Thumos is found eighteen times in the New Testament; seven of those occurrences refer to God's wrath.  In Galatians, we see an example of shadow thumos in the word jealousy, which when smoldering breaks out in wrath.  Thumos and another word for "wrath" (orge) are coupled in two places in Revelation:  "the fierceness (thumos) of his wrath [orge]" and "the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God."

For most of us, that's as far as our one-dimensional understanding of this beneficial-slash-harmful attribute goes.  The following is a good example: One popular New Testament commentary shows how narrow is our comprehension of this vibrant attribute.  The author states that thumos means "wrath" and "hot."  "Wrath is like a volcano….stuff a cork in it."

This perspective leads to the emaciation and wilting of many souls, largely because it ignores the creative seed in properly handled anger and because it overlooks anger as an intrinsic component to righteous indignation, which should lead to deep and abiding love for those who are weak and oppressed.  The Bible shows a more noble side to this attribute in the way Jesus demonstrated muscular indignation—the kind that battles for transcendent truths, protects others who are being stripped of their worth, and loves those in need in practical ways—as opposed to anger that stems from not getting what we want.  In Jesus we see a thumos that guards and provides for those whom leaders have exploited and abused.

Noble thumos burns for the good of others, for God's will to be done on earth as in heaven, and thus it causes people to act; wrathful anger is usually personal, born of envy, self-absorbed, and vengeful.  Stuffing a cork in thumos will diminish your spiritual growth and weaken your faith-in-action!  Anything that says otherwise is a misguided recipe for being unable to wrestle with and tackle real issues in real life.

Today's Official Script, though favors lower-thumos and contemplative folks over bolder and more active ones; people who prefer reading to doing; theological polemicists and parsers to mission-minded burden lifters.  Today we applaud the kind of strength that suffers but not the kind that says no, lives courageously, and rescues others the way Christ did.  Why not honor both?

And why do we applaud heroic strength in films (for instance) if there's something wrong with having it at church?  This is a sign that we don't honor what our souls tell us is right and good because somehow it doesn't appear "spiritual" enough.

Machiavelli observed:

This way of living, then, seems to have rendered the world weak and handed it over as prey to wicked men, who can safely manage it when they see that most men think more of going to Heaven by enduring their injuries than by avenging them.

The world, he concluded, "has become effeminate and Heaven disarmed" by this kind of faith—the version of Christianity I call "the Official Script."

So far I've been giving Official-Script illustrations without providing a real definition of what it is or where it came from.  The Script is a cut-and-paste version of a biblical outlook; while it's an essential part of a life well-lived, it masquerades as the entire thing.  In that sense it's similar to Thomas Jefferson's homemade New Testament, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.  Jefferson jettisoned everything supernatural—angels, prophecies, miracles, divinity, and of course, the resurrection.  He considered belief in the metaphysical an embarrassment to a learned man.

Our Official Script today retains the supernatural, but it does something similar.  It's scandalized by the mysterious rather than the miraculous.  In an attempt to make the gospel appealing to contemporary bias and prejudice, the Script endeavors to explain and reason through everything.

Its grasp overextends its reach and thereby renders God's Word increasingly flaccid and lifeless.  Again: Reason alone has never created or brought about virtue.  The French Revolution is one of many historical examples showing that the idolization of reason often leads instead to destruction and misery.

News flash from God to us:  It's okay not to know everything!  In fact, it's good—this leads to deepened faith, spirited animation, and established righteousness in you.  My mysteries keep you hooked, curious, aware, motivated…and I designed it that way.

Yes, righteousness.  In Paul's first epistle to Timothy, a letter full of warnings, probes, admonishments, and direct judgment upon those who work against the addressee, Paul concludes with a description of righteousness that sometimes snares today's evangelical eye.

            Pursue a righteous life—a life of wonder, faith, love, steadiness, courtesy.

Wonder is integral to what it means to pursue righteousness, just as it's inseparable from the creation of courage.  Today's evangelicals often read this verse, miss Paul's point about wonder, and say or think something like, "Hey, wait—what about keeping the main thing the main thing?  What about piety?"

The Official Script, ultimately, is what we want to hear as opposed to what we need to hear, and I'm no different than most people when it comes to this convenient game.  I'd rather avoid the things I don't want to hear.  And sometimes I do.

There's no better explanation for the Official Script's predominant trait than what we discover in Paul's other letter to his beloved protégé.  With patches of Paul's loving thumos threaded throughout, 2 Timothy deals primarily with the character of a Christian minister.  And here he exposes the underlying motives of those who cling to the Official Script:

The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine.  Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.  They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

I don't know when that time began, which is irrelevant anyway.  What I do know is that when I compare the Bible's overall content, tone, and flavor to what I hear when I flip through the "Christian" programs I find on TV, I can hardly locate similarities.  The only exception I've found recently is on a Catholic cable channel.

What we want to hear is pretty much that which makes us comfortable and preserves that comfort.  For example, Scripture doesn't show the luminaries of our faith turning to Christ so they can climb corporate ladders.  But as Americans, we love our money, our bulbous cars and our bulbous homes, so we turn many portions of God's Word into business training classes.  Many of the biblical passages used to promise wealth and advancement are tortured beyond recognition.  The deception continues and at a blistering pace.

The Official Script is part myth, part lullaby, and part nursery rhyme.  It's unable to alleviate real suffering and in the process emulate the real Christ.  Also, no one denomination or person defines it or owns it.  It's one large act of group-think (as opposed to God-think). 

The truth about life—primarily, that it's hard—is less appealing than the illusions currently swirling around.  Like one of the real biggies:  that you can have a really peaceful life right here, right now.  (Yeah, you can, if you duck and flee all the battles that rage.)

Intriguingly, but also frighteningly, this is one of today's main evangelical credos and a basic premise of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.  Neither evangelicalism nor the New Age is accepting (much less embracing) the fact that deep and abiding love, like deep and abiding courage, is risky and sacrificial.  There's no legitimate or truthful way around it: You live, you get hurt.  "Take your share of hardship, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus."

            "You are a king, then!" said Pilate.

Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king.  In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

Truth is demanding and uncompromising, but it's infinitely better than illusion.  Still, most of us prefer illusion—it's less taxing and less disruptive.  This brings us to the Script attribute that's perhaps the most damaging.

The Official Script pretends that the narrow path of spiritual growth and maturity is wide.  The fact remains, as it's always been, that those who love God, exercise genuine faith, and love truth, are in the minority.  Love, faith, and truth are simply too much hassle for most people to care about.

The Official Script makes people feel good as opposed to helping them become good.  It's what our fears and our ego want to be true—we want self-preservation and self-glorification to be true and right, to be essential to reality, as opposed to what the Holy Spirit reveals to us as being unassailably and everlastingly true and right.  Things like losing oneself so that one will live, and bringing glory to God instead of to ourselves.

The Official Script is hell-bent on removing challenge and difficulty, which are two of the most effective raw materials in forging growth and faith; they're God-given materials that lead to the kind of life that people remember when you're gone.  The Script, instead, erases legacy, deconstructs potential heroism, and wipes away adventure.  It continually reminds us about our sinfulness, hardly telling us anything about our God-given Glory.  It mistakes feeling horrible about ourselves for being humble.

Finally, the Official Script has one ironclad law:  It will always bunker around and suckle the status quo in crowning mildness king over and above all other temperaments.  Some of the status quo is good, and some of it is not.  But because the Script-holders have been blinded in pursuit of comfort and mildness, they rarely are capable of distinguishing between them.

Thumos is found eighteen times in the New Testament; seven of those occurrences refer to God's wrath.  In Galatians, we see an example of shadow thumos in the word jealousy, which when smoldering breaks out in wrath.  Thumos and another word for "wrath" (orge) are coupled in two places in Revelation:  "the fierceness (thumos) of his wrath [orge]" and "the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God."

For most of us, that's as far as our one-dimensional understanding of this beneficial-slash-harmful attribute goes.  The following is a good example: One popular New Testament commentary shows how narrow is our comprehension of this vibrant attribute.  The author states that thumos means "wrath" and "hot."  "Wrath is like a volcano….stuff a cork in it."

This perspective leads to the emaciation and wilting of many souls, largely because it ignores the creative seed in properly handled anger and because it overlooks anger as an intrinsic component to righteous indignation, which should lead to deep and abiding love for those who are weak and oppressed.  The Bible shows a more noble side to this attribute in the way Jesus demonstrated muscular indignation—the kind that battles for transcendent truths, protects others who are being stripped of their worth, and loves those in need in practical ways—as opposed to anger that stems from not getting what we want.  In Jesus we see a thumos that guards and provides for those whom leaders have exploited and abused.

Noble thumos burns for the good of others, for God's will to be done on earth as in heaven, and thus it causes people to act; wrathful anger is usually personal, born of envy, self-absorbed, and vengeful.  Stuffing a cork in thumos will diminish your spiritual growth and weaken your faith-in-action!  Anything that says otherwise is a misguided recipe for being unable to wrestle with and tackle real issues in real life.

Today's Official Script, though favors lower-thumos and contemplative folks over bolder and more active ones; people who prefer reading to doing; theological polemicists and parsers to mission-minded burden lifters.  Today we applaud the kind of strength that suffers but not the kind that says no, lives courageously, and rescues others the way Christ did.  Why not honor both?

And why do we applaud heroic strength in films (for instance) if there's something wrong with having it at church?  This is a sign that we don't honor what our souls tell us is right and good because somehow it doesn't appear "spiritual" enough.

Machiavelli observed:

This way of living, then, seems to have rendered the world weak and handed it over as prey to wicked men, who can safely manage it when they see that most men think more of going to Heaven by enduring their injuries than by avenging them.

The world, he concluded, "has become effeminate and Heaven disarmed" by this kind of faith—the version of Christianity I call "the Official Script."

So far I've been giving Official-Script illustrations without providing a real definition of what it is or where it came from.  The Script is a cut-and-paste version of a biblical outlook; while it's an essential part of a life well-lived, it masquerades as the entire thing.  In that sense it's similar to Thomas Jefferson's homemade New Testament, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.  Jefferson jettisoned everything supernatural—angels, prophecies, miracles, divinity, and of course, the resurrection.  He considered belief in the metaphysical an embarrassment to a learned man.

Our Official Script today retains the supernatural, but it does something similar.  It's scandalized by the mysterious rather than the miraculous.  In an attempt to make the gospel appealing to contemporary bias and prejudice, the Script endeavors to explain and reason through everything.

Its grasp overextends its reach and thereby renders God's Word increasingly flaccid and lifeless.  Again: Reason alone has never created or brought about virtue.  The French Revolution is one of many historical examples showing that the idolization of reason often leads instead to destruction and misery.

News flash from God to us:  It's okay not to know everything!  In fact, it's good—this leads to deepened faith, spirited animation, and established righteousness in you.  My mysteries keep you hooked, curious, aware, motivated…and I designed it that way.

Yes, righteousness.  In Paul's first epistle to Timothy, a letter full of warnings, probes, admonishments, and direct judgment upon those who work against the addressee, Paul concludes with a description of righteousness that sometimes snares today's evangelical eye.

            Pursue a righteous life—a life of wonder, faith, love, steadiness, courtesy.

Wonder is integral to what it means to pursue righteousness, just as it's inseparable from the creation of courage.  Today's evangelicals often read this verse, miss Paul's point about wonder, and say or think something like, "Hey, wait—what about keeping the main thing the main thing?  What about piety?"

The Official Script, ultimately, is what we want to hear as opposed to what we need to hear, and I'm no different than most people when it comes to this convenient game.  I'd rather avoid the things I don't want to hear.  And sometimes I do.

There's no better explanation for the Official Script's predominant trait than what we discover in Paul's other letter to his beloved protégé.  With patches of Paul's loving thumos threaded throughout, 2 Timothy deals primarily with the character of a Christian minister.  And here he exposes the underlying motives of those who cling to the Official Script:

The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine.  Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.  They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

I don't know when that time began, which is irrelevant anyway.  What I do know is that when I compare the Bible's overall content, tone, and flavor to what I hear when I flip through the "Christian" programs I find on TV, I can hardly locate similarities.  The only exception I've found recently is on a Catholic cable channel.

What we want to hear is pretty much that which makes us comfortable and preserves that comfort.  For example, Scripture doesn't show the luminaries of our faith turning to Christ so they can climb corporate ladders.  But as Americans, we love our money, our bulbous cars and our bulbous homes, so we turn many portions of God's Word into business training classes.  Many of the biblical passages used to promise wealth and advancement are tortured beyond recognition.  The deception continues and at a blistering pace.

The Official Script is part myth, part lullaby, and part nursery rhyme.  It's unable to alleviate real suffering and in the process emulate the real Christ.  Also, no one denomination or person defines it or owns it.  It's one large act of group-think (as opposed to God-think). 

The truth about life—primarily, that it's hard—is less appealing than the illusions currently swirling around.  Like one of the real biggies:  that you can have a really peaceful life right here, right now.  (Yeah, you can, if you duck and flee all the battles that rage.)

Intriguingly, but also frighteningly, this is one of today's main evangelical credos and a basic premise of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.  Neither evangelicalism nor the New Age is accepting (much less embracing) the fact that deep and abiding love, like deep and abiding courage, is risky and sacrificial.  There's no legitimate or truthful way around it: You live, you get hurt.  "Take your share of hardship, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus."

            "You are a king, then!" said Pilate.

Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king.  In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

Truth is demanding and uncompromising, but it's infinitely better than illusion.  Still, most of us prefer illusion—it's less taxing and less disruptive.  This brings us to the Script attribute that's perhaps the most damaging.

The Official Script pretends that the narrow path of spiritual growth and maturity is wide.  The fact remains, as it's always been, that those who love God, exercise genuine faith, and love truth, are in the minority.  Love, faith, and truth are simply too much hassle for most people to care about.

The Official Script makes people feel good as opposed to helping them become good.  It's what our fears and our ego want to be true—we want self-preservation and self-glorification to be true and right, to be essential to reality, as opposed to what the Holy Spirit reveals to us as being unassailably and everlastingly true and right.  Things like losing oneself so that one will live, and bringing glory to God instead of to ourselves.

The Official Script is hell-bent on removing challenge and difficulty, which are two of the most effective raw materials in forging growth and faith; they're God-given materials that lead to the kind of life that people remember when you're gone.  The Script, instead, erases legacy, deconstructs potential heroism, and wipes away adventure.  It continually reminds us about our sinfulness, hardly telling us anything about our God-given Glory.  It mistakes feeling horrible about ourselves for being humble.

Finally, the Official Script has one ironclad law:  It will always bunker around and suckle the status quo in crowning mildness king over and above all other temperaments.  Some of the status quo is good, and some of it is not.  But because the Script-holders have been blinded in pursuit of comfort and mildness, they rarely are capable of distinguishing between them.

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Lack of thumos disgusts more than wives—it disgusts us as a culture as well.  You might remember seeing footage of or hearing about an elderly man being assaulted by a young man trying to steal his car.  That elderly man was ninety-one-year-old war veteran Leonard Sims of Detroit, who was punched in the face and neck more than twenty times during a brutal carjacking in 2007.  The attack was caught on video and broadcast throughout the world.  But what most of us didn't see was the wide-angle footage that showed four bystanders watching the attack—and doing absolutely nothing to help the man being pummeled like a punching bag.  They stood there like ravens on a power line, like the proverbial monkeys who saw, heard, and spoke no evil.

Mr. Sims was unable to life his hands—he used them to brace himself against the gale-force attack until he was knocked to the ground and was almost run over as the shadow-thumos thug pulled away.  The punk stood only five-foot-nine and was slim; the crowd could have taken him easily.  Instead they just watched.  They didn't even call 9-1-1.  A nearby convenience store clerk did.

We witness low-thumos life and feel gut-piercing remorse, righteous anger, and stomach-turning disgust.  We're designed this way.  This is a natural, God-given response to one of the most despicable behaviors in humans (especially men).  God made us to disdain cowardice, not so that we'd be consumed by guilt and shame, but so that when we face trials we'll be compelled within to forge greater character: fortitude, strength, boldness, courage, and love.

British preacher Paul Scanlon talks about a baby who was dying in a nursery ward in England.  The child's chart showed how doctors conducted every possible test to find out why this child was dying.  Then, at the bottom of the chart, in the sobering diagnosis field, was written, "Failure to thrive."  This child had no fighting spirit, no lust for life.  Unlike other children in that nursery, he was missing an animating quality or soul-blood that would compel him toward the activity necessary to survive.  He seemed to have been born without the essence that no machine could install or induce; he needed an animus to help move him past adversity and into a life of vitality and growth.

Many of us adults have the same actual but mysterious ailment that's killing us spiritually.  Gichin Funakoshi, known as the creator and founder of modern karate, gave us something essential to chew on regarding this lack: "That in daily life, one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility; and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice."  He meant real humility, not the false form of humility that tells us that we are nothing but worms—that's just another form of lying.

Worse, our false humility undercuts our God-given gifts and power, and I don't think this is a coincidence.  When we reject our strengths or our talents it's often because, like thumos, they make us conspicuous.  We show up on people's radar.  In other words, if we woke up to their realities, then we would wake up to their responsibilities.  Fearful and selfish, instead we slink away with a pious smile, a pledge to pray, and a wish for blessings.

Thumos helps us to play our part in the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of love, light, and truth.  It also help us to avoid what Francis Schaeffer noticed with chagrin:

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is ask them to be conservative.  Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.  To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us.  If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.

Schaeffer wasn't using the word conservative in its popular and narrow political dimension.  He meant it in the broader sense of how young Christians are inculcated into maintaining what currently is.  What currently is includes a vast indifference to the well-being of others and catering to our own comfort.  Cain's comeback to God—"Am I my brother's keeper?"—is often our unsaid snotty remark, except that we usually lack the audacity to be so direct.  Nonetheless, our actions too often are the same.

We know that thumos deficiency is a spiritual ailment.  But is it a psychological disorder as well?  Counselors complain that sometimes their best insights go unheeded by clients.  They often scratch their heads as to why one finds his way to healing and spiritual growth while another barely moves in a better direction.  I think thumos has a lot to do with this quandary.  If one has no internal urge to push past a misconception or neurosis, does he really have a chance?  If he has no inner urge to grasp the better life above him, and if he's too cowardly to face his fears, he simply isn't going to make much progress.

Thumos is part of what philosopher William James described as "reserve energies," a capacity that every person possesses and that should be depleted by the end of life.  The energy in this reservoir lifts people to higher and better places; as a man who was horrified by the waste of human energy in armed conflict, James believed this energy should be used to "drain marshes, irrigate the deserts, and dig the canals, and democratically do the physical and social engineering which builds up so slowly and painfully what war so quickly destroys."  This energy recognizes that while there will be defeats, there also are victories yet to be won.

As a lay minister, I know that people who are unable to carry on through life's inevitable suffering and pain are eventually somehow stuck, very much like people addicted to drugs.  If they are skilled at manipulating others, they usually will prey upon the weak and the earnest to meet their cravings.  They will line others up like bowling pins and mow them down.  Cowardice is an orientation toward life that leads to apathy in all who possess it; in some it likewise leads to manipulation.  These sound like psychological ailments.

Making matters worse, we don't live in a world that rewards courage, except the selfish kind where we'll applaud others who have enough thumos to keep our borders safe.

But what about the kind of courage that rushes toward Twin Towers ablaze?  "What happened to the respect for that kind of manliness?" a friend asked me during a recent fishing trip.  "For a time we really appreciated people like that.  Now we've just slipped back into a flat existence where we don't even acknowledge heroes, much less honor them.  We're not even sure they exist anymore.  I mean, everywhere you turn, including church, it's as if everyone is trying to rip courage out of you."

This is a man with a prophetic nature, a man who believes that some things are right and others wrong.  He recently had to clean up after a head pastor made a shambles of his congregation and was eventually fired.  The wreckage took place right under the noses of deacons and elders who did virtually nothing to contain (let alone stop) it.

This angered him profoundly.  "You guys are a bunch of cowards," he told them.  "One of the reasons he [the pastor] made such a mess is because you watched it happen and did nothing."  He said there's still more cleanup to do, and he's afraid there isn't nearly enough will to create the necessary healthy changes.

"Can you create a coalition of the willing?" I asked.

"I really don't think it's there," he said, sounding tired.  "What do you think I should do?"

This is among the hardest questions to answer since I know what it often leads to.  In an average group of ten people, one, two at the most, have a functioning thumos.  That's plainly a minority.  You can comfort yourself by saying that one person plus God is a majority—and it may be.  But I speak from experience in affirming that it doesn't always work that way.  People of noble thumos often get their head handed to them on a platter, actually or figuratively.

So I replied, "It may not be a battle that's worthy of your blood."  After thinking about it more, though, I said, "But then again, your integrity and your loyalty to Christ will take a beating if you don't speak up.  If you do speak up, make sure it's done lovingly and with wisdom, but then expect to be slandered and ostracized later.  Planning on this can take out some of the sting and disappointment.  And, if you're right, time eventually will vindicate you."

I'll say it again: Thumos is a burden made lighter by Christ, who is life itself, who is disruptive courage, and who honors those who tell the truth the way he did, does, and will.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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People new to Coughlin Ministries sometimes ask: Why such an emphasis on bullying?

Here's why.

Our ministry and resources fuel a more substantial expression of love and faith in action. They encourage people to get into the real world and make a real difference. Yet we found that for many, traditional avenues of service and ministry didn't provide for them this more rugged but still loving opportunity. People who have been nourished by our resources and presentations wanted a more vigorous way to exercise their newfound faith, love and courage.

So we created The Protectors, the only faith-based solution to adolescent bullying of its kind. The Protectors gives those who are serious about their ignited faith an outlet to love, change, confront, and redeem. Bullying is an area today that isn't reached by God's justice-loving will as it should be, so it's a natural place to devote such newfound power.

But there's another reason. For many, working on behalf of justice is exactly the prescription to their spiritual ailment of passivity, timidity and even the sin of cowardice (Rev. 21:8). It's where God wants them, and it's where they need to be in order to become the new creation God wants them to be.

Hundreds of thousands of oppressed children need you--not someone else. You. Today. They need you to be heroic, righteous, and Christ-like in order to deliver them from the evil of bullying. And in a profound and ironic way, you need them. Targets of bullying need you because that's how God often works--through His flawed people who imperfectly fight like Christians to defend human dignity, a gift from God that no one has a right to tear asunder.

And you need them because their predicament is the jagged stone upon which you sharpen your soul. By caring for them with such a powerful expression of love, faith and hope, you become a new creation drenched in good deeds and soulful transformation.

There is another reason. I know what it's like to have the gift of dignity stolen. To have one's psychological and spiritual skin seared and stripped away. Many of you do as well. It's an unholy act, one that takes place thousands of times every day across this great country. Bullying angers God, and he works through his people to redeem what the enemy of our soul intends to destroy.

It's time to suit up for a new and belated battlefield, a field ripe for harvest but missing workers. A place where God's love, mercy, justice and compassion is sorely needed.

Justice is calling all of us this very hour, a time when faith and religion are increasingly marginalized and deemed irrelevant and even dangerous.  But what we have to say (and more importantly do) is not only relevant. It's essential. Who else other than the children of the living God will muster the love, courage and sacrifice necessary to deliver children from abject cruelty and evil?

When Apple's Steve Jobs tried to pull John Sculley from Pepsi, he appealed to every person's innate desire for purpose and meaning: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" The Protectors asks a similar question: Do you want to spend the rest of your life with sweet spirituality, or do you, too, want to change the world?

We offer one way that you can begin to effect that change today.  Well-known talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey has created what she calls an "ongoing conversation about bullying."   We applaud her for this, but it must include the faith component in order to succeed.

As a result, we have sent on Open Letter to Oprah, asking her and her producer to include The Protectors in her upcoming conversations.

If you would like to see The Protectors as part of this important programming, please write to:

Producer Ms. Lisa Morin
110 N. Carpenter St
Chicago, IL
60607

Tell her your story and how you know that without the faith community, there will be no lasting answer to this cruelty and injustice.

Open Letter:

Dear Oprah,

I have the great privilege of diminishing adolescent bullying in both private and public schools. After a recent assembly, a young girl with Coke-bottle glasses and a light-blue blouse shyly whispered in my ear, "Does bullying include sex?" This little girl was being bullied for sex with older boys. She was just nine years old. Another girl asked me, innocently, "Did you ever feel like killing yourself to get away from bullying the way I think about killing myself?"

These wounded children, along with the inspiration of Martin Luther King Jr., drive me to challenge people of faith to muster the courage and imagination necessary to love and protect others.  In the words of Dr. King, "We have learned to tolerate the intolerable." He was describing the injustice of segregation, and I'm convinced he would feel the same today about adolescent bullying's cruelty and dignity-stripping injustice.

America's noble Civil Rights Movement succeeded in part due to three powerful forces: media, legislation, and clergy. Today America faces a similar Civil Rights battle, not based upon the color of one's skin, but a variety of other differences, commonly an unassertive personality and children who are physically or mentally challenged. On a daily basis, adolescent bullying denies hundreds of thousands of children equal access to a public education and sears their psychological skin, leading to mental disorders that can last into adulthood. Hundreds of children have committed "bullycide"-suicide driven by the despair of bullying, and almost every one of America's school shooters told the Secret Service that their motivation was revenge from being bullied.

The media are more than willing to show America the devastating results of bullying. More and more states are drafting tougher laws against bullying. But the faith community is largely missing. Until now. We are The Protectors, the faith-based response to adolescent bullying. Our faith-inspiring curriculum is being used throughout North America and in other countries including South Africa and Uganda. Mukisa Peterson, a rural minister and community leader in Uganda, uses our anti-bullying curriculum each time he opens a new orphanage in his rural area.

Oprah, The Protectors is so glad that you have initiated an ongoing discussion about this seminal topic, and hope you will include us in future conversations. Our mission is to bring the faith community into the battle against this growing epidemic. The Public School System has already called upon people of faith to play a larger role in the theater of bullying. The Bullying Prevention Handbook, put out by the National Educational Service, states:

In the end, bullying is related to our ultimate beliefs about the worth of individuals and the way they should be treated...Educational leaders may look to the world's religions for answers to...how we interrelate. For example, the Judeo-Christian view that man is created in the image of God has enormous moral implications for how the weakest among us are treated. In the Christian tradition, Jesus stated that whatever was done to the weakest was done to him.

It is usually people of faith who have taken the lead in defending human dignity and value. It is well past time for people of faith to rise up and defend the dignity of hundreds of thousands of children who need an advocate and protector. We provide the inspiration and training needed to complete this noble task.

I welcome any opportunity to be part of your continued conversation about this pivotal issue.
Sincerely,

Paul Coughlin
Founder, The Protectors

For many its graduation time from a nice but innocuous and boring spirituality to a more bold and more loving Christianity. Together, we'll change history within history.  

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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On a daily basis, much of life's essence is about how much energy you give away and where you give it.  Believe it or not, a passive and cowardly approach takes far more energy than an assertive and courageous approach.  Cowardice puts us on the defensive, constantly covering up, being reactive, protecting ourselves from life's many blows—some of which are unjust, a fact that really steams cowardly and passive people, which derails and drains them even more.  We neither make progress nor replenish our resources while playing defense all the time.

Defense destructs.  Offense creates.  Deconstructing, which is easier than constructing, has permeated evangelical spirituality.  We judge our spiritual "progress" more in terms of what we don't do; this is intrinsically defensive.  Think about it: Doing something good is more challenging than avoiding something bad.  Doing good has an offensive orientation toward life.

We're more likely to be criticized for being offensive than defensive, so we usually settle for the less conspicuous position…and thereby avoid spiritual growth.  Nevertheless, behaving flawlessly and having all your ducks in a row is no defense against criticism.  Behave perfectly, or make a few mistakes—in the end, when it comes to being criticized, it doesn't matter.  Have a more offensive orientation toward life, the kind thumos urges us to have, and you will be criticized.

There's no way around it.   People love the status quo, and when you break from it, like a prisoner over a fence, all kinds of sirens and lights will be thrown on to get you back in the yard.  Jesus warned us about this, saying that following him would tear families apart and cause hatred and even result in murder.

At the same time, being on the offensive really scares passive men: it requires thumos, the employment of creativity and courage.  However, it also creates much more progress, and with less energy.  No matter that you have to fight and struggle to get there—you're already fighting, so you may as well be making more progress with less energy.

More than twenty-five times the bible tells us to be strong and courageous.  For Christian Nice Guys, a part of them knows that this is true, and it resonates within them, yet their spiritual background—what they understand to be "Christianity"—tells them it's sinful and wrong, dirty somehow.  If this is you, then in order to light a spark and familiarize yourself with action, I recommend trying entry-level martial arts; or give archery or target-shooting a chance; or take up hunting or fishing.  One or more of these endeavors may help you to experience the value of focused will and intention within a disciplined framework.

If you've been conditioned to listen only to music that's sweet and amiable, without a single rough edge, try listening to soul music; try some R&B; look for some good hip-hop; sample my favorite, jazz…at any rate, ingest some music that has fire in its belly, wind in its lungs, and dirt under its nails.

Too often when I make such suggestions, I'm met with a blank stare.  "Um, I'll look into that," a man will say, with approximately zero conviction.  For some, this concept of thumos-building is just too much, too far outside their domesticated, castration-producing background.  At the same time, they wonder why they give up easily when the going gets tough.  They can't figure out why they never really enter into life in the first place; the answer is: They don't enter in because they aren't really alive.

To show you what I mean, here's one of many such letters we get a Coughlin Ministries:

I am a college student who has been struggling with being more courageous for years.  Before and after becoming a Christian, I was always picked on, abused, laughed at.  I always thought that prosperity in my career was wrong and immoral.  I thought as men we are supposed to be passive and not succeed in our work life and that doing something like that is "worldly."

Sometimes I see myself as a dead dog that doesn't deserve anything better, while all of those secular people get to have all the fun.  I'm not saying that we drink and party our way to heaven, but as Christian men, we should walk with integrity and stand up for the weak one and what is morally right.

I don't want to be a wimp when it comes to being married either.  Thank you for clearing up some misconceptions about my religion.

We can listen to this young man and say his real problem is that he doesn't have much self-esteem.  While it's true that he's lacking self-worth, one of the reasons he undervalues himself is that he does not possess an inner sword, what I call a sword of willingness.  Not will, in this case, but willingness, a spiritual eagerness (which is one way English Bibles translate the Greek word prothumos) to enter the fray, to confront, to clarify, to pronounce, and to protect himself and others so that he can deeply love.

His thumos-heated internal sword is recognized the world over and by different names, much the way thumos in general is recognized by different names.  The Tibetans refer to it as the "Vajra sword."  I wonder if it's from this attribute that someone created the word Viagra, an allusion to the tight connection between virility, sex, and thumos.  Without this inner sword, they say, no spiritual life is possible, nor is manhood obtainable.  Through spiritual atrophy, men without this sword are sitting ducks for spiritual abuse and sexual frustration.

The deepest matters are hard to put into words that go all the way down, which is one reason why Jesus told stories.  He left us with images and characters that, like the prodigal son, may not be historical but nonetheless are vivid, engaging, and truthful.  We give deeper truths a kind of "container," for instance, in the way we say emotions are found in our "heart," thoughts are in our "head," and courage is in our "chest."

And so it is with thumos.  To better understand how it repairs us, we have to give it some shape and form.  In Greek epics, thumos represents winds of change inside and outside of us: It's a life-wind that requires and facilitates action and boldness.

The fierce wind that blew through the upper room, igniting the early church with God's Spirit, can be perceived in a larger and more metaphorical sense in terms of God's thumos visiting us.  It is fierce and agitating, intent on change, and filling his people, like Peter, with boldness, and others with disturbing behavior, including tongues "as of fire," and speaking in foreign languages.  We can't miss this point, because if we do we miss what thumos does.  Thumos is disturbing, but at its best, it's good, necessary, and life-giving trouble.

God's thumos troubles our air for our own good as part of his mysterious grace and his perfect will for us.  Similarly, thumos is man's inner wind that disturbs, hopefully toward the deepest love, one that bears earthly energy, arising from a Latin word for rush, run, flow.  At its best, it cultivates a desire to know and to alleviate the suffering of others, often (though not always) through our own suffering, when that suffering is unavoidable.

Suffering in and of itself is neither noble nor heroic.  Viktor Frankl, concentration camp survivor and founder of Logo-therapy, which is one of the most muscular attempts to make sense of life's inevitable suffering, wrote about the spiritual growth that can be the result of unavoidable hardship.

Is this to say that suffering is indispensable to the discovery of meaning?  In no way.  I only insist that meaning is available in spite of—nay, even through—suffering, provided…that the suffering is unavoidable.  If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

Thumos--courage helps us to do more than just endure suffering.  It helps us thrive through the suffering, to learn from it, to grow into a better person on the other side of the trial.  Otherwise, we're likely to remain impoverished and stuck.

But the view today that suffering born from sacrifice can somehow be exalted couldn't be more foreign.  We think suffering is something of a mistake, a false accusation to our lives.  Suffering and sacrifice are things to be eradicated and fixed.  And with this mindset, we also jettison the framework of courage.

In addition to wind, thumos is also described as breath, which is airy and flexible, and which is not to be mistaken for mere life.  Paul's eloquent dialogue in Athens provides an important distinction that helps us get our minds around this somewhat mysterious, intrinsic-to-spiritual-staying-power attribute.  He told those assembled that "[God] is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else."

Why does Paul use two words: life and breath?  A foundational understanding of thumos may provide the answer.  There's a substantial difference between the state and gifting of being alive (life) and an animating quality that rests within this gift (breath).  All men possess life, but not all men possess breath—an animated spirit.  You see it wherever you go—offices, churches, restaurants.  Some men are simply and undeniably alive and vibrant and courageous.  They are the go-to guys, men known for getting things done.  Man is far more than a sophisticated organism capable of mere mechanical life.  He has the potential to take life to a higher, more God-glorifying level to "make life [his] own" (Hebrews 10:39 NEB).  Thumos men are too animated and vital to waste their lives.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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