fathers involved and leading, without a fraternity to accompany it, it’s not a durable, coherent community.
Mainstream institutions, be they educational, vocational, government, civic, entertainment, etc. are failing us. They’re walking right over a cliff and if we do not take the steps necessary to build better alternatives for our families then we’ll go right over with them. We need the pioneering and creative energy of men coming together, being friends and building viable alternatives. And that’s never going to happen if most men stick to the “Why I Don’t Have Friends” routine. This starts with you being in the home of your friends and they in yours.
As men, we need to expand our vision of what it means to protect, provide and preside, rather than see it as a form of isolation.
When we figure out how to get the men in our lives together often to do meaningful things, then and only then will we have the community we desire.
The LDS church does have an intentional, structural encouragement for male friendship: ministering brothers. But for all the reasons listed in this post, it can often struggle to work.