Herb: Gordon, tell us about your ministry and how you work with men.
Gordon: Back in the 1980’s I began to realize that my friends and I all had a hard time getting focused with our lives. I had been a high school teacher, pastor, counselor, lots of different things. I never had a sense of destiny or what my real gifting was. Most of us felt insecure around women. We didn’t know how to relate to a woman as a person and lacked sexual boundaries. The common dysfunctional thread was that we didn’t have close relationships with our fathers.
Eventually, I saw that this insecurity and lack of life focus among men crossed all boundaries-social, economic, racial, nationalities-it’s the elephant in the world’s living room that nobody dares to face. That’s what led me to write Healing the Masculine Soul, which pioneered the Christian men’s movement back in 1987, became a bestseller and has never gone out of print since.
Herb: What percentage of Christian men have a good relationship with their father?
Gordon: Men who can talk openly and freely with their father about their lives without being judged, who have a two-way relationship of sharing together–that’s very rare from what I’ve seen. I’ve done some secular conferences, but my sample is mostly Christian men. Frankly, I would almost guess it might be better among non-Christian men because in churches we struggle more with shame.
Shame is the great crippler of men. Wherever you go with men, shame is the enemy. You’ve got to look good on the football field, in the business boardroom, up in the pulpit. As soon as someone finds out we’re not so good, you put a protective spin on it, you try to cover your shame. In churches, shame often hides in the background. It’s the bearer of death among Christian men. This is where the spirit of religion gets into churches because it promises to cover our shame if we just perform well for God. You do these five principles of godly manhood, these eight marks of a biblical champion, these seven promises, and you’ll be okay. You “align” with these biblical standards, apply them correctly, and you’re in. The Father will love you now because, just like when you were a boy, if you got a D on your report card your dad was upset with you until you get a B. You learn how to please a dad. You have to take the trash out at the right time. You’ve got to get decent grades. You keep your nose clean, perform well, and the father loves you. So welcome to church. If you want Father God’s love, you’d better do it right.
Herb: Performance religion.
Gordon: That’s right. You better watch out. “Thou shalt not” or you die. And if you don’t die, then we’ll kick you off the team – which is a form of death to a man. The church message is clear: Perform like us, and we accept you. It’s all a charade. The fact is, nobody can perform like we know we should. If we could, Jesus would never have had to come and die on the cross for us. The Apostle was real enough to confess that. “I know that good does not live in me, that is, in my human nature,” he said in Romans 7. “For even though the desire to do good is in me, I’m not able to do it. Who will save me from this body taking me to death?” When a man faces the truth, that he just can’t perform as the church culture requires, then he either has to leave the church or join the religious game. He has to pretend he’s performing like all the other men. That’s when the false father of Lies takes over – not to remove your shame like Jesus, but to hide it.
Herb: How can men break that pattern?
Gordon: We have to understand that this spirit of religion is a killer. It killed Jesus. The Apostle Paul said flat-out that the Law brings death, but the Spirit brings life. The Pharisees were classic religionists. It’s the operative spirit in performance oriented faiths like Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and Mormonism. But you also find it in religiously correct evangelical Christianity, as well as politically correct liberal Christianity. Jesus is not about being correct before men, but being real before your Father. That’s why he came, to free us from the shame that keeps us from being real.
So how do you break loose of that? Guys tell me they want that freedom to be real, but they keep running away from God. I tell them, “Run as long as you can.” You have to come to the end of your own power before you can receive your Father’s power. That’s the job of the Law, to bring a man to death, to make him realize he can’t measure up on his own. When the Law has done its job, then a man is ready for the work of the Spirit. In Romans 2:28-29, Paul asks, “Who is a real Jew, truly circumcised? A real Jew is not a man whose flesh has been circumcised – that is, who’s done all the performance things correctly. Rather, a real Jew is a man whose heart has been circumcised, and this is the work of God’s Spirit, not of the written law. Such a man receives his praise from God, not from man.” When I read that text years ago it blew me away, because I’d been struggling so hard to get the praise of other men, other pastors, other teachers, just like when I was a boy with my dad. It was like, “Everybody, please tell me I’m okay!”
Finally the wounding and bitterness that grew out of this farce forced me to realize that I had bitten the enemy’s bait and let him distract me from the love and acceptance only Father God can give a man. I asked Father God to forgive me for not trusting and receiving His love, and began learning to get my praise from Him. I realized what I had to do to get it, that is, nothing. He just said, “Come to me.”
Now, to get to that place in your life where the Spirit takes over your life, the flesh has to die. And that means you have to get crucified. You have to confess that you’re not in control, that you can’t do it, that you don’t need ten more principles of manhood, four more marks of a champion, all these things I must do to measure up to God. So many Christian ministries will tell you the right thing to do – like, “It’s right in the Bible and the benefits of doing it: you get to be in the fellowship of the good guys, you go to heaven, your wife will love you, your kids will turn out okay. And if you don’t do it, you’ll be out on your butt, so you better do it.” It sounds great until you realize you can’t do it. Just the other day this lady got out of a car in a miniskirt in front of me and this whole thing became real yet again to me. I’m not ignorant. I know what the bible says about sin, all the reasons not to look, but my eyes lingered.
My problem is not that I’m ignorant, but that I’m dying. I don’t need knowledge, I need the saving hand of a Father. So you have to die to all of this. You have to be able to say to other men, “God bless you. I’m not here to judge you. That’s between you and God. I desperately wish I could, but I can’t perform to the standards you’re promoting.” That’s how you die. Your pride gets nailed.
Herb: How do you get from the point of doing something out of obligation to doing something out of love?
Gordon: The Bible says that love comes from God. If you’re doing something out of love, then the true passion behind that is the Spirit of the Father. I was just on my knees in this room last night begging Father God to give me more of His heart for my son. He’s 21. I need to know how to love him better. My dad gave me the very best he had and I honor him for that. But it’s not enough for my son in the world he faces today, with porn just a tap on his keyboard away. I want to speak truth to him, but I know he can’t hear me unless I do it with grace – something in very short supply today. I don’t know how to do that. I only know my heart needs to be circumcised, that is, surrendered to the Father of us both and trusting Him to do for my son what I can’t. I talk about how I learned this in my newest book, Do Pirates Wear Pajamas? and Other Mysteries in the Adventure of Fathering.
As any surgeon will tell you, the operation to save your life starts with getting cut. Now for me, personally, I literally had to go through a lot of hell to discover these things. Satan had to work me over. My dad was a career military guy during the 60’s, so I became a hippie. I got into peace marches, hair down to my shoulders, lived in my Volkswagen in San Francisco, crashed in communes. Like so many other young men in those rebellious days, I did everything to punish my dad for not giving me what I needed from him. Before long, after a few other things I did, he just said, “You’re out of the family.” Now that forced me into some bad places – bitterness, resentment, anger. I tried harder and harder to prove that I’m okay – like, “Forget you, Dad! You can’t hurt me. I don’t need anything from you anyhow!” But it was a lie. A tree cut off from its roots begins to die. But that’s where my whole generation was. The father of Lies was right with us to give us a man-hating spirit to get back at our dads. But we were so naive spiritually. Under the banner of “Peace and Love,” we gave in to the enemy and ended up hating our own manhood. That man-hating spirit drives today’s politically correct movement. It’s feminine grace without the balance of masculine truth.
To stop the pain from my dad’s rejection, I shut down my heart – which led me into wounding relationships. Churches told me to discount my feelings, but I was so numb I had no honest feeling even to discount. For openers, if you want a healthy relationship with a woman, you better have your heart in good shape. You need to know what you’re feeling and deal with that. Otherwise, you’re going to make blind choices that will later come back to destroy you, especially in relationship with a woman. I did that. The awful pain from that eventually forced me to seek healing. My book Sons of the Father: Healing the Father Wound in Men Today deals with this.
Herb: How did you become a Christian?
Gordon: I went to Harvard Divinity School and won a preaching award all three years I was there. I knew about Jesus, but I didn’t know Jesus. I could talk about the all best German theologians, even quote a lot of Scripture. And I’m obviously intelligent enough to pass the test to get into Harvard and do well there. But God doesn’t look at your transcripts when you’re on the way into His Kingdom. He’s looking at your heart. Because I do have that background – I have a Master’s degree from Stanford as well – I know a lot of well educated, secular folks. And it seems like the more educated people get, the more impressed they become with their natural abilities and the less impressed they are with God. So that’s the background I came out of.
I was ordained in an oldline liberal denomination and after I’d pastored a church in that denomination for two years, I felt dry and empty. My marriage was falling apart, and I wanted to know if anything I’d read about in the bible – and even preached about – was really powerful enough to make a difference. I was intrigued by the bible stories about people getting healed and having demons cast out. That was more powerful and real than anything I had experienced in my liberal church background – or frankly, in any of the Evangelical churches I knew.
Eventually, I decided to go searching and I sneaked around. I went to Catholic mass and was impacted by communion there. I went over to the Evangelicals and got born again. I went to the Pentecostals and received the baptism of the Spirit – all very exciting adventures! As I gave Holy Spirit room to work in my life, my faith started to get real, alive at last. My church, I have to say, was not so excited about it. And eventually I resigned as pastor. I tell the whole story in my book Broken by Religion, Healed by God.
While I was still at that church, a woman came to me upset one day saying that she loved her boyfriend but she just froze up when he held her hand. We did all the standard secular psychological analysis and nothing was working.
Eventually, she mentioned that she had almost been molested as a girl. On impulse, I asked her to invite Jesus into that fearful memory. To her surprise – and mine! – he showed up and led her not only to forgive the perpetrator, but receive from Jesus the love and acknowledgement of her feelings that she never got from her parents. Seeing Jesus come powerfully like that to heal a daughter of the Father upended my worldview and set me on a faith journey I just couldn’t turn away from.
So at that point, I knew that Jesus was real. But I was terrified to tell anybody what had happened. I couldn’t tell my liberal friends, who say supernatural things never happened as the bible says. But I couldn’t tell my Evangelical friends either, because they said such things happened in the Bible but don’t happen now. But the next week someone else called me for help who had been badly wounded and there was just no going back. We asked Jesus to come and heal the person’s heart, and he did. The Father just kept sending folks to me and Jesus was healing them.
With nowhere to go and no one to go with, that’s when I knew I could only go to Jesus. Eventually, I met up with some oldline charismatic folks who understood what was going on and reassured me that what I had experienced squared with the biblical accounts of Jesus and that he is alive and well even today. As Amy Semple McPherson used to say, “I worship a God named I Am, not I Was.” And so, after that, it was all over for me. Religion was gone. The church I’d grown up in, all the sermons and meetings and bible studies and none of God’s power–I just couldn’t deal with it any more. I was hooked on Holy Spirit. Finally, the church board came to me and said, “You’re not the pastor we hired.” I was about to defend myself, when the Father drew me up and made me realize they were right. I tell this story in my book No Small Snakes: A Journey into Spiritual Warfare.
Herb: How can church men’s ministry leaders provide a safe place for men to be real?
Gordon: Good question. This is the key issue. I don’t know that a safe church can happen apart from leadership who are real and have cried out to Jesus to overcome their shame. Sadly, most church leadership today reflects our fatherless culture, where dads have often been absent, physically and/or emotionally. So many pastors – like myself – have learned religion, but not relationship with Father God. We’ve heard about obedience to religious standards, but not trust in someone called Father. The father-wound reminds men that we don’t have what it takes to be men. It stirs unfathomable shame in a man’s heart, and leaders too often have not trusted Jesus enough to bear their own shame to the Father for cleansing. So all they can do is preach obedience and performance, wounding yet others as they were wounded. Everybody’s trying to please God by doing the right thing, but nobody’s real enough to confess they can’t, that they need Holy Spirit to do it in and through them.
People in the pews keep coming because it all sounds and feels so familiar to what they experienced in their childhood families. The pastor fills in for the absent father and everyone wants to please him to get the blessing they hunger for from childhood. When everyone’s afraid to get real, the church becomes an all-too-familiar dysfunctional family all over again.
Church leaders can’t speak to deeply broken people – much less help them get healed – until the leaders have faced the depth of their own brokenness and surrendered to Jesus in the midst of it. One sign that a man has done that is that he doesn’t judge others for their brokenness. Instead of “laying burdens on people without lifting a finger to help,” as Jesus criticized the Pharisees, he can reach out an accepting, comforting hand without feeling threatened – because his other hand is humbly and securely in the Father’s mighty hand and outstretched arm. The cheater Jacob became the winner Israel when he wrestled with God in the dark river gorge and came out with a limp. Like the old saying, Never trust a leader without a limp. He hasn’t wrestled with God enough to respect your struggle.
My ministry motto is, “A real man is a man who’s real.” When leaders set the pace, the people in the church will dare to get real. That’s what makes a safe church.
To men, a wound feels shameful. But the fact is, we’re all wounded. A wound is not shameful; it’s painful. A real man knows that. He also knows that if he doesn’t go to the physician, his wound becomes not only infected, but also contagious. But again, that requires a man to trust “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” as Paul declared in Romans 8:1.
When I started out pastoring my first church, I was an entertaining speaker. I was educated. I had studied the Bible. I had high moral standards. I wanted to help people improve their lives. So I thought I was a qualified Christian leader. But one thing was missing. I had to get crucified, to let go of all my control and agendas and plans to the Father. When I let go of my ministry, that’s when it began to be His ministry. I’m still growing in that reality.
Herb: Gordon, thank you so much for your time. I so appreciate your heart for men and your willingness to be open.
Gordon: Thanks. Actually, I just don’t have the energy anymore to shut down or run away.
Learn more about Gordon Dalbey’s books and ministry to men at Abba Father Men’s Ministry.
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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