Josh Benner

Tag: love

  • How to give the perfect wedding toast

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    I love weddings. I’ve had the chance to have a wedding (thanks Kari). I’ve officiated several weddings, and been in a few more. I also do public speaking every week.

    Having to write a speech can be scary and a major source of stress for people who are less comfortable in front of an audience.

    Listen to me. You can give a great wedding speech. You have it in you.

    1. Do not make the toast about yourself! 

    Common mistake.

    It’s not about you. People are not at the wedding for you. They’re there for the bride and groom. Make it about them.

    Sure it’s appropriate to say how you know the bride and groom. It can be appropriate to share a story about you and the bride or groom or a story that involves you and the bride and groom.

    But don’t have the toast revolve around you.

    2. Keep it short

    Have you ever seen a commercial that was so poignant it moved you in your soul? You can say something meaningful in a short time.

    The Gettysburg Address was 272 words. That’s a 2-3 minute speech.

    If your wedding toasts goes past four minutes, that’s too long.

    Also to show what can be accomplished in a short period of time:

    3. Humor is optional

    Wedding toasts can be funny. But don’t feel pressure to make it funny.

    Good rule of thumb: are you funny?

    I’m not asking if you proclaim yourself to be funny. Do other people tell you you’re funny and laugh at things you say? If so, sure use humor if you want to. If not, don’t try to make a wedding toast the opportunity to do something you’re already bad at.

    4. Do not say any of the following 

    “I”m not a professional speaker.” No one cares. I’ve seen people who have plenty of public speaking experience give terrible speeches. And I’ve seen people who have very little public speaking experience get up there, speak from the heart, and give awesome speeches. You don’t have to be a pro to speak well.

    Similarly, if you make a mistake, don’t apologize, don’t say “oops,” keep going. People won’t remember it if you keep moving forward with the speech.

    If you’re the best man, and you don’t know the bride very well or if you’re the maid of honor and you don’t know the groom very well, don’t say “I don’t really know (their name)…”

    Don’t mention an ex of the bride or the groom in the speech. That person is from their old life. Your friend is going forward with someone else (who’s better).

    5. Awkward and embarrassing stories about the bride and groom 

    Don’t!

    No one looks back fondly at wedding toasts that were trying to embarrass the bride and groom. People do look back fondly at the ones that support the couple and where it is evident that the toast master has a lot of love for both the bride and groom.

    6. DO NOT make jokes about their love for each other, commitment to each other, references to past relationships, or any suggestion whatsoever that the relationship might not last. 

    I once went to a wedding and the best man said “I wrote a great toast…but I plan to give it at his next wedding.”

    That’s not funny.

    It’s poor form. (Also that person did have a lot of public speaking experience and should have known better).

    It dishonors the bride, the groom, and their marriage. It’s not the time or the place. In fact, it’s the worst time and place to joke about the status of their relationship or the sincerity of their love.

    And while we’re at it:

    7. Do not use the toast as a soap box to complain about marriage 

    Don’t say things that undermine or undervalue the union of marriage.

    Maybe you’re cynical about love or marriage. Maybe you’re divorced. Whatever the case, if you’re not a huge fan of the commitment of marriage, that is not the time or place to share your views.

    8. Public speaking tips 

    Don’t wing it. The week of the wedding, give some thought to your relationship with the bride and groom, practice a few times. If you’re drinking alcohol at the wedding, make sure you’re able to give a clear speech. Speak slowly. Breathe.

    If you follow the rest of what I’ve said, you’re going to be fine. If you give a quick, sincere speech that focuses on the bride and groom, that shows a lot of love, you’re going to give a great speech.

    Questions? Feel free to ask in the comments. 

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • The true test of love

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    Everyone loves love.

    But not everyone agrees on what love is.

    Much of society associates love with tolerance and acceptance.

    And while we can agree that love is good, truly having love for people is challenging. Yes, it’s easy to love family and good friends. Jesus addresses that in the Gospel of Luke: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that (Luke 6:32-33).” 

    The Bible shows us what love is on the cross. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).”

    In 1 John 3:16-17, the Apostle John says:

    By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?

    -1 John 3:16-17

    It’s easy to agree with that. It’s easy to see the virtue in that.

    But what an incredibly difficult picture of love that is. I don’t think that it exclusively means dying (the second half of the passage talks about helping those in need, which assumes someone is alive to do that).

    Being apathetic to what people do, and calling that love, is easy.

    Just saying you love people is easy.

    Actually loving people is hard. Actually serving people is hard.

    And perhaps the truest test of love is how we treat those who are hardest for us to love. Again, it’s easy to love those who are nice to us. It’s easy to love those we like.

    But we’re sinful. And we all have those who are harder for us to love. Who is it who is hard for you to love? Maybe it’s someone who believes differently politically. Maybe those of another religion. Maybe it’s those who are rich or those who are poor and on the bottom of society’s rungs. Maybe it’s criminals or those who battle an addiction or have a mental disorder. Maybe it’s more than one of these groups.

    Again, it’s easy, in theory, to agree that we should love everyone.

    But whoever it is who’s the hardest for you to love is who you need to love. It’s a message that makes no sense to the world. And it’s a message that Jesus died to bring to the world.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • My first year of marriage: How I Met My Wife

    first lookI got married a year ago today.

    It’s crazy.

    As I think about how we met, there’s always been a certain amount of fatalism in our story. We met on eHarmony. I was living in Minnesota, she was in Atlanta. The first time we ever talked was February 20, 2017. It was a Monday night, I thought she was cute and seemed nice. Never in a million years dreamed that I was messaging my future wife.

    A couple weeks earlier, she had gotten out of a relationship. Had that not happened when it happened, we might not have ever met. Because she was looking to move further into Atlanta to be closer.

    In the same few days the relationship ended, her dad accepted a job in the St. Louis area and was going to move from the south to the midwest.

    The rest of Kari’s family was living in Alabama at the time. Kari was teaching in suburban Atlanta, but she wasn’t from Atlanta and didn’t have anything keeping her there. So with her parents getting ready to move, they asked Kari if she wanted to go to St. Louis, live at home, save some money.

    She said yes and when she joined eHarmony, planning to move to St. Louis, she listed that as her city.

    For me, in western Minnesota (not exactly the world’s most populous area,) I had widened my eHarmony search parameters to include Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri. But not Georgia.

    So had that relationship not ended at the same time that her parents had decided to move, we wouldn’t have met. Had her parents not decided to move, she likely wouldn’t have moved to a different part of the country, away from family by herself. Had her parents not moved to an area that was within my search parameters, we would not have met.

    All of the things in our lives matter. They ripple out. They’re connected to each other. Ripples from one event impact other things happening in our lives which impact those around us, our families, our futures. Every day matters, every choice matters.

    When I was single, more than anything, I wanted to be married. There were setbacks along the way. Times of frustration. But I never doubted that it would happen. But a funny thing about marriage is that once you get married to someone, it’s almost like you forget life before ever being married to that person.

    Happy anniversary Kari! I love you babe.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • Joshua Harris kisses “I kissed dating goodbye” goodbye

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    It’s crazy that one of the most popular books on dating written in the 90s was the dating philosophy of a 21 year old man…who was single at the time! In 1997, Joshua Harris wrote his dating manifesto “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” where he talked about…kissing dating goodbye. Instead of casual dating and having lots of relationships, Harris favored courtship, intentionality, rules and boundaries.

    It was a popular book.

    This philosophy continues to influence people. While Harris didn’t invent these ideas, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” exposed many to these approaches and rules.

    This week, the pastor and writer announced that he is working with his publisher to discontinue the book:

    In light of the flaws I now see in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I think it’s best to discontinue its publication, as well other supplemental resources tied to it (this includes the two books I wrote after it whose content is similar).

    -Joshua Harris statement

    In a 2016 interview with NPR, Harris acknowledged his consideration of the results espoused in IKDG: “I think it’s taken time for the consequences of the way that people applied the book and the way the book affected people to play out. And so I’m hearing these different voices saying, here’s how your book was used against me, here’s how it was forced on me, or here’s how I tried to – no one forced it on me, but I tried to apply it and it had this negative consequence in different ways. I’m trying to go back and really evaluate, you know, where did my book contribute to that? Where was it too stringent? And where was that me and what I was writing, and where was that – the families and the church cultures and so on?”

    Thoughts

    I was never a huge fan of this book. It’s not that everything in it was bad. For instance, of course it’s good to have intentionality in relationships. But Harris’s philosophy wasn’t just conservative on physical intimacy before marriage but also on emotional intimacy.

    In wanting people to not get overly emotionally committed before marriage, it risked a person getting too relationally committed to soon to people they knew too little.

    Some took Harris’s philosophy as gospel when it came to relationships. Harris argued against a culture where people hopped from one dating relationship to another to another. There needed to be more intentionality in dating. It was a courtship model where relationships were only entered into with people you could seriously see yourself marrying and where activities were largely based on building friendship.

    I think these ideas continue to reverberate through American Christian culture. While Harris warned against casual dating, hyper-intentional dating can put tremendous pressure on a couple from the outset of a pursuit. I think in Evangelical Christian circles, when two people do start dating, there can be this tendency to think “well they’re going to get married.”

    But there might be some serious reasons as to why those people are not a good fit. Dating without emotional connection (which Harris was weary of) can lead to superficial relationships.

    I think that millennial Christians tried to navigate relationships while a “hook up culture” existed for much of the rest of this generation.  And while many might not have taken dating and relationships seriously enough, I think Evangelicals pushed too far in taking dating to an opposite extreme which could be just as unhealthy, and where even the beginning of a relationship was taken with extreme seriousness.

    There is still be an “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” approach within Christian circles where courtship is seen as being inherently better and more God-honoring than dating. This is absurd, because neither dating nor courtship is the common method in the Bible of finding love.

    Some young Christians brought a formulaic approach to relationships and marriage. Almost like good things would happen for avoiding certain pitfalls of dating and relationships.

    This approach can lead to legalism and false hope that “if you follow the rules, you’ll have a fulfilling marriage.”

    In his statement this week, Joshua Harris touches on this idea that many took from his book: “The book also gave some the impression that a certain methodology of relationships would deliver a happy ever-after ending—a great marriage, a great sex life—even though this is not promised by scripture.”

    Dating should be taken seriously. But in our society, it does need to be taken casually enough to where a person doesn’t feel prematurely committed to someone who they’re just getting to know. And this isn’t just a critique of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” because there are other books from the same late 90s, early 2000s period which espouse similar philosophies.

    I think it’s worth appreciating the humility of Harris. He obviously took a long look at his book and its impact. It’s a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and put Harris on the map. For him to look at his own work and say it should be discontinued and to recommend other books, I think that take a big person.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • Woman sends exit survey after break ups. Crazy or genius?

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    A Tweet has gone viral about a young woman who send an exit survey to men she dates at the end of a relationship.

    Questions on the exit survey included:

    -What is wrong with Katie?

    -What is wrong with you?

    -At what point did you know this wouldn’t work out?

    -Would you refer Katie to a friend? If so, please list numbers here.

    While it’s unorthodox (ok, it’s strange), I appreciate wanting to be reflective and to learn from mistakes. It can be easy when a relationships ends to want to blame the other person, but usually when relationships end, it’s a two way street.

    Anytime a person has a relationship end, it’s helpful to ask how you contributed to the end of it. Otherwise it can be easy to get into a cycle of one failed relationship after another where a person keeps dating the same kinds of people and making the same types of mistakes thinking that things will be so much easier when they find this mythical “the one.”

    As I already mentioned, the Tweet referencing the survey has already been liked 21,000 times.

    Although not everyone is a fan. Some comments I saw on articles were negative, saying “Run!” and calling it crazy, others mocking the young lady and saying things like “I think I know why she’s single.” Again, I realize it’s unusual. But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting some closure. And at the end of a relationship, if a little constructive reflection can leave both people suited to be better off in their next relationship, that strikes me as a good thing. Especially if a person chooses to respond and add some insights.

    Before getting married, I know there were times when things would inexplicably end and I didn’t always get the opportunity to find out why. So I can definitely empathize with a person wanting that closure.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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