Dear Effeminate Pastor, Here’s Why You’re Bleeding Men

by Publisher | May 7, 2025 | News ✪ Read this article ad-free and leave comments here on Substack

You stand on a stage, not a pulpit. Beneath theatrical lights, not the burning fire of truth. Draped in pastel rebellion and accessorized like a department store mannequin on discount, you glide across the platform like a self-help seminar host with a theology degree from Instagram. And you wonder, out loud, why men won’t darken your doorway.

You scratch your head while lamenting from your acrylic barstool why your pews are filled with Pinterest moms and therapy junkies, while the men stay home, grilling burgers, throwing footballs with their sons, or just reclaiming their dignity in silence. The answer isn’t buried in mystery. It’s staring back at you in your own reflection—right there under your scoop-neck cashmere blend.

Not because men have abandoned Christ…many have, but that isn’t why. It’s because your church has abandoned them. You’ve swapped the lion’s roar for a kitten’s purr. The sword of truth for a feather duster. You’ve alchemized the radical call of discipleship into a self-help session set to acoustic guitar.

And your attire? A sermon in fabric on how to castrate masculinity without ever drawing blood.

You dress like a gender studies major on laundry day and preach like a man apologizing for the God he claims to serve. You mistake cowardice for meekness, spinelessness for gentleness, ambiguity for nuance. You whisper sweet nothings from the pulpit because you’re terrified of conviction, allergic to confrontation, and addicted to applause.

This isn’t just about your pink sweaters, delicate gestures, or cropped pants that scream ‘urgent identity crisis.’ It’s the whole curated aesthetic: the Instagram-filtered sermons, the caffeinated sanctuaries, the emotion-simulating light shows that make church feel more like a boutique wellness retreat than a battlefield for souls.

You invite open homosexuals posing as pastors to lecture on sexual ethics. You platform men who dress and act like female fashion influencers, and then ask why your church has become a man-repellent zone. Spoiler, it’s not because men hate church. It’s because they hate pretending they’re at a Hillsong cosplay convention every Sunday.

You don’t want men. Not real ones. You want docile, agreeable, emotionally delicate eunuchs—men who ask permission to lead their families, apologize for existing, and nod along to your diluted gospel like interns at a yoga retreat. You want the kind of man who quotes Brené Brown, shops at Anthropologie, and thinks Paul was just a bit too “assertive.”

But the world is choking on weak men. Families are gasping for fatherhood. Classrooms are cluttered with boys trained to apologize before they speak. And into that crisis walks you—with your sermon series titled “Feelings” and your fog machine set to “safe mode.”

Don’t kid yourself—this isn’t cultural accommodation. No one demanded this. Vogue didn’t bully you into it. GQ didn’t send you a subpoena. This is theological rebellion dressed in Urban Outfitters clearance. You chose this. You built this. You curated this aesthetic down to the bracelets and bangles. This isn’t conformity. It’s a calculated revolution against everything Scripture teaches about men, strength, and spiritual leadership.

You’re not appeasing culture. You’re attempting to reprogram it. You want to declaw biblical manhood. You want to rewrite gender by platforming fragile men who know more about their skincare routines than their Bibles. You’ve traded apostolic clarity for blog-tier babble, swapped soldiers of Christ for emotionally unstable spokesmodels. And you did it all in the name of being “approachable.”

You sanitized Paul. You neutered David. You turned Elijah into a therapist. You erased the battlefield and replaced it with a beanbag circle. And now you look out at a sanctuary full of emasculated, aimless, confused men—and you blame them for not wanting to stay.

All while the world burns. Kids are being groomed and trafficked, families are dissolving, and masculinity is in retreat. But you, with your soy latte and your books titled “Gentle & Lowly,” are worried about whether your tone is too triggering.

You’ve built a brand, not a body. You’ve gathered fans, not disciples. You’ve confused applause with authority. And now the church is bleeding out onto the street—one skinny-jeaned sermon at a time.

“ Several years ago we took my MIL to her Methodist service in a college town on Easter Sunday. The pastor (a woman in sensible shoes) never mentioned Jesus or the resurrection. We only went to a Methodist service one more time and that was my MIL’s funeral. Oh, I lied, we went to their service a year later on All Saints Day. It was sad.”
I can relate to that. When my Uncle Jack passed away, my goofy cousins decided that they would have his memorial service at an Episcopal church that he did legal services for. This church is in Portland Oregon if that tells you anything. Uncle Jack was a WW2 veteran who was a navigator on B-24’s. He was my mom’s oldest brother and we were very close. During the service, I thought about how pissed off he would be to having a lesbian minister doing his memorial service.

Chris Rosebrough, who runs the Fighting for the Faith YouTube channel, has been exposing and fighting against these modern-day apostate “churches” for years. One thing he says is whether it’s a sudden claimed “revival” or a “seeker-sensitive” “church”, try one thing and see what happens: Try removing the music and the “worship band” and see if anyone stays, or if the claimed “revival” continues. His point is that this self-centered, watered-down corruption of the church is highly dependent upon emotional manipulation through music.

You can even see that in the language they use, such as referring to the music as “worship.” Music can certainly be used FOR worship, but it is not the sum total of worship that these churches imply. Heck, the now-discredited Hillsong is about almost nothing BUT their music (other than a thin veneer of severely twisted “teaching”). The reason music has become so central to these types of wayward “churches” is that music can be very powerful in manipulating the emotions of congregants. It’s important to understand the difference between this and the natural inspiration that comes from listening to, and especially singing as a congregation, songs that contain deep theological truth.

Where these “churches” differ is in how they instead use vapid “worship songs” with zero theological weight, but very emotional, almost romantic music, to manipulate people’s emotions, putting many into a near-trance state which makes them highly susceptible to error and outright heresy aimed at them.

John MacArthur has a great take on this when he observes that the quality of the music a church uses reflects the true level of their actual worship. Frothy, emotion-laden, relentlessly repetitive, but substance-free contemporary “worship songs” reflect a low view of worship, while classic hymns, with their deep theological content reflect a high view of worship.

And that’s not to say that we can only play or sing old hymns, only that true “worship music” should exhibit deep reverence for God, not making Him sound like a teen crush or something, and should especially teach the singer or listener something profound about the gospel. A great example of this is Phil Keaggy’s “Maker of the Universe.” It’s a modern song (based upon a historic poem) with nothing more than his voice and acoustic guitar, yet you will have goosebumps and be profoundly affected by it, and not because of a manipulative tune but because of its deep meaning.

It’s a thousand times more profound than the ironically shallow and creepily romantic-sounding “Oceans”, or the mindlessly-repetitive “Good Good Father.”

The true test of whether a so-called “church” of today is truly a biblical church is what would happen if the music was put away for a while and services consisted of nothing but a man standing behind a lectern doing nothing but reading and exegeting scripture. If that results in a large portion of the congregants never returning, then it wasn’t a true church to begin with. The true Gospel has the inherent power to save. It doesn’t need stages and flashing lights, nor does it need sappy emotionally-manipulative music to make people receptive to it. It only needs to be read and properly explained.

These alleged “churches” that focus instead on entertainment and manipulation tactics obviously have little confidence in the power of the Gospel and think it somehow needs their help. These are false churches and should be shunned.

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