It's always a joy for me to speak at men's conferences, pastors' conferences, church leadership conferences. I love speaking to men and encouraging them to be men-real men; manly men, unashamed of our masculinity and unapologetic about it.
As a matter of fact, I think one of the crying needs in the church today is a bold, earnest pushback against the steady feminization of the church. In recent years, this is a subject that more and more evangelicals have begun to pay attention to. We can't ignore it anymore. Men have been leaving the church in droves. It's now more than a decade since the Promise Keeper's movement peaked and all but died, and the ratio of men to women in the church is now smaller than it has ever been.
And let's face it: to a very large degree, that is because the church itself has deliberately marginalized manhood, belittled masculine qualities, favored womanly, soft, delicate mushiness-even from our preachers. (Perhaps I should say especially from our preachers.) Evangelicals love speakers who can tiptoe around tough issues without upsetting anyone. We've heaped to ourselves teachers who will tickle our itching ears. And now the evangelical movement is overrun with weak church leaders and church-growth engineers who are obsessed with being stylish. By and large they are too frightened to take a bold stand for anything. Because these days, contending earnestly for...
