I was having lunch with a friend whose relationship with his wife is incredibly strained. I told him that his wife seems to have a fantasy that he will be dragged off into the woods by a bunch of idealized Pilgrim men, who will proceed to make him into the man she really wants. “That would be great,” he said. He really did mean it.

I think it’s a wish many men have, that a group of men will draw close and rescue us from ourselves. It’s what made John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart so successful, in part, because he appealed to wide swaths of men who have the sense that we have not received an induction into Christian manhood. We could catalog the causes in the failures of recent decades: rising divorce rates, the proportion of children born without a father in the home at 25 percent and rising, a generation of men reared by the fantastically self-obsessed Baby Boomers, a culture that elevates personal satisfaction over all other standards.

In the face of these trends the Church has proven largely impotent, such that the practice of faith has become marginalized and atomized. Churches have little authority to discipline members or their children. If you aren’t happy with your pastor’s tie color, let alone any discipline your session might try to mete out (assuming you’re in a church with that kind of conviction and mettle in the first place), there are any number of congregations happy to receive you with no questions asked. It is the Burger Kingization of Christianity: have it your way.

The consequence, too often, is every man for himself. I have another friend who was on the brink of divorce, who practically begged the elders and seeming leaders in his church for help, with barely a phone call in return. That church is planting churches. They’re thriving, at least according to whatever meaningless measures we apply to church growth. Our buildings and finances seem far stronger than our spines, than the bonds that are supposed to unite us one to another.

I’m blessed to be in a church with many strong and faithful men. My friend, the one with whom I had lunch, will have help if he’ll take it. He will have men who come alongside him, and his wife will have women do the same with her. This ought to be the measure, I think, of a church. Does it care for those in need, and discipline those in sin, all with a spirit of love? Is it a community of faith, or a clearinghouse for faith-based activities?

I don’t think we can afford much more of the latter. We have a great deal of work to do. Too many of our parents have failed us, and too many of us are failing our own children. There is so much work to do, and so little time, and it’s one of the reasons that I, at least, couldn’t care less about what some fool of a Democrat or Republican has to say about the state of the GNP, or our national greatness, or whatever other snake oil they’re peddling this week.

The real work, I think, begins in our churches, shoring up one another’s weaknesses, and giving our children the foundation many of us were denied. We need to show our sons how to be men, and our daughters how to be women, and for many of us that means figuring it out as we go. It certainly means so for me, and for many men I know. We are trying to learn how to be real men in a world that devalues and mocks the very notion of manhood, yet which cries out for it.

Nobody is going to drag my friend or me into the woods to make us into real men. We’re learning as we go. Hopefully our children will have an easier time on their paths. Hopefully they’ll have less repair work to do, and can take part in the true building — not of church buildings, but of communities — that desperately needs doing in a country that is increasingly rich in wealth, and increasingly impoverished in life and hope.