You're listening to the Hard Men Podcast, reclaiming your host Eric Khan. This is season one, two hard men in a world of softness.

Well this episode I'll be sharing an experience that occurred several years ago

and that first opened my eyes to the problem of effeminacy in the church and in particular the

pastorate. Now two things brought about this keystone revelation. First I

attended a series of talks by Toby Sumter and in them he talked about what it means to

fight the good fight. He captured the warring spirit of masculinity that is so often

absent from the church.

And the other event was reading the Grace of Shame.

It really is one of the best books that I've come across in dealing with

homosexuality and a feminacy in the modern church from a biblical perspective.

Now at that time you have to keep in mind I was pasturing a small church in the rural west and

I was also working as a freelance gun writer. Now as it was ruminating on the topic of

masculinity I started to recognize a trend that I'd experienced almost all my life but I couldn't quite ever put my finger on it.

It was this. It's that a majority of pastors I knew were soft and effeminate and the churches that they pastored weren't a whole lot different.

I'd attended seminary and I'd even pastored my own church and yet most of the Christian

literature most of the ministry of the church somehow seemed unappealing to me.

Most of it I found was emotionally sappy. It was devotional in nature and quite frankly uninteresting.

I started the thing about my childhood and the way that I grew up. My interests were in Teddy Roosevelt, in hunting with my dad and my brother, in firearms and trucks and off-roading in World War II

biographies and reading the great histories of the world. The movies we were

watching were Braveheart and Die Hard.

And yet when I went to the Christian Men's section

at the local bookstore, all I found was sentimental,

...