I am not writing this from above you. I am an elder, not a senior pastor. I have never carried what you carry on a Saturday night and I will not pretend I have.
I am writing anyway, because I think we have a problem we are all too polite to name, and because the men it is killing are sitting in our rooms every week while we tell each other attendance is up.
I am also not going to argue it. My observations do not have the weight to move anything. So let me hand you the passages and get out of the way, because "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword" (Hebrews 4:12). That is the instrument. Not my case.
Here is the plain version.
We have men in our congregations who are not saved and who fully expect to go to heaven. And almost nothing we currently do will ever find them.
The charge God already made
Jeremiah says it about the leaders of his day in one line, and I have not been able to get out from under it:
"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace." (Jeremiah 6:14)
Healed it lightly. Not maliciously. Not cynically. Lightly — a quick word of comfort over a wound that needed to be opened. That is not a description of false teachers. That is a description of tired, kind men who wanted to reassure somebody and moved on.
Then there is the chapter about shepherds, and the charge is not what we assume:
"The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought." (Ezekiel 34:4)
Read the verbs. Every one of them is individual. Not one is about preaching. God's complaint is not that the teaching was bad — it is that nobody went after anybody. The flock scattered while the shepherds were fully occupied with shepherding.
I do not read that and picture a man who does not care. I picture one who is exhausted, running a building, managing staff, preaching forty-five weekends a year, and who has not asked one man a hard question face to face in eight months. Not because he does not love them. Because there is no version of his calendar where that happens.
That is not a character failure. It is a design failure. And it is ours, because nobody else is going to fix it.
Why our tools cannot catch this
The sermon cannot diagnose. It is a broadcast. It convicts, and it does real work — but it cannot tell you which man in row nine nodded and changed nothing, because from the platform that man is identical to the one who went home and repented. Ezekiel preached to people who loved his preaching: "they hear what you say, but they will not do it" (Ezekiel 33:31). Paul warned it would get worse — people who "will not endure sound teaching" and instead accumulate teachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). We are pastoring inside that verse.
Everything else we offer is optional. Group, study, retreat, class — all opt-in. Which means every structure we have built systematically selects for the men who least need it. The genuinely lost, genuinely comfortable man will attend for two decades and never enter a room where anyone can ask him anything. We did not intend that. We engineered it anyway.
And the counterfeit is invisible by design. In the parable, the seed among thorns is received. It comes up. It looks alive. Then the cares of the world and the desires for other things choke it and it proves unfruitful (Mark 4:19). The thorny ground is indistinguishable from good ground until harvest. You cannot see it from the platform.
The one we did to ourselves
We became generous with assurance and silent about testing. We told a generation to pray a prayer and then told them for thirty years never to question it, and we learned to treat self-examination as an assault on grace.
Scripture does not do that. It gives assurance lavishly — and it also says, to His own churches, "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves" (2 Corinthians 13:5). Jesus tells men holding up ministry credentials, "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:23). And to an entire congregation: "You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead" (Revelation 3:1) — addressed to that church's messenger. To its leadership. To us.
We cannot keep letting men sit in our congregations assuming they are going to heaven while nothing in our entire apparatus is built to ask whether it is true.
What the pulpit is actually for
Our job on Sunday is to hold the Word of God up in front of men. That is the entire assignment. It is not to be admired.
Paul was explicit that he handicapped his own delivery on purpose. He said he did not come with lofty speech or wisdom, and that his message was not in persuasive words — and he gives the reason plainly: "so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:5). He was afraid that if he was too good, they would end up believing in him. "For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord" (2 Corinthians 4:5).
I do not think most of us are consciously chasing applause. But I know what we talk about with each other, and it is mostly craft. How the bridge landed. Whether the illustration worked. Whether it was tight. Almost never whether a man in that room was made deeply uncomfortable by God.
And he should be. Guest experience is a good thing and it has quietly become a governing thing, and a room engineered so that no one ever feels exposed is a room where the Word cannot do what Hebrews 4 says it does. If the sword is living and active and piercing, somebody should be bleeding occasionally.
Here is the part we do not want. There should be men who do not come back to your church because they could not sit there and remain comfortable.
That is not a failure. That is precedent. Jesus said something hard, and many of His own disciples said "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" and walked away. He did not chase them, soften it, or reframe it. He let them go and turned to the twelve and asked if they wanted to leave too (John 6:60–67). He emptied the room and He was not wrong to.
No man can sit under the actual Word of God week after week and never once be confronted. If yours can, the problem is not his attention.
The call we make at the end
I want to say something carefully, because I am not trying to take anyone's practice away.
The altar call has bothered me for a long time and it took me years to name why. It is not that it is wrong. Calling men forward to pray is not wrong, and God has met people in those aisles. My problem is what we are treating as the response.
We built our whole measure of a sermon around a moment. Hands raised, men down front, a number to report. And then everyone goes home, and nothing is asked of them until the next weekend.
But a moment is exactly what a man can produce without being changed. He can walk an aisle on genuine emotion and be entirely unaltered by Tuesday — and we will have counted him.
Here is the response I think Scripture actually describes: he will not be able to contain it.
Jeremiah tried to stop speaking and could not. He said God's word became "a burning fire shut up in my bones," and that he was weary with holding it in and could not (Jeremiah 20:9). Peter and John — the same two men the council could not explain except that they had been with Jesus — were ordered to stop talking and answered that they "cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). Not will not. Cannot.
That is the test. Not whether a man came forward. Whether, on Wednesday, at work, in his truck, at his own dinner table, he is talking about the living God — because something got into him on Sunday that he cannot hold.
And notice what he would be talking about. Not the sermon. Not you. If your people leave talking about how good the message was, you have your answer, and it is not the one you want. Real conviction does not produce reviews. It produces a man who cannot stop telling people what God is doing in him — how He is encouraging him, correcting him, changing him this week.
That is not a new idea, either. God told Israel to put His words on their hearts and then talk about them in the most ordinary hours of an ordinary week — sitting at home, walking on the road, lying down, getting up (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). Weekday conversation was always the design. Sunday was never supposed to be the container.
So make the call. But do not stop at the aisle.
Call them to accountability. Tell them plainly: if this actually did anything to you, you will not be able to keep quiet about it. So find one person and talk about it before Wednesday. Tell them what God said and what you are going to do about it. And come back next week ready to be asked.
If we only call men forward and never call them to walk it out in front of somebody, we will keep collecting responses from the men who are moved easily — and we will keep missing every single man who most needs to be found.
And the men who *are* His
Now the other half, because this is not only about the unconverted.
We have a generation of men who are genuinely walking with God and completely complacent. They have decided that because they are not the pastor, there is nothing required of them. Work, home, weekend, repeat. Many of them retire and golf. They will tell you they love the Lord and they are not lying — and they have never once mentored a young man in their life.
Scripture does not leave that alone. Older men are supposed to be teaching younger ones (Titus 2:2–6). That is not a spiritual gift. That is an assignment, given by age.
And service is not extracurricular. John says "We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers" (1 John 3:14) — he offers it as a test of whether a man is alive at all. James says faith without works is dead (James 2:17). If a man is serving no one, giving nothing of himself, and pouring into nobody, that is not a discipleship gap. That is a data point about his salvation, and we should be honest enough to say so.
We also need to stop letting men hide behind their wiring. I am an introvert. My Enneagram is a five. That is just not my personality. None of that has any standing in Scripture. Not one of the commands comes with a temperament exemption. A man can be quiet and still confess sin, still pursue a younger man, still serve his church, still tell the truth in a hard conversation. Personality shapes how he obeys. It does not decide whether he does.
Here is how I would put it to them. We should be guilty of walking with God — not feeling guilty about walking with God. There should be enough evidence to convict us. When the council looked at Peter and John, they were uneducated, common men, and the thing the council could not get past was that "they had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13). It showed. It was chargeable.
Most of our men feel guilty and are not chargeable. That is exactly backwards, and we have been the ones managing the guilt instead of calling for the evidence.
Before you ask a single man
One thing goes first, before anything I am about to ask of you.
Paul warned about men with "the appearance of godliness, but denying its power" (2 Timothy 3:5). No one on earth is better positioned to live that than we are. We can hold the form professionally. We can study the Word for a living and go months without being pierced by it. We can teach on prayer from notes rather than practice. Nobody catches it, because from the outside our fruit and our output look like the same thing.
So I will tell you what I do, not because it is a method but because I no longer trust myself without it.
I do not expect to graduate from this. I expect to spend the rest of my life holding the posture that my own heart cannot be trusted — that left to myself, I will serve myself. Every morning I submit to the Lord and ask His Spirit to lead me, because I have proven I will not do it on my own.
And I ask myself two questions:
Do I really believe Jesus has done everything to save me?
Am I really willing to go and do what He has called me to?
You do not graduate from those. You do not settle them at ordination and file the paperwork. If we are actually walking with God, we live inside those two questions every morning for the rest of our lives — and a man who is not asking them of himself has no business asking them of anyone else.
Ask them first. Then go ask everybody else.
What I am asking
Not a program. Five things, and none of them need a budget.
Stop reading attendance as discipleship. Twenty years of presence tells you one thing: he is available on Sundays. It is evidence of nothing else and we keep treating it as though it is.
Preach assurance in both directions. If you have never preached the test — not as a threat, as a mercy — the men who most need it have never heard it from you. "Preach the word... reprove, rebuke, and exhort" (2 Timothy 4:2). Reprove and rebuke are in the job description.
Let the Word make men uncomfortable, and stop apologizing for it. Hold it up. Get out from in front of it. Measure the sermon by whether God confronted somebody, not by whether it was clever.
Ask a man for something costly, then watch. This is the only instrument I have found that cannot be beaten with vocabulary. Not a book to consume — a thing to do, that requires him to look at himself and report back. Men who are His will struggle with it and come back. Men who are not will negotiate the assignment.
Be willing to say it out loud. At some point you will have to sit across from a sincere, generous, well-liked, serving man and tell him you are not sure he has ever surrendered anything to Jesus. It will be the least popular thing you do that year. Do it anyway. He will not hear it from anyone else — everyone else is enjoying him too much.
And one more, which is the real one
Everything above asks you to change what you do. This one asks you to lay down what you are.
But before I say it, let me carve out the men it is not for.
Some of you are already doing this. You are in real, particular relationships with specific men — you know their sin, they know yours, and it costs you evenings you would rather have back. If that is you, this challenge is not for you. I am grateful for you, and the church needs more of you.
Before you set it down, though, do one thing. Name them. Out loud, right now. Not roles — names. Not "my staff," not "my elders," not "my small group." Men, by name, whose sin you actually know and who actually know yours.
If they came out easily, good. Go back to work.
But if you had to think about it — or if what came out of your mouth was a category instead of a name — then this next part is for you.
Take one year out of the pulpit and be the discipleship pastor. The small group pastor. Get out from behind the platform and get into living rooms.
One year. Not a sabbatical, not a study break. Twelve months of the unglamorous work — sitting across from men in their houses, asking questions nobody claps for, being bored, being needed at inconvenient hours, doing the thing that produces no highlight clip and no one to admire you afterward.
Go back and read the charge in Ezekiel 34 again and notice what it actually asks for. Strengthen the weak. Heal the sick. Bind up the injured. Bring back the strayed. Seek the lost. Every one of those verbs happens in a room with one person in it. None of them can be done from a stage. We have built a job description that makes the indicted work structurally impossible, and then wondered why the flock scattered.
And I am not only talking to senior pastors. This is for any of us with a title.
Here is an irony I did not see until I started writing this down. Your student pastor never had the option.
He does not get to decide whether he is in the discipleship business. He is in living rooms, in gyms, in hospital hallways, in hard conversations with parents who are scared and kids who are lying to them — every week, whether he feels like it or not. If he is doing his job at all, he is already doing the exact thing I am asking the rest of us to go do for a year.
And he is very often the last person consulted when the church makes a decision about discipleship.
That should bother us more than it does. The man closest to the actual work usually has the least authority over it, and the men furthest from it set the strategy. If your student pastor is doing his job, he has probably earned more standing on this subject than anyone else on your staff. He knows things about the families in your church that nobody else in the building knows.
Go ask him. Not for a report — for his read. And then take it seriously enough to change something.
I am aware of what I am asking. The pulpit is the thing most of us love most. Which is exactly why it is the test.
If you are truly a shepherd, you can lay it down for a year and be fine. If what you actually love is being clever in front of a room, you will not last four months, and the reason you give for quitting will sound completely reasonable. That is the diagnosis. It is the same instrument I asked you to use on your men — give a man something costly and watch what he does with it — and it would be dishonest of me to hand you that tool and not turn it around.
And here is what I actually believe will happen, because I have watched it in other rooms.
If you last the year, you will come back able to speak more truth and more life into people than you ever have. Not because you will have new material. Because you will have been with people, close enough and long enough to know what is really killing them. Paul said he came without lofty speech on purpose, so that faith would rest on God's power rather than a man's wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:4–5). A year in living rooms will do that to you whether you plan it or not.
You will not have to make anything up. It will be real.
And the part that was never yours
I want to end here, because some of you are carrying weight you were never handed.
The chapter before the shepherds is the watchman, and the terms are exact. If he sounds the trumpet and they will not listen, their blood is on their own head. If he sees the sword coming and stays silent, it is required at his hand (Ezekiel 33:4–6).
That is the whole assignment. Sound it. Not results. Not conversions. Paul said the same of his own ministry — "I am innocent of the blood of all" — and the reason he gives is that he did not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:26–27). His conscience rested on what he said, not on what they did.
And you are not the one who finds them anyway. God reserved that for Himself in the same chapter that indicts the shepherds: "I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out" (Ezekiel 34:11). He does the seeking. He gives the new heart (Ezekiel 36:26). Nobody in your building will be saved because you were clever, and nobody will be lost because you were not.
But we will be held accountable for what we said and did not say. Those of us who teach are judged more strictly (James 3:1). We keep watch over souls as men who will give an account (Hebrews 13:17).
So do not let one more day go by preaching to be admired instead of holding up the Word.
And do not let one more week go by without sitting across from one man and asking him, to his face, whether he is actually walking with the Lord.
We have to quit assuming and start challenging — and we have to do it with the Word of God, not with our clever words.
That is the whole distinction, and I think it is the one we will answer for. Not whether we were compelling. Not whether the room was moved. Whether we held up the thing that is living and active and then got out of its way and let it cut.
Our words are not going to be weighed on that day. His will.
So let this be the prayer, and let it cost you something to pray it honestly. Not that your name would be remembered. Not that anyone would walk out of that room impressed with you. But that His Word would go out and do the exact thing He sent it to do:
"It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11)
He promised that about His Word. He never promised it about ours.
Hold it up. Say it plainly. Get out of the way.
— Josh Menold
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.