2 of 3

I wanted to say in the book that I had to learn that if you have a penis, then you are a man. God has spoken. Nobody's going to take that away from you or use manipulative tools to get you to respond. That was a really affirming epiphany to me. God says I'm a man, but because I grew up without a dad, it just stung when they'd say only real men did certain things.

So why did you keep going to church? What kept you there at a time in your life when many guys tend to stray?

There were years when I didn't go to church at all. But whatever happened to me in terms of encountering God really happened. It was not something that I wanted to get away from. I rebelled, but I continued to follow God, and he continued to father me, even though I didn't realize at the time that's what he was doing.

Church and faith were pretty different to me. I don't know that that's a good biblical model, but that's how it happened in my life.

We talk about God being our father. Yet he can't replace an earthly father.

And he's not meant to. God's good at playing his role. We're given metaphors in Scripture to help us understand who God is and how to relate to him. There's sheep to shepherd, king to subject, brother to sister, bride to bridegroom, and a dominant metaphor is also father to child.

In our culture, we interact with God like he's a slot machine or like he's a computer. It's the dominant way we interact with God, but it's not a biblical way. The biblical way is that we interact with him as a father. There were things I learned with John and Terry MacMurray that were pretty remarkable epiphanies in terms of understanding that Jon as an authority figure in his children's life would often withhold things that they wanted in order to better them.

In our culture, if you pray a certain prayer, you expect to get what you want from God. That's voodoo. That's not God fathering you.

You talked to a bunch of guys at a frat house about not seeing women as sex objects. For those guys, being a man meant having sex. What did you say to them?

One of the things that I wanted to communicate with those guys is that because we live in a commercialized society and women are beautiful, their bodies are often associated with a product. It gives a sort of positive feeling about what we're seeing, and it's then associated with dish soap or something like that. Because of that, we're being trained to see women as less than human. They're just images.

It's important to interact with a woman in order to become a man. It's part of how we become who God designed us to be. I feel like our culture just wants us to be isolated individuals fulfilling our sex drives with images. It's sort of a mantra in the Christian culture, but I'm happy to step on to that.

What is the Belmont Foundation?

We've started a foundation here in Portland that is taking care of the needs of single moms. First, we want to take care of their needs to relieve the stress in their lives to free them up to spend more time with their children. Second, we want to provide mentors to guys growing up without fathers. Eighty-five percent of guys in prison grew up without a dad. We think the church is in a place to be able to make a pretty big dent in this crisis. We're modeling that at our church, and then we're going to clone it at churches all over the country.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50