Shepherding Pornified Men
Leading Strugglers Out of the Wasteland
By Dan Wilson

So many men in the Church are spiritually emasculated by their sexual sins - in a spiritual wasteland - pretending everything is fine at church and home.

But in reality, they are enslaved to the idols of some form of sexual sin, like pornography, hammered by guilt and shame, and they can’t escape the tyranny of living for themselves and self-gratification. What does it take to lead these men to repentance and restoration?

What Does Not Work? 

Telling a “pornified” man in a “one-and-done” counseling session, “Just say no!” just does not work. Paul lamented in Romans 7 how he did what he did not want to do. Like him, we are all conflicted in our hearts—that’s the hopelessness of self-salvation for a sinner. There is no pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, especially with secret sexual sin. Sending a struggler off to the resources of his own will power with simplistic, legalistic answers is futile. 

Just doing nothing won’t work either. The ostrich can live in denial, but, with his head in the sand, he leaves an easy target sticking up. Likewise, a pastor who never addresses his men personally and these sexual issues biblically won’t work toward making his church a place where men can honestly and effectively struggle with sexual sin. This stuff won’t simply go away. 

Shooting the wounded doesn’t work either. Shunning or immediately exercising church discipline on the man who is caught or confesses will only drive other struggling men further underground. Sometimes repentance takes a minute, but immediate shunning, whether intentional or because you find his sexual sin repulsive, cuts him off from the very relational means of grace that Christ intended—ministry from the Body of Christ. Sexual immorality is a relational sin, and it takes Christ-like relationships to make progress in repentance. Church discipline is a process that starts small but strong before more severe mercies. It is not intended to be a nuclear option for driving off unwanted men.

Remember from politics, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”? We have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture of false intimacy in the Church. Yet, it gets worse: “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t know, can’t even care.” Galatians 6:1 commands us to “restore the one caught in a trespass” and verse 2 says that we “must bear one another’s oppressive burdens in order to fulfill the Law of Christ.”

When we do not know our sheep, we cannot engage them where specific sins are crouching to destroy them and their family members. If we allow our men to subsist on trifling relationships and shallow talk merely about sports or the news without really knowing one another’s’ stories and temptations, we are perpetuating false brotherhood by empty eldership, despite our formal doctrinal correctness and otherwise orthodox preaching. The false intimacy of empty brotherhood can do nothing to combat the trap of false intimacy of sexual sin. 

Studies show that 80% of men in the Church do not have one best friend. This culture of male isolation is a form of worldliness. It is sin not to have and cultivate godly friends. Our pastoral leadership must be about leading men out of this relational desert where secrecy is the norm. Secrecy never succeeds in combating sexual sin. Sexual sin thrives in relational secrecy. 

Root Problems of the Worship Disorder of Sexual Idolatry. 

1. Ignorance or unbelief. It is hard to say which is a deeper root problem. Men languish in ignorance of who they are in Christ and who they are to be as men. Without vision for manhood—including how to steward our sexuality—men perish. We think that many “know better” so that’s where unbelief in what we supposedly know is right and good comes into play with ignorance. 

2. Pride. American culture in general is so entitlement-centered that many churches try appealing to men on the basis of self-enhancement—“It’s all about you and your comfort.” When that happens, men are having their pride re-enforced by the entertainment-oriented church on the one hand and sexual-entitlement oriented porn and media on the other. No wonder many men act like consumers of value added services at church and like sexual consumers at many other times. In a marketing competition, such a vision for church will fail to grab men’s hearts like pornography and a ‘playboy lifestyle’ can. 

3. Pain. As I mentioned in the last article, men are in various stages of pain, and sexual sin enables them to mediate their pains and losses in isolation, autonomy, and passivity—that is without real manly adventure and challenge. Proverbs says, “iron sharpens iron” but iron left alone gets dull and rusty. Isolated men—friendless men—often sooth every pain (even that pesky conscience) with the cotton candy of easy sex. 

After the explosion of being discovered, “pornified” men frequently want instant recovery like they wanted instant gratification. There’s a theme here: get sex easy, get rich quick, and get a quick recovery too. They want to “get back to a normal life”. We should not be shooting for normal or average. The Christian man and ministers’ life is a life at war, racing and crashing toward the coming of the Kingdom when normal will be forgotten either in heaven or hell.     

What Does Work? 

C. S. Lewis once wrote to the effect that “we are not too hard to satisfy. We are too easily satisfied.” Our culture, and perhaps even our fathers, taught us to try to satisfy our hearts with easy sex, which is bad sex—not good sex as God intended. We’ve been taught, trained, and discipled to be satisfied with shallow relationships—whether that is with two-dimensional women in pictures, computer screens, or sleazy “relationships”. And as Americans, a rugged individualism has taught us to be friendless, isolated, and autonomous. There is much to “put off” as Paul wrote in Colossians 3:9. 

Yet we must “put on” as well. What must we put on? Accountability? To be honest, I do not think that “accountability” is the biblical concept and category. Haven’t you seen accountability measures fail?

The biblical term and concept here is not “accountability” but brotherhood. Accountability or accountability partner, as used in evangelical circles since the 1980’s, is a very modern term that can tend toward a very sterile sense. Brother is a family term and reality that draws up all the best of “accountability partner” and much more. The book of Hebrews refers to Jesus, the Son of God, as our great Brother (Heb. 2:11 “He is not ashamed to call them brothers”), and as such a Brother, He counters in His work on the cross the murderous heart of Cain, the son of Adam, who said, “I am not my brother’s keeper!”  

Brothers, we must do brotherhood. This is a practical theology where we apply and live out the doctrine of the Church, the household of God (1 Tim. 3:15). In my own growth in Christ and struggle against sexual temptation and sin, I have found this to be true: it takes me being a good brother to be a good son. In other words, it takes me intentionally cultivating brutally honest relationships with godly brothers in Christ for me to be a good son of The Father. Otherwise my love grows cold for him and hot for something or someone He created, which is idolatry. Iron does sharpen iron (Pro 27:17) and I have found the “wounds of a friend” (Pro 27:6) to be precious in my own spiritual health as a man. 

Here’s some of my logic, for what it’s worth: 1) Since sexual sin is the biggest presenting problem in the lives of a majority of Christian men in America, and 2) since entrenched patterns of isolation, autonomy, and secrecy only compound sinful patterns of sexual compromise men picked up from their fathers or peers when boys, then 3) there can hardly be more important and strategic kingdom work for pastors and shepherd than enabling men to bond in true, honest, and Scripture-guided brotherhood.

Are You Leading? 

If the theological logic above is true, are you leading men to do Christian brotherhood—a band of brothers—fighting the good fight of the faith together? Many pastors are isolated and virtually friendless. It is hard to teach and model what we do not practice. Maybe some of us shepherds have need of repentance here in slaying our fears and rationalizations in actually being and cultivating friendships and brotherhood.

Certainly we should teach and preach on how God gives the best sex and sexuality to dispel the lies of the playboy and post-modern sexuality. And we certainly ought to pointedly and practically teach and preach how God enables sexual repentance and grants relational restoration. 

Many shepherds need to educate themselves, their staff, and leadership teams with reading and training in the area of sexual brokenness ministry. This can practically fire a church up to form a sexual brokenness ministry plan and start mentoring and/or small groups aimed at restoring the sexually struggling men in the Church.

Dan Wilson is Mid-South Region director for Harvest USA, a ministry dedicated to proclaiming Christ as Lord to a sexually broken world and equipping the Church to restore sexually broken people. dan@harvestusa.org; www.harvestusa.org

Pulpit Helps Magazine, a ministry of AMG International, was a monthly publication which ran from 1975-2009. Founded by Dr. Spiros Zodhiates, Pulpit Helps was dedicated to the mission of equipping pastors, Bible teachers, and students of the Word for preaching, teaching, and living God's Truth. Each month, Pulpit Helps provided sermon starters, bulletin inserts, illustrations and quality articles on preaching, counseling, Christian living, and more. The ministry goals of Pulpit Helps continue today in the form of Disciple Magazine online.