- A growing Christian movement is encouraging men to discard
their "nice guy" personas and emulate the warrior heroes of films
such as Braveheart and Gladiator to get closer to God.
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- Churches and Christian groups worldwide are organising
military-style boot camps and "weekend warrior" retreats to help
men fight their perceived emasculation within church-going societies. The
inspiration for the movement is Wild at Heart, a book by Colorado-based
author John Eldredge, who believes "God designed men to be dangerous".
The book has already sold 1.5 million copies in English and been translated
into 16 languages.
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- In it, he claims many Christian men have become bored,
"really nice guys", and urges them to rediscover passion by seeing
their mission as "A battle to fight. An adventure to live. A beauty
to rescue".
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- "This is what a man longs for. This is what makes
him come alive," he writes on his website, ransomedheart.com. "There
is something fierce, passionate, and wild in the heart of every man. That
is how he bears the image of God."
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- He believes most men abandon paths of adventure and risk,
and Christianity, which often "feels like nothing more than pressure
to be a nice guy", is in part to blame.
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- "It is no wonder that many men avoid church, and
those who go are often passive and bored to death," he says. The kind
of character Mr Eldredge cites is Russell Crowe in Gladiator as he fights
noble battles and finds adventure.
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- The author, who was caught up in the Los Angeles drug
scene before discovering spirituality and the church, said he had been
astounded by the response to his book, first brought out in 2001 by a Christian
publisher.
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- The retreats he organises - the "boot camp"
and more advanced "platoon leaders' training" to help men "find
and recover your masculine heart" - are vastly oversubscribed. And
Wild At Heart has inspired other retreats and study groups worldwide, from
Virginia, where the Immanuel Bible Church holds weekends for God's Warriors,
to Kazakhstan. But critics say the movement is in danger of reinforcing
stereotypes.
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- "The basic premise that men need a princess to rescue
has set back the male-female relationship in the church by 30 years,"
said Chapman Clark, associate professor of youth, family, and culture at
Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
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