I remain shocked at the number of young men whose father never talked to them about masculine sexuality. Last weekend I led a breakout session titled “Transforming Male Sexuality” at the Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh for college students. Out of the 70 guys in this men’s only discussion only 3 of them raised their hands to the question, “How many of your Dads sat you down and talked to you about your sexuality?” If boys do not learn about God’s design for their sexuality from their fathers, from where will this wisdom come? Movies? Music? Peers?

Sadly, young guys are left to fend for themselves in an openly sex-crazed, gender-confused culture. While many fathers may discuss the biology of reproduction very few bravely go beyond that. Cowardice and passivity prevail as fathers watch their sons walk into the fire that is lust. They fail to offer any warnings, techniques, or tools to their vulnerable young sons as they battle the blaze.

It is disastrous for a father to flee from openly discussing with his son the realities of both the glory and brokenness of male sexuality. This is a father’s job–to draw from God’s wisdom for us as men and prepare his sons for the issues in life that await them (Prov. 5). Telling sons simply to “not sin” and “hold on until marriage” does not form them. Boys need life-long formation regarding what it means to walk the road of chastity. They need to be trained how to spiritually, emotionally, and physically love women in a way that is pleasing to God and brings joy to a wife.

Fathers, be active and brave. Walk with your sons and be honest about your own struggles, successes, and failures with sexual purity. Demonstrate to them what it means to live in absolute dependence on the Holy Spirit. This is not a one-time conversation. Fathers serve as a reservoir of wisdom for identity throughout the son’s life. There is no better person for this than a boy’s father (Deut. 6:4-6).

Sons without Godly fathers, seek out men in the church to step up and bless you by teaching you the truth. You may need to initiate and lead older men by asking them questions. The silence must end today. It’s never too late to start because the fire awaits and many have already been badly burned.

The evangelical church grossly underchallenges men aged 18-29. What does the church expect of young men? Not much: Stay out of trouble, get married, and remain sexually pure. Now God has raised up an army of men to fight against a world of evil as part of His redemptive mission, and the best thing most churches have for guys is an informational Bible study, group penance in an accountability group, and once-a-week basketball.

David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going To Church, says the church’s focus on “relationships” — a personal relationship with Jesus and healthy relationships with others — appeals directly to the needs of women. Jesus, as the fulfiller of relationship needs, “partners with women to fulfill their deepest longing” for safety and security. Few churches model men’s values, says Murrow: “risk and reward, accomplishment, heroic sacrifice, action and adventure.” Men respond to challenge and invitations to embark on missions.

Jesus invited his disciples to “follow” Him into mission and battle for the purposes of the Kingdom. Churches ask young men to be quiet, nice, and cuddly with a hippie Jesus. Jesus did not say, “Hey guys, will you have a relationship with me?”

Men typically aren’t looking for a church with safe programs either. Men change through encounters with inspiring men, Murrow argues: “Every successful man will tell you of a father, an uncle, a teacher, a coach, or a sergeant who made the difference in his life.”

Passivity, softness, pink walls, love ballads, safety and security idols will not sustain a population of younger men. Many churches attempt to rectify this by unwisely creating separate ministries to reach “college and career” young adults or developing a special service with “cooler” music. Music ain’t the problem.

If you want to capture the hearts of men you must invite them to die by rejecting the idols of safety and comfort. Jesus invites men to follow him into mystery, uncertainty, adventure, danger, pain, suffering, warfare, and death. Jesus invites men to live in poverty, fight evil, endure attacks, and to follow inspiring men. Most churches only challenge young men to be nice, live for safety, hang out with youth, sing “You’re altogether lovely. . .altogether wonderful to me,” and stay out of trouble until they get married. As a result, young guys avoid church, stay at home to play Nintendo Wii, watch sports, plan their next female conquest, brainstorm about tattoos, and ski.

I was having lunch with a friend whose relationship with his wife is incredibly strained. I told him that his wife seems to have a fantasy that he will be dragged off into the woods by a bunch of idealized Pilgrim men, who will proceed to make him into the man she really wants. “That would be great,” he said. He really did mean it.

I think it’s a wish many men have, that a group of men will draw close and rescue us from ourselves. It’s what made John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart so successful, in part, because he appealed to wide swaths of men who have the sense that we have not received an induction into Christian manhood. We could catalog the causes in the failures of recent decades: rising divorce rates, the proportion of children born without a father in the home at 25 percent and rising, a generation of men reared by the fantastically self-obsessed Baby Boomers, a culture that elevates personal satisfaction over all other standards.

In the face of these trends the Church has proven largely impotent, such that the practice of faith has become marginalized and atomized. Churches have little authority to discipline members or their children. If you aren’t happy with your pastor’s tie color, let alone any discipline your session might try to mete out (assuming you’re in a church with that kind of conviction and mettle in the first place), there are any number of congregations happy to receive you with no questions asked. It is the Burger Kingization of Christianity: have it your way.

The consequence, too often, is every man for himself. I have another friend who was on the brink of divorce, who practically begged the elders and seeming leaders in his church for help, with barely a phone call in return. That church is planting churches. They’re thriving, at least according to whatever meaningless measures we apply to church growth. Our buildings and finances seem far stronger than our spines, than the bonds that are supposed to unite us one to another.

I’m blessed to be in a church with many strong and faithful men. My friend, the one with whom I had lunch, will have help if he’ll take it. He will have men who come alongside him, and his wife will have women do the same with her. This ought to be the measure, I think, of a church. Does it care for those in need, and discipline those in sin, all with a spirit of love? Is it a community of faith, or a clearinghouse for faith-based activities?

I don’t think we can afford much more of the latter. We have a great deal of work to do. Too many of our parents have failed us, and too many of us are failing our own children. There is so much work to do, and so little time, and it’s one of the reasons that I, at least, couldn’t care less about what some fool of a Democrat or Republican has to say about the state of the GNP, or our national greatness, or whatever other snake oil they’re peddling this week.

The real work, I think, begins in our churches, shoring up one another’s weaknesses, and giving our children the foundation many of us were denied. We need to show our sons how to be men, and our daughters how to be women, and for many of us that means figuring it out as we go. It certainly means so for me, and for many men I know. We are trying to learn how to be real men in a world that devalues and mocks the very notion of manhood, yet which cries out for it.

Nobody is going to drag my friend or me into the woods to make us into real men. We’re learning as we go. Hopefully our children will have an easier time on their paths. Hopefully they’ll have less repair work to do, and can take part in the true building — not of church buildings, but of communities — that desperately needs doing in a country that is increasingly rich in wealth, and increasingly impoverished in life and hope.

About 90 percent of boys raised in the Church abandon it by their 20th birthday according to David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going to Church. Many of these men will only return later under the influence of a spouse, girlfriend, or because “the kids need to see Dad at church.”

Murrow’s thesis is that the church focuses more on the needs of women and young men are jumping ship. In a video for a John Piper’s Desiring God conference, Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle says this the church is packed with “church boys” wearing “sweater vests, walking around singing love songs to Jesus.” Driscoll believes that the problem in the church today is that we have a lot of “nice, soft, chic-a-fied church boys.” Church is a turn-off to young men when they walk in and see walls painted “sea-foam green, fucia, and lemon yellow,” he says. “The whole aesthetic and the whole architecture is feminine.”

“Most churches,” says Driscoll, “are built to cater to 40-something-year-old women and their children and the guys are nowhere to be found.” A recent Barna study reported that the least likely group of people to attend church are men between the ages of 18 to 29. Murrow offers this explanation:

“Almost everything about today’s church—its teaching style, its ministries, the way people are expected to behave, even today’s popular images of Jesus—is designed to meet the needs and expectations of a largely female audience. Church is sweet and sentimental, nurturing, and nice. Women thrive in this environment. In modern parlance, women are the target audience of today’s church.”

This is most obvious in the “contemporary” music played in many churches today which are nothing more than prom songs and love ballads with “Jesus” inserted in lyrics instead of “baby” or “my darling”. Here’s are lyrics from the praise band Underoath:

Oh sweet angel of mercy
With your grace like the morning
Wrap your loving arms around me
Oh sweet angel of mercy
With your grace like the morning
Wrap your loving arms around me

Yeah, I can just see the men 18-29 years-old flocking to churches grabbing guitars to softly serenade the one from whose mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rev. 19:15-16).

Blogger Make It Man pointed out this essay - “A Requiem for Friendship” - from one of my favorite magazines, Touchstone.  The thesis, in brief, is that the sexual revolution and the cultural parade of homosexuality have sullied the possibility of friendships between men.

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

The bottom rail is on top again.

Of all the pathetic “bait and switch” approaches churches have used to attract males, using Halo 3 reaches new lows. The New York Times ran a story describing escalating uses of the Halo video game to attract boys and young men to church.

This is sad not because churches are using a violent video game. A video game based on Leviticus, Joshua, or Judges would be equally violent and gruesome. Tragically, this programmatic, outreach-oriented approach is out of a 1950’s playbook on attracting men and boys to church buildings.

Bait and switch: find a common denominator and use it to hook’em! Youth pastor Gregg Barbour uses Halo because he believes God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.” “Teens are our ‘fish,” he writes. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.” What’s next, “hook up” night?

The 1950’s approach, akin to Oklahoma running a wishbone offense in 2007, is primarily concerned with getting more bodies into buildings. This method cannot be found in the Bible.

“Yeah, but it worked for me,” some argue. So what?

Men and boys are not a “market,” they bear the image of God and are called to follow Jesus. What if churches did something radical like loving and serving men and boys in their local neighborhoods, off the church property, bringing them into real discipleship by immersing them into communities of authentic and open masculine formation?

If churches were really serious about having boys and men join them they would stop singing love ballads to Jesus, repaint the pink and lavender walls, and preach to the transcendental questions looming in the minds of boys and men. Jesus does not use gimmicks he simply invites men into danger to heal, fight, suffer, and die for the Kingdom of God.

Time Magazine recently asked: “Does being more of a father make you less of a man?” Responses from the man on the street were mixed, with some dads noting that women are attracted to a man who spends time with his children, and others saying that they feel emasculated by taking on more of the childcare responsibilities. Of particular interest to me was this quote, from University of Texas psychologist Andrew Rochen:

“Masculinity has traditionally been associated with work and work-related success, with competition, power, prestige, dominance over women, restrictive emotionality. . . But a good parent needs to be expressive, patient, emotional, not money oriented. Basically, masculinity is bad for you.”

I found myself nodding at the first two sentences, and growling at the third. Many of us have seen how men in modern America measure themselves — by their wealth, their authority in the company, the success of their children in sports. Those of us who have seen good fathering, likewise, know that Rochen is right about the necessity of patience and expressiveness.

But is masculinity inherently the opposite of these things? Guys, do we have to abandon our manhood in order to be the fathers our children need?

With all due respect to the good professor, that’s hogwash. Consider Teddy Roosevelt, the epitome of a man’s man. Accomplished hunter, soldier, and leader of men, if Roosevelt doesn’t qualify for the label “masculine,” then I’m not sure who does. But consider his hundreds of letters to his children, imparting encouragement, admonition, advice, and above all, affection. His diaries reflect a similar concern with shepherding each of his children into adulthood. He spent time with them, he taught them on his knee, he made sure each son and daughter understood a father’s love.

But he also once hunted down a mountain lion and stabbed it in the heart with his knife. When I read about men like Roosevelt, I don’t find myself wondering if I have to be less of a man to be more of a father; instead I find myself thinking that I need to work on being more of a man and more of a father.

The problem with ideas like masculinity and manhood is not that they are bundles of bad behavior. The problem is that they’ve been hijacked by half-men. The droves of males we see advancing themselves in their careers by neglecting their children should not rightly be called real men. They are boys playing at the game of man. It is a man-boy who thinks money is his measure. It is a man-boy who works long hours so he can win the approval of his CEO. It is the man-boy who thinks he is something because he can get women to do his bidding.

A real man, on the other hand, protects and provides for his family, and partners with his wife to train up his children in the way they should go. He isn’t necessarily gabby, but his children know in their souls that he loves them. He is patient and kind. He lays down his life for his family every day.

Fifty years ago, we all knew these things. Today, however, we are beset by a host of intellectuals who haven’t the sense to recognize that fewer and fewer males know how to become real men. The problem is not that masculinity is rotten. It is that so few men live up to it.