Many men today report dissatisfaction with life. Maybe you are one of them, or maybe you know some of them. If so, this interiew is for you.. Today we’re diving into a conversation that I think is very timely. It is one about faith, identity, and what it means to rediscover God in a disenchanted world.
Joe Barnard is the author of The Road Back to God: Faithful Men Dissatisfied by the Modern World – a book that speaks directly to men who are feeling a spiritual restlessness. Men who sense that there’s something missing from the modern vision of success that we’ve been sold, but aren’t really sure how to find their way back to something deeper.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Joe and chat about the book!
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Steve: Joe, thank you so much for coming to tell us more about your latest book. For those who don’t know you, tell us a little about what you do, what you’re involved with, and then we’ll jump into The Road Back to God.
Joe Barnard: I guess I wear two hats. I’m a pastor of church in Edinburgh. Previously, I pastored a church up in the Scottish Highlands. So, my feet are on the ground in that sense. But I also have started, and run, a men’s discipleship ministry, trying to help guys find a path to spiritual growth in the modern world with all of its complexities and difficulties.
Steve: Very good. Tell us a bit about the book! It’s your third book, if I’m not mistaken. One of the previous books is The Way Forward, and in many ways I suppose the new book is a prequel to that. Why did you feel like this is something you wanted to write about?
Joe Barnard: You know, it’s funny because two years ago, when I was writing this book that I felt there was this change, like there was a surge of religious interest among men. But to be honest, a couple of years ago, you couldn’t get much information or data about that. But I had this sense that that men were groping for spiritual truth, but they needed two things.
In a sense, they needed an exit out of the modern world, out of this sort of secular identity that they breathed in and unwittingly had left them with this kind of spiritual emptiness. But then, of course, they also needed a road to the gospel itself.
It’s trying to find a roadmap to get guys out of their confusion and disorientation to where they could understand the gospel in a modern context so that, God willing, they could actually become Christians themselves. That was the motivation behind the book.
Steve: Before we get into some of the chapters, in the introduction of the book talk about modern men who aren’t necessarily going to church or reading the Bible, but are really curious about faith.
And so it seems they’re drawn to Christianity, even if still keeping a bit distant. Part of that is probably due to popular current thinkers and speakers like Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland and Russell Brand, who have put faith back in the spotlight in a sense.
What do you think is behind this growing spiritual interest? Why are so many guys who maybe previously were dismissive of religion now feeling drawn back to it?
Joe Barnard: Yes, you know we could spend a lot of time tracing some of these potential causes. Certainly, there’s a sort of reaction against some of the progressivism. That’s one element of it. There’s also, and this will sound odd for some people, but the research of someone like Richard Reeves. There’s a strange way in which men have fallen behind in the world. And they’re finding themselves not in positions in universities and graduate schools and other jobs. They’re not in dating relationships. There’s this way in which nobody is more lost in the modern world than your young man.
And that’s created all kinds of problems. But it’s also created something that God is using, which is that they’re searching. And they don’t like the trajectory of civilization right now, which means they’re doing something that we didn’t expect a decade or two ago. Instead of looking forward for answers or looking sideways at the present age, they’re looking backward. And so, you’re seeing young guys very interested in tradition, very interested in ancient philosophy, but also increasingly interested in Christendom, whatever that might mean to them.
Whether it’s cultural Christianity, whether it’s a more authentic variant, guys are actually finding their way to their Bibles, and into churches with their questions. And so that’s really interesting because that’s not something I think many people had foreseen a generation ago.
Steve: Definitely not. Not after the rise of the ‘new atheism’ which told us God is dead. We were told that interest in belief in God was completely waning and would ultimately just die out. But we really are seeing something very different to that in many spaces, aren’t we? In the intro to the book, you write that men are not blank slates, just waiting to be taught about God. Rather, we first need to start off with being unschooled from the secular heart or the habits that we’ve been programmed with in our modern secular culture.
What does that mean? And why is that unlearning such an important first step in the road back to God?
Joe Barnard: We can think about this in different ways. One would be that there are certain critical truths that many men have never considered or bumped up against. They need something like what C.S. Lewis describes in his phrase ‘imagination being baptized’. So, case in point: holiness. There’s nothing in the secular materialistic modern world that gives you a kind of grammar by which you might make sense of holiness.
Well, if we strip holiness out of our kind of lived experience, we’re not in a good place to be able to think about the cross or to think about Jesus in any sense. So, you know, there are some things where it’s not just concepts, it’s actually dimensions of reality that guys need unveiled to them. So that’s one aspect.
Another aspect is the rise of the ‘modern self’. That degree to which you know we are not just introverted, but we are actually narcissistic and self-centred. And that sort of consumeristic, individualistic, expressive attitude, again, does not prepare you for the kind of worldview the gospel introduces you to. And so, it’s not just depositing information into people’s minds. Something much more radical has to take place. They need their worldview reconstructed, their notion of self reconstructed, their notion of reality reconstructed. And that’s part of the challenge of evangelism in a post-Christian age.
Steve: So it really means helping deconstruct some earlier sort of worldview lenses that might be there and helping people to see something different. And that’s not something that happens at the drop of the hat. It’s a process. And I think that’s what the book really leads you through so well.
I want to touch on four chapters from the book briefly. It’s really structured around 10 chapters, which you call 10 rules.
In chapter two, page 36 in your book, speaking about truth and wisdom, it says,
“Men in the 21st century are like bumbling tourists in a foreign city. Spiritually, we feel disoriented, lost and confused. Yet according to Proverbs, there’s a presence that is trying to get our attention and who is saying, ‘hey, I can help you’. The name of this eager guide is wisdom, and the path she is trying to lead us along is truth. Her only initial demand of us is that we shift the posture of our hearts from one of pride, despair, and scepticism to one of humility, hope, and trust. In her voice, we hear a promise. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Her pledge is that there are answers to our deepest questions and satisfactions for our deepest longings. Rather than existing in a silent universe, she coaxes us to believe that we are encompassed by a word that is waiting not just to be deciphered, but to be known, trusted, and loved.”
I just love that! But it seems to be leaning towards something very different in terms of what the current secular worldview is saying. You go on to point out that the fundamental message of this modern attitude is to be true to yourself. It’s subjectivism: you find the answers within yourself.
Very different to what the Bible gives us in terms of wisdom and seeking truth, which is outside of ourselves. Can you unpack that a bit, like how those two things hit up against each other?
Joe Barnard: Yeah, I think part of what’s happened through modernity is that as we’ve stripped the external universe from feeling like it’s a cosmos, that it’s a meaningful whole, we’ve lost meaning. And so, the only other place then to look is within ourselves. And so, we go on this great quest looking for this holy grail of purpose and significance and dignity, you know, just trying to probe our inward dimensions. And I think anybody who’s tried that for very long comes up dissatisfied and honestly just really confused because the self is like an onion where there’s always another layer underneath and you just never hit anything that is able to hold your weight.
The wonderful thing about the Bible is that it tells us that actually we’re in a meaningfully created world. You know, this call of wisdom that we have throughout the Proverbs, and not only in Proverbs, is the way God structures the world in Genesis – that actually there is His voice in it. He is trying to get our attention. And that it’s a personal dimension to our existence to where if we’re willing to listen, if we’re willing to yield ourselves, truth wants to be known. God’s not trying to hide from us.
The picture with Adam in the book of Genesis is that we’ve been hiding from God. And so, it’s time to come out of our hiding and encounter him. And he’s a God who wants to be found. And so hopefully that’s part of the teasing men out of staring at themselves and it’s bringing them into this awareness that actually there’s a God who has made himself so present. He’s taken flesh in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Steve: In many ways that is exactly where I was in my late teenage years. And as much as I was trying to learn more about faith, it was this journey. It took about four years until I really lifted my eyes and stopped looking to myself to find ultimate meaning, purpose, and value, because that only comes from God. It urns out we need something outside ourselves to fix us. And I think you speak about that so clearly in the book.
In chapter 4, titled “Face the Truth About Yourself”, I think one of the things that really stands out to me is just how direct you are about self-honesty and how necessary that is. You really press readers to face uncomfortable truths about who they are before taking those steps toward God. And something that really popped out to me is the idea that “hopelessness is very often the womb of hope”.
You then challenge readers to confront their own moral brokenness as that first step in spiritual growth. So how do you see this process of self-confrontation playing out in today’s culture, where there’s so much self-distraction and the self-justification?
Joe Barnard: So many of us are hiding from our negative emotions. We’re treating them as if they are evil when in fact they might be indicative of something important. The shame, the guilt, the anxiety that is so rampant among men and others too – they might be a symptom that there’s a real, deeper problem. And you know the more that we turn to amusement we realise that it doesn’t alleviate it. There’s something broken within us and we all know it’s there.
We all need the courage to face that and to own the depth of the problem. The truth is that at my core, the deepest bit of my brokenness is something my therapist and the scientist is not able to fix. Until we reach that place, we’re not going to see what’s distinctively offered in the gospel itself. But, you know, the one Christian doctrine that’s empirically verifiable is the Bible’s view of human sin!
Other things are a little bit harder to demonstrate, but we should be able to reach that place where we acknowledge that that we are flawed and that there is a depth to the problem that exceeds human capacity to fix. And so, I want to urge guys to courageously face that reality.
Steve: It’s a hard step because we have to be very honest and often we don’t want to do that. But I agree that it’s definitely the starting point and it’s necessary.
The first part of the book is really that inward focus pushing us to be honest about that. But then you change gears. Chapter 8, Rule No. 8, “Resurrect Your Worldview”. Here you start shifting from that inward journey to a larger vision and how having faith, specifically, a faith in Jesus Christ, reshapes our perception of not just ourselves, but reality as a whole. In that you reframe the resurrection of Jesus not just as something that that really happened in history, but as something that also transforms the way we live and think now.
You describe the resurrection not just as a past miracle, but as this lens that reshapes how we see the present world. You frame it as thinking that Christians are a spreading network of heavenly colonies on earth. But, how does this reimagined worldview challenge the way we would typically separate faith from everyday life? The contrast of just having a faith that somehow pops out on a Sunday when we go off to church but is always present in every aspect of our lives, in the ‘real world’ that I live out all the rest of the time.
Joe Barnard: I think Marx was stating something true when he said religion is the opiate of the masses. That’s how we often view Christianity ourselves. We imagine it to be something that’s ultimately detached from this reality, detached from this world, detached from our body. So, we bear with our conditions until one day you die and your spirit goes to heaven to be with the Lord.
But the resurrection is such a challenge to that kind of Gnostic mindset. Christ was resurrected bodily! That’s the beginning of a process that’s going to result in a new heaven, a new earth. And it gives significance to the here and now. It says that we’re able to live our lives in an embodied way with real hope that the things that we do, as the Apostle Paul says, that they’re not entirely in vain. And that in our physical existence there is actually great value before God and that we can anticipate the fullness of his kingdom even right now in the broken communities that we embody as the church.
And I think that mindset is a radical shift for people, even for many Christians to really believe that – that their present life has significance, and is somehow connected in an anticipatory way to that kingdom of heaven. That is, with Christ at God’s right hand, but that the ultimate goal is for that king to come here and to restore all things, including our body, even our whole universe.
It’s such a different worldview that as it begins to land into people’s lives, they find that actually Monday has much more significance than they ever would have previously imagined.
Steve: What you’re touching on is something that I see quite often. And I think it is something that has made its way into the Western Christian mindset. It’s basically the idea that faith is all about getting to heaven, that’s it. It’s all just about when you die and you what happens after that. And yes, the Bible is clear that everlasting life is a glorious and true reality. But when you look in the Gospels and you see Jesus speaking about the Gospel, he frames it as the Kingdom of God being made manifest in Him. Like he has come to basically inaugurate that. And so that has an in-this-life-now dimension, yet it is not fully seen and expressed.
I think we rob ourselves of so much of the experience and the joy of life now and then finding that meaning and purpose, especially as you say, in our Monday to Friday. That is really important.
Chapter 9, Rule 9, “Act on the Truth”. I think you do a great job in the personal challenge to starting steps of radical honesty with ourselves. Then it’s this reshaped worldview. But people may stop there. But Chapter 9 calls us to say realise it all leads to action, too.
The illustration used there is basically that true conversion isn’t just like adding sugar to tea, but it’s the death of the old self and the birth of a new one. And so, in this chapter there are lots of verbs like repent, submit, profess, attach, follow. There’s this call to practical action. Why do you think so many people today settle for this mild spiritual interest rather than that kind of amazingly radical transformation that we see Jesus calls us to?
Joe Barnard: I think the box of ‘religion is to blame’ that plays a big role in that. That’s how we conceive of religion and we conceive of Christianity as just another religion. You know, it’s something that comes on the side. It’s just a little garnish on my life. It’s meant to alleviate some of our negative emotions, give us a sense meaning and purpose. But there’s no sense that it would actually turn us inside out and change everything about us. And if we have that small box of what Christianity is, then we’re never going to understand Christianity properly. I think part of what the book is trying to do is highlight what someone like what Kierkegaard would talk about – stages that you pass through. There’s an aesthetic existence, there’s an ethical, and then there’s the religious.
And guys have to go through this full transformation where initially they go from just living for something like pleasure, then on to thinking. But thinking’s not enough. Ultimately they need to enter into the fullness of a life with Christ, which is a totally different experience than what they had previously when they were outside of him.
There should be a kind of ‘birth pain’ when the Holy Spirit is at work as men think about the gospel, and realise they are being brought out into a whole new world just like an infant is when it’s born. And that’s gonna mean, among other things, action! Not just thought.
It’s going to be embodied and it’s going to have to be embodied among other people. And so, I think part of what modern men need to hear is that this is not something you get on your own. People are used to getting truth on podcasts. They go to YouTube and listen to their favourite speaker or commentator or whoever. But Christianity doesn’t fit into that. You’ve got to find your way to embody yourself into a church, ultimately to be a disciple. And so, it’s trying to help lead guys you know through that process.
Steve: that leads me very nicely to the last question. So, we know that there is rising interest in Christianity among younger guys, as you mentioned. Is the church prepared to be receiving guys who are experiencing that and then actually acting on that interest and ultimately walking through the doors of the church?
If the answer is no, what could churches be thinking about or doing to be more ready for that?
Joe Barnard: I’ll be I’ll just be honest. Churches are not ready. And I’m speaking to the reader now. The way you know this is true is at least one or two of these young guys are stepping inside your church. But here’s the thing. They’re also stepping out of it. So, what I think we’re all seeing is there are men landing and leaving. Especially evangelical churches, because they tend to be going to the higher churches, the sort of Orthodox Roman and Roman Catholic churches. The question is, what would you do if one of these men stepped into your church on a Sunday and you thought in three weeks he might be gone?
We better have something you can do quickly. And I hope this doesn’t come across as egotistical, but… that’s why I wrote the book! So, one thing you could do is actually give a book like this to him and better yet say, hey, I’d love to read this with you. That would be a concrete, simple next step that would be able to engage those questions of that young man.
Steve: I think what I really appreciate about The Road Back to God is that it’s not content with just this vague spirituality. It calls us and to honesty and courage and action.
For any guy who reading this, who is maybe feeling that quiet tugging, that sense of restlessness that you described in the early chapters of the book, this may very well be that guide to begin the journey home.
Joe, where can people go if they want to find out more about you and your ministry? I know you’ve got a really good men’s ministry. Where can we find that?
Joe Barnard: Yes, it’s Cross Training Ministries. You can go to www.xtrainingministries.com and find a whole variety of resources. But certainly, check us out on YouTube, check us out on the website, and we’d love to get you involved.
Steve: Thank you again, firstly, for writing the book, and for taking the time to chat about it.
