A winter's day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow

Men are tired of being the square peg force fitted into the round hole. At our jobs, we hear corporate visions and see pictures of serene nature scenes on black motivational posters depicting slogans of team unity, high quality, and employee loyalty pumped into our heads that must be followed to the tee. We then see the hypocrisy of management as the "team" becomes "I". For example, when the team recommends a solution to a chronic problem and then management says "no" and paves a pathway that ends up making the job of management easier and the jobs of the workers harder. While the problem becomes worse and more chronic. We have seen the "high quality" sacrificed to exceed quotas and to make a shipment appear on time to the customer only to have the customer cuss the company out because the hardware needed to assemble the product is missing. The tragedy is that the companies knew the materials were missing and act like it was a "freak" accident. Then we dismiss the customer's complaint as rubbish but we chew the minimum wage burger flipper out because he shorted us of our fries. We have seen loyalty thrown in the trash can as men who are one year away from retirement are forced to go through unneeded stress in an attempt to force him to quit and therefore, not have to pay out retirement benefits.

The reality here is that everything we do should please "The Great I Am". We should perform our best in everything we do for the kingdom.

Men feel the square peg / round hole concept enacted in their churches also. The church in many areas has gone corporate desiring more the numbers and the money instead of the power and the glory. Our churches pride themselves in their Fortune 500 way to financial prosperity, their organizational charts, and the way politics is handled. I thought the church was the place where we learned the Great Commission and enacted it in our world to reach people in our jobs, neighborhoods, and society. Instead, it appears backwards. It appears that we go to work and end up learning how to "brownnose", survive, hoard authority, and make money at all costs in the church. Our churches aesthetically please the female psyche in architectural layout (my ex-church has peach colored walls and teal green and pink chairs, urrgh!! Where are my sunglasses!!) and with a nice landscape with perfectly manicured shrubbery and lilies and daiseys surrounding the building. The music appeases the female psyche with the soft, smooth rhythms. While any sounds of drums is made flat or suppressed. The teachings appeal to the emotional aspect of the female psyche to motivate people to some kind of action whether the action is Godly or not. Most men in today's church appear feminate in nature and too meek in the church today. It is one thing to circumcise the heart, but to feel like in order to be a "so-called" Christian man you have to be spiritually and psychologically castrated? In women physically, to castrate her does not affect her hormone balance seriously. You castrate a man and see what happens to his hormone balance? No more testosterone, therefore man becomes feminated.

Because of the feminization of man being more seen today in our churches, it is hard for me to fellowship with other Christian men because they mentally appear and act like Christian women in their personalities. According to the article in Religion Today mentioned earlier, "Eighty percent of their pastors are more in tune to their feminine side... the problem is that eighty percent of the men in the congregation are not". Maybe the problem is in the 20% of the pastors and not the 80% of the men. It has gotten to the point of "If an attack came on their lives and any organization we were members of, how would they fight?" Would they be like a man and stand in the gap to defend their honor, or would they run and retreat to a safe place. David killed Goliath when he was under attack. Moses killed an Egyptian who mistreated a Jew. Gideon tried to use his low self-esteem and identity crisises to get out of God's plan for him and ended up being the mighty warrior. David was a man after God's own heart and was instrumental in bringing back worship in the church but fought on a moments notice when God commanded him to. We think that we fight only by worship. But to fight is to fight, nothing else is on your mind except for defeating the enemy. We have beaten the swords into spiritual kitchen utensils beacuse we are too busy eating and drinking and saying "Isn't God good?" when everything around us is falling apart, our children are doing the things we explicitly taught them not to do, and the devil is devouring all around us. At the same time, someone comes to us in need and we tell them to take the crumbs off the floor instead of giving away freely to the needy what we freely received from God. At most banquets and receptions, there is an overabundance of food left over. Caterers purposely make more than needed to accomdotate people who did not respond beforehand. We have this food and spiritual manna that we will never eat and will spoil over time and we still hoard it. That is one reason why I prefer T.D. Jakes' Manpower materials over Promise Keeper materials. Manpower brings out the man within the man. Another popular men's rally, to me, suppresses and evolves man into "wo"man.

Lokk at the differences between men's and women's conferences. You see the brochures of women's conferences and some clips from "Woman Thou Art Loosed" and you see women that are encouraged, edified, and pampered. In fact, it appears to be like a spiritual form of a 'Jenny Jones makeover' where they come out different that the way they came. You go to many men's conferences and you see not only the attempts of 'feminization' take place, but constant belittlement of manhood. I have been to numerous men's conferences and seen many on TV and in the majority of the conferences, men are not encouraged. Instead, men are belittled as they are called deadbeat dads, coldhearted, internet pornographers, and if you live in the South East United States, racist by default. Of course, their answer to these charges of deadbeat dads, coldheartedness, racism, and internet pornographers is to become a more feminized, 'butterfly kissing', Republican dad instead of getting to the core issues and tapping into the warrior mentality God placed into the man.

The tragedy is that many Christian women both single and married want the "feminized" man to be their husband. In other words, it's like having another sister psychologically and spiritually but in a male physical package. It is almost to the point of being "spiritually transgendered" or because the physical Christian man is now psychologically woman, he now has to spirtually "CROSS-dress" to be considered an acceptable role model for other feminized Christian men. This, in turn, adds more confusion by increasing and reenforcing the identity crisises many men experience. To be the mechanically inclined handy man who likes hot rods and likes to be with his friends on Monday nights watching football is seen as too aggressive, of the devil, fleshly, and non-Christian. If this is the case where Christian women want to marry the Christian feminized man, does this mean that the Christian woman is spiritually lesbian in nature and has issues to deal with? Hmmmmmm. As Archie and Edith Bunker used to sing in the opening theme on All in the Family "Girls were girls and men were men". There is nothing wrong with women being women and men being men. When we lessen the role of man, or worse, enact the "role reversal" psychology of Camille Pagilla and usurp the God ordained authority structure, something is wrong.

Are the men imtimidated by the pastors themselves? No! Are they turned off by the feminized church and feminized church leaders? YES! Between the fact that pastors have trivialized hell by "scaring" people into the kingdom constantly preaching fire and brimstone instead of dealing with the real issues of men by compassionately developing relationships, men see church as futile, useless, and irrevalent. Most people know they are going to hell if they are not saved. Men are seen as greedy when they want to work a little overtime to find some way of putting their kids in college. Men are stigmatized by the "deadbeat dad" mentality when they do not spend enough time with their families. Many Christian men were duped and deceived into believing that they were the worst wormy human beings on planet earth when they refused to get overemotional when the song "Butterfly Kisses" was sung or enacted in a drama. We expected men to cry their eyes out and act even more female in nature and become more "sensitive" to appease the church and in some cases their wives. Men need to know that many women (even their wives) have identity crisises and other problems to deal with. The church has inappropriately placed blame on all the problems society faces today on the men. Women are seen as blameless. Men are seen as no good. The root of our problems deal with poor choices people, not men, not women, make. Remember, both Adam and Eve sinned, not just Adam, not just Eve.

Click Here for part four of A Rock Feels No Pain, And An Island Never Cries