Dr. Gene Getz, author of “Measure of a Man” and many other books, was both my professor and pastor while I attended Dallas Seminary.
Herb: Dr. Getz, thank you so much for getting together with me. Bring us up to date on what you’re doing now.
Dr. Getz: I have a fifteen minute daily radio program, Renewal Radio, where I do interviews. In fact, I just did a series of interviews with Karen James whose husband died on Mt.Hood about ten years ago. It’s an incredible story when they lost those three guys.
Herb: One of your early books was Measure of a Man, and we’re at a men’s ministry conference. That book is still in print, isn’t it?
Dr. Getz: It has never gone out of print. It came out in 1974 so it’s almost forty years since it was first published. Why didn’t it go out of print? I have a simple answer: I borrowed the outline from Paul.
Herb: Yes you did!
Dr. Getz: And you know where he got it, from the Lord. And I sometimes joke that when we get to heaven, at the rewards, he’ll get rewarded and I’ll get penalized for plagiarism. I have only revised it twice.
Herb: Do you know how many copies have been sold?
Dr. Getz: It’s over a million. It’s been translated into probably 25 different languages. But I don’t know exactly how many are out there. For example, it was translated into Hausa and used in the Hausa tribe and the first print was 2,000. But I really don’t know how many are out there.
Herb: Tell us about your latest work, Life Essentials Study Bible, where you combine the biblical text with printed commentary as well as Internet video commentary.
Dr. Getz: It was an unexpected development. I was just in the process of passing on my baton and leadership at Fellowship Bible Church North to my successor and I got a call from Nashville, from Broadman and Hollman, and they said, “Gene, as you know, we’ve just completed our new Home and Christian Standard Bible and would you do a principles to live by study Bible from Genesis to Revelation. That was the working title back then. So I said I’d take a look at it and they had published twelve of my character books, ten from the Old Testament. Every chapter ends with principles to live by. So they knew my whole approach to principalizing Scripture, which was a hermeneutic that I had worked on and refined for a long time. So they said, “You know how to principalize and we feel that we have a great study bible and you’ve done all these books [on Bible characters] so maybe it’ll take two years to do this.
Well, two years turned into seven years because this is line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I’ve been in the ministry for years, but you never teach every line. But on this project, it had to be every sentence and I had to work through the whole Bible. And I no sooner got into it and I realized that I couldn’t even borrow what I’ve already done. I’ve got to create it fresh so the whole thing holds together so there’s continuity, there’s flow and consistency.
And so I started and I determined to research it, write it, and teach it to a live audience. And by the way, I’ve had people helping me that have stayed with me for over six years while I was doing this process. And then my high tech guy says, ?If you’re going to do all this, you need to video tape it all. Let’s do it with high quality video, multi-camera, PowerPoint, and put you on the Internet so people can see what you’re doing.”
Well, we didn’t realize that five years later YouTube would come along and smart phone technology with QR codes [Quick Response scanning codes similar to bar codes]. And fortunately, I had five years of teaching already that I had. So I’m going through this process and into the seventh year the Bible formatting had already been laid out with principles corresponding to their appropriate passages… My idea was a built-in curriculum, highlight the big idea in each passage, lay the principle right there so the Bible would virtually teach itself. So it’s all laid out and they said, “Gene, we want to put a QR code by each of those principles.” So they had to go back to the layout people in Denmark and insert that QR code.
We took 300 hours of video that I’ve done over the last five or six years and edited that all into 1,500 segments, to go with 1,500 principles. The 1,500 principles are laid right in with 1,500 sections of commentary. We’re having a really exciting response to it. People are getting into the Word for the very first time. They understand how the whole Bible fits together because I unfold the whole Biblical story around those 1,500 principles.
Herb: On the topic of men’s ministry, what would you say are the main issues that men’s ministry and men in general face?
Dr. Getz: One of the main issues that guys are facing now is moral purity. I think every male, generally speaking, if we’re normal, could be addicted. Sex is a natural gift that God has given us and pornography is tapping into a gift that God has given us and perverting it. So it’s a tough situation for guys. So I think that’s an issue that we really have to address with accountability. High school kids, junior high kids, what they’re getting exposed to. It used to be you could put safety devices on your computers, but what about your cell phones? It’s open season. It’s not if, it’s when, our kids are going to get exposed to porn. And for me that’s one of the most significant things that we have to deal with because it’s just a male issue and a male problem that’s being tapped into.
And the issue of pornography is interrelated with marriage. Marriage has enough challenges in our culture. The whole view of marriage in terms of commitment is a problem in terms of what it means to love a woman. The more guys who grow up in dysfunctional families, the more guys there are who don’t know how to love a woman. So the church has got to re-parent them. I love the concept of re-parenting. Just think of the New Testament when men and women came to Christ in the Roman world, you talk about dysfunction, it was almost 100% dysfunction, other than some Jewish homes. But God changed that. So the hope is, if they could come out of it and have Christ-centered homes and marriages, can’t we stay out of it? That’s the hope. But it’s going to take a lot of work.
Herb: Why do you think men’s ministry tends to be a weaker ministry in the local church?
Dr. Getz: I think women tend to be better readers. They read more. Men are so busy. They’re not readers, which makes them more vulnerable to the media as well. Just go back to Promise Keepers. Its vision was not to just have big events, but to see a lot of men’s ministry take place in the local church. And I think a lot of that has happened, but not as they anticipated. I think part of it is as pastors, we don’t realize how important men’s ministry is. And if we’re not involved in it, especially in a small church, it’s not going to happen.
I was fortunate enough to be in large churches where I could have men assigned to men’s ministry. But I also found, though, that when we did retreats, the greatest thing that they appreciated was I was out there with them, playing volleyball, just letting my hair down, letting them poke fun at me, laughing together, praying together. As pastors, we’ve got to come off the bench. We’ve got to get out there with them. Even if we delegate, we need to do that. But I’m not sure I can answer your question as to why it’s weaker. Satan certainly doesn’t want it to be stronger.
Herb: Do you feel like seminaries are doing an adequate job for preparing men for men’s ministry specifically?
Dr. Getz: Let me broaden that. The seminary has been challenged in the last 40 or 50 years with whether or not we’re preparing men to be pastors; teaching them the Word, yes, but not teaching them how to relate to people. So I think there are a lot of areas where I think the seminary has been trying to give more attention to those practical matters. And certainly one of them is men’s ministry. Now to be honest with you, ve been out of the seminary environment for years in terms of being in church planting. I got into church planting in 1972. I kept teaching at Dallas Seminary part time. But my life has been the local church. If you asked me right now to do an analysis of the curriculum of every evangelical seminary in terms of what they’re doing in men’s ministry, I couldn’t do it. You probably know more about that than I do. I’m generalizing when I’m saying that I think the seminaries have lacked in dealing with a lot of the real issues that are being faced today. They are fighting to keep up.
Herb: Dr. Getz, I want to thank you for being my pastor and my professor while I was in seminary. What an honor it has been to know you. Thank you so much for your time.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North America and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt widows, single moms and fatherless children in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church at newcommandment.org.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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