Leadership Journal

The most obvious thing in Robert Lewis's office is the sword. The pastor's desk and shelves of commentaries are standard issue. The large photos of his four children hugging Minnie Mouse and the family in a raft shooting the rapids are warming, but expected.

Not the sword. It demands to be examined.

A full three feet long, it looks like Excaliber, the sword Arthur pulled from the stone, thereby becoming king. "The men gave that to me," he says. "It's attached to the frame by magnets, so I can draw quickly if I need it."

We chuckle and pull our fingers back a bit.

"The men" are the Men's Fraternity, the 1,100 who gather at the church Wednesday mornings at six to hear Lewis teach on what it means to be a man. Some are members of his church, Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Arkansas; many are not. Many are not yet Christians.

"We had a car dealer in town bring all his salesmen," Lewis says. "He opened the paper and saw our ad: Learn how to be a man. He said, 'We're all going to go.' And you know what, they did. They stuck with me the whole year and finished, too."

The men haven't crowned Lewis king, but they hold him and his teachings in high regard.

With fractured families and alternative family forms increasing, and the traditional family in the minority, Lewis's approach is changing his church and his community. He's helping harried working parents to cut back their kids' overprogrammed schedules and to take charge of their moral and spiritual development. He's taking well-to-do suburban men into the inner city where there are few fathers and giving kids a hope and a future. And with his wife, Sherard, he's raised four children. Their youngest son is in high school.

Lewis founded Fellowship Bible Church with Bill Parkinson and Bill Wellons in 1977. They are still the preaching team today. Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Eric Reed met with Lewis to talk about his notable work with men and their families.

What is noble masculinity?

I love that term. Guys stick out their chest when I say the word noble. We still live in a time of dumbed-down masculinity. Nobody knows what it means to be a man, or if it's okay to be a man. I think guys want to step up and be men, in the way that knights were men.

It started one night in 1989 when the three of us pastors and our families had supper together. Our children were playing around us, and one of the wives said, "How are you going to raise these boys to be real men?"

It was a simple question, but it stopped the conversation. Among us we had seven boys, two about to enter puberty.

Someone else asked, "What is a man?" Amazingly, we couldn't answer that most basic question. Just silence. Three pastors, and we had not a clue. But it started us talking.

Not long after, my family and I spent the summer in Poland. Our church partners with a seminary there, and it was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. My two boys and I would take trips into the countryside where we visited huge castles overgrown by the forests. ...