Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s ingeniously titled Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation left me with a similar, but more widespread, sense of disappointment in Christian men. As I sat together with my father, we both wondered, Can’t we do better than this? I thought of men I had personally known who had fallen from grace.
![between jesus and john wayne between jesus and john wayne](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jV83xBl1Kyw/maxresdefault.jpg)
I thought of men like Bill Hybels, Jean Vanier, Ravi Zacharias, Mark Driscoll, and the victims, churches, and organizations left to pick up the pieces from their various scandals and failings. I caught the note of disappointment in his voice as we both wondered at the failures of men-but there is a particular kind of grief when pastors you once looked up to have been exposed exploiting their power and abusing those under their spiritual authority. “Of course,” he said, “the guy that was in charge of it got caught having an affair-not exactly keeping his promise.” It was encouraging to see other men taking up responsibility for their faith and their families. He spoke about how much those events had meant to him at the time. These various memories came to my mind a few weeks ago as I was talking with my dad about Promise Keepers. I remember having a hard time telling the difference between what she was doing in the morning and what some pastor I had never heard of named John Piper was doing in the evening. In college, I went to the Passion youth conference in Atlanta organized by Louie Giglio, and I remember a guy in our group saying, “I can’t believe they are letting a woman preach.” That woman was Beth Moore, who was permitted to do a group Bible study before thousands of attendees at one of the morning sessions. Neither my dad nor I were hunters, or fishermen for that matter, but we enjoyed the spectacle and the fun.
#Between jesus and john wayne pro#
They gave out camouflage pocket bibles many people wore John Deere hats and Bass Pro shirts. Years later I would go to Southeast Christian Church’s wild game night, a men’s event where all sorts of wild animal game could be eaten: squirrel, opossum, bison, deer. The Promise Keepers movement called men to be faithful to their wives, leaders in their families, and, above all, committed to a life in Christ. He was a large, enthusiastic man who gave us a powerful testimony of his life being turned around by Jesus. As a young boy, I went with my dad to Freedom Hall in Louisville, where along with thousands of other fathers and husbands and sons we went to worship and learn what it meant to be a Christian man.