Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video

What difference does a men’s ministry make? With well-discipled men come better marriages, stronger families, and more effective church communities. Today we’re interviewing Pat Morley and Brett Clemmer, two of the men behind Man in the Mirror - a ministry that focuses on bringing men closer to Christ as they fulfill their unique God-given roles in life.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again. I'm Marlin Detwiler, and you've joined us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Pat Morley and Bret Clemmer. Pat, as many of you may know, wrote a book, Man in the Mirror, which has become a very extensive ministry to men. And I thought it would be a really good thing to hear about that.

But before we do that, Pat, if you could give us a little bit of personal background on you and then Brett, if you would do the same. So that people have a little bit of a sense of who you all are.

Pat Morley:

Well, first of all, thank you, Marlin, for having Brett and me on your show. We're excited about the work you do and the ministry that you have and then also your viewers wouldn’t know that, but you and I, we go back a few decades back and we were all newlyweds.

Marlin Detweiler:

I still remember very fondly coming over to a beautiful building entryway and learning about the book release of Man in the Mirror. I don't know what year that was. You probably do!

Pat Morley:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, That was March of 1989, March 1989. And that was the Maitland Colonnades building.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's right. So you do you have children, I know that.

Pat Morley:

Yeah. So, Patsy and I, we just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary!

Marlin Detweiler:

Congrats.

Pat Morley:

So that's a nice. Yeah, nice milestone. And so I met I met Patsy when I was not a believer. She was a believer. We fell in love. My answers to her questions weren't that satisfying. So I basically started telling her whatever she wanted to hear. So I basically tricked her into marrying me. And I think she wanted to be tricked, to be honest.

And so we had a pretty awkward start to the marriage, but through her prayers and basically some young men my age at the church that we ended up attending because I couldn't manage my life and I was desperate and needed help and church seemed like a nice place to try to find that help. Through her prayers and some young men that took me under their wing and showed me the ropes and explained the gospel, I became a follower of Jesus as my wife already was, and something took hold of me. And then, you know, most of the really big ideas about Christianity took 10 or 20 years to sink in. So I didn't really understand grace for about 14 years. But on that day, when I did finally understand grace, we'd already started The Man in the Mirror Bible Study.

We started that Bible study in a bar here, and you remember the old Villanova restaurant. We started in the bar there. Pretty quickly, moved over to the Winter Park Civic Center. That Bible study still going on after 37+ years. But it was after that I really had my biggest encounter with God in the middle of a business crisis and really came to understand that his love is unconditional.

And I was into performance-based Christianity because that was the only system I knew. So without going into much more detail, we do have two children. They're both married and we have five grandchildren and we are just in love with the Lord and really honored to be here with you today. And we want to help as many men as possible to know Jesus and become disciples.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's what a wonderful, focused ministry. Brett, what's a little bit about your background? You function now as the CEO of Man of the Mirror Ministries and have worked with Pat for a long time. How did you - what's your personal background that led to this?

Brett Clemmer:

Yeah, I'm I grew up in New England, but Austin grew up outside of Boston. And so I love my Boston sports teams to this day. So excited to see the Celtics doing well right now!

Marlin Detweiler:

That far South. Boston people remain loyal regardless of where they live.

Brett Clemmer:

We are. We are. But yeah, so I grew up in a really wonderful Christian home. My mom and dad - well, my dad’s passed, but my mom is still alive at 91, and they're both very, very godly parents. I did not follow Christ very well in college, and then out of college, ended up in Connecticut and I met this girl at this church I was going to, and it turned out she was the pastor's daughter. And we fell in love and sort of came back. We have both, I think, grown up in the church. And so it was very much something that we had been handed and didn't really have to figure out for ourselves. And so I think we both went through that process together of figuring it out for ourselves.

And so we ended up in Florida, have two kids, the 29-year-old daughter who lives here in Orlando and a 26 year old son who lives in Chattanooga with his wife. And I tell people I have three granddogs but no grandchildren yet. So, in the late nineties, I was in the nonprofit world.

Marlin Detweiler:

I'm sure that will happen for you - grandchildren!

Brett Clemmer:

Yeah, I hope so. I hope so! They’re promising. But I keep telling them those are pretty empty promises right now. But yeah, they're doing great.

So late in the nineties, I was in the nonprofit world here in Orlando in the social service sector and I actually ended up helping develop some technology that agencies were using and that became its own technology company.

And in the late nineties I was doing that and really just trying to build something big and really caught up in the rat race, caught up on the idea of having a tech start-up and making a lot of money. And my marriage was struggling, and then the company started struggling, and a buddy from church invited me to join a men's group, and I grew up in the church.

So I knew I needed help. So I joined the men's group, and I said, what are we going to study? And he said, “I don't know. They handed out a book in church the other day for men. Just bring that book.” And that book was The Man in the Mirror. And so in 2000, as the tech market was crashing and my company was crashing along with it, I was in this group with these guys. That was just a remarkable experience of men really leaning into each other's lives. And the Man in the Mirror book was just instrumental in helping us talk about the right things, ask the right questions, hold each other accountable in the right ways. And so, over the course of that year, the company went out of business. But my marriage was saved, and my family was restored. And at that point my kids were toddlers. So it was a it was a really critical time. And so towards the end of that year, I said, guys, I got a I got to find a new job. We're not going to make it. And a buddy in the small group said, “You know, I think Pat Marley's looking for a guy like you.” And I'm holding the book in my hand, and I'm like, what are you talking about?

And he's like, “Read the back of the book. There's a ministry in Central Florida.” And so a couple of different friends of mine knew some folks at Man in the Mirror. And so the beginning of November, we closed the doors of the company. And at the end of November, I came to work here at Man in the Mirror. And so I'm celebrating 23 years at the ministry this month. And so it's been a remarkable experience. I’m glad to be here.

Marlin Detweiler:

What a great segway! I remember, and I think I heard most of this from a guy that led your real estate business named Chuck Mitchell. But I remember you telling him, and I may have the story wrong here, but telling him one morning, “I'm going home for lunch, and I'm going to come back determining whether or not I'm going to go this way or this way.”

And the two ways were to continue with Morley Properties, a very successful commercial real estate investment firm, or to step out of it and go and make Man in the Mirror happen. Give us a little bit of play-by-play on what that day was like and what was going on that led to it.

Pat Morley:

Well, Marlin, first of all, thank God for Chuck Mitchell. Chuck is a man of complete integrity. And he was a man who was the general manager of our company at that time. And I remember inviting Chuck into my office one morning several years earlier and lamenting that I couldn't really get anyone to ever tell me the whole story, you know, because I was the boss.

And so I said, “Could I give you permission, and would you be willing to take on the responsibility of coming into my office and telling me the truth?” You know, what I needed to hear. And he did. And he did a wonderful job and he was gracious about it. Of course.

So yeah, I had become I didn't realize it at the time – I didn't have the category bi-vocational, but early in my career as a real estate developer, after I received the Lord, I mean, I was out and out for Christ, and I was taking all my friends out to lunch to say, “I cannot believe what I discovered – you’re going to want to know about this.” And so we were doing Bible studies and prayer breakfasts in small groups and then started the Man in the Mirror Bible study 86

And then in 1988 I had this leading to write a book. So I ended up writing The Man in the Mirror book, and it came out in 89. And so I was, you know, in the early days of this, I was maybe 50% ministry, 50% business, and then suddenly with 75% ministry and 25% well, got to be, you know, like 90% ministry and 10% business.

So Chuck Mitchell, my truth-teller. So he got with our controller, and I thought I was coming to a meeting to set the budget for the year the two of them had colluded together, and they ambushed me. And they said, “We think that if this business is going to thrive, that you really need to step back into the business full-time.”

Well, that just sounded so wrong to me. And I was devastated. And so that's what I did. So that's picking up the story. My checks said yes. So I did, I went, I said, “I'll get back to you.” And I went home and on the way home not to make the story too long, but on the way home, all the different possibilities are spinning around.

But ultimately, by the time I got home, I said, you know, I either probably need to do what they say or I need to go ahead and pull the trigger on going into ministry, which had been planned at about five years earlier by our pastor. Yours and mine. Chuck Green. And so anyway, by the time I got home, it was kind of a black-and-white decision.

Well, Patsy, my wife. She's the sort of consoler in chief. The Mother Theresa. She's not the decision-maker. She's not the person with a strong opinion. But on that day and maybe two other occasions in our entire marriage, she's really felt strongly. So I laid out the options to her, and she said, “Let's go for it.” just like that.

Wow. Know who are you? What did you do with my wife? So then that was the point. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing and getting into, but we fumbled around for about five years, and I was afraid to say no to anything. So I said yes to everything.

But at about the five-year mark of that, it just became clear that, okay, the calling was to men and to men's discipleship. And so once we focused on that thing– there was it's kind of like riverbanks, you know, when you when the water is going down the river out into the lake, it just kind of swirls around, but eventually gets back up in between two riverbanks?

So, the riverbanks give the water direction and velocity. And so, we narrowed the focus to two men. We suddenly have a direction,we had velocity, and great things have happened.

Marlin Detweiler:

What a great lead-in. But you've mentioned Patsy, and I want you to hear something that has stuck in my head for more than 30 years. It's the only thing that I can say. I remember Patsy having said, ”Why are you so worried about that? Why are you so worried about that $100 table, more than that million-dollar check?” Damaging a table. That has stuck. So please tell her I said that. But tell us, with Man in the Mirror, it has been focused on men from the beginning. I understand the value of focus, but tell us, why men? What has been the focus for you all?

And Brett, you started to talk about this. In your personal experience, what has it been about men? And, of course, natural questions follow, and you can feel free to just jump into what you would expect those follow-up questions to be about how that permeates into more than just men.

Pat Morley:

Oh, Brett, he has set this up so well for you. Yeah, It's like, Oh my gosh, you put a basketball on a golf tee.

Brett Clemmer:

When you influence a man, the ripple effects of that just touch everything. So if you get men right, if you get men following Christ, if you get men living lives of sacrificial leadership, that's how you get marriages healthy. When you get a man right, and then you get his marriage right, then you affect his whole family.

When you affect his whole family, not only do you have the generational impact of that, but you have the support of the sort of the vertical impact of that. But you have the horizontal impact because churches are made up of families.

And so when you get a church that's full of healthy families, then that church can do the work that God has called it to more effectively. So, in effect, you get men right, you get marriages right, and you get marriages right, you get families right. And when you get families right, you get churches right. And when you get churches right, that's our best chance to really influence the world.

And, you know, it's not it's not saying that women aren't important, too. Women are absolutely as important as well. But men are unique. The other reason I think that there needs to be a focus on men is because we have unique needs, we have unique perspectives, we have unique pressures in society.

Right now, I think even more so, there's this whole you know, there's this whole cultural soup that we're swimming in where people are calling, you know, sort of normal, regular, everyday masculine traits, they are calling them toxic. And, you know, sort of lumping all of the negatives in. You know, there are some negatives out there, but lumping not all in with all the amazing positive things that men are doing and amazing traits that men have.

And so you know, somebody – somebodies. We're one of them. We're not the only ones, but somebody needs to stand up and say, this is Christian manhood. This is healthy manhood. And this is the impact that men can have in society and churches and families and marriages.

Marlin Detweiler:

You all are probably, you know, in the circles that I run in. And I suspect that you run and maybe even more so, we see scripture talking about men, leading families. And that has all kinds of ripple effects that you've alluded to. Well, how do you address that aspect of society, maybe even that aspect of Christian community that's dismissive of what I think are pretty plain scriptures? That man has a certain kind of authority that a woman doesn't. And with that, a certain type of responsibility. When I hear a bit of a feminist mindset object to that, I think, oh, do you know what you're asking for? Do you really want this responsibility? But how do you all address that internally, or is that is that not an area that has become a problem for you?

Pat Morley:

Well, Brett, would you take that, or would you like me to take it?

Brett Clemmer:

Go go ahead. And I might add something, and you get something.

Pat Morley:

So we're pretty clear in it. Another way of approaching this would be to say, well, what is a man and how do you become one? All right. And so part of what it means to be a man is to be, in most cases, a husband and often a father. Now, not in all cases. And we have an increasing diversity in our culture.

And that's that's fine. And we want to minister to all of the men. But that's the norm. And so we want to show men that Jesus, through his apostle Paul, the spirit of God, through his apostle Paul, said that husbands should love their wives just as Jesus and his role as Christ loved the church. Well, in His role as the Christ Jesus in traditional theology is known as our prophet, our priest and our king.

And so we teach men that we are to love our wives and by extension, the fruit of our loins– our progeny, our children. That's there's no twisting of Scripture to extend that beyond. But we're to love our wives and by extension, our children in the same way that Jesus, in his role as prophet, priest and king, loved the church or his family.

And so we teach men how to be the family prophet, how to take the responsibility for the spiritual nurture, care, and instruction of their wives and children, and then how to be the priest, to be a man of prayer, to be the man who is making sure the children are in church, for example, and getting the other kinds of, you know, love, structure, roots and wings that they need.

And then he's also the family king So he leads, protects and provides for the family. Now, that's kind of like an analytical way of looking at it. So Brett maybe you could lend some words.

Marlin Detweiler:

Add the pastoral to it!

Brett Clemmer:

It's funny because I was going to this this may not be as pastoral as you want, but, you know, I think also that, you know, it goes back to the cultural mandate. You know, back in the very beginning of Genesis, God gave man and woman this cultural mandate to turn creation and to take care of it.

And then in the next chapter in chapter three, you see Adam get this role of being put in a garden to work it. Then he names everything. So he's providing structure and identity to things, and then it turns out that it's not good for him to be alone. And none of the animals are suitable as help meet, although I'm pretty sure a Labrador retriever came close.

And so God makes a woman out of Adam's side, you know, to be alongside of him. Woman means with man, doesn't mean underneath, man doesn't mean over over man. It means with man. And so together they had this beautiful relationship, this mandate to take care of the garden and to fill the earth and to tend to the earth.

And then sin comes in and, you know, Eve committed the action. But Adam stood there and watched it. And so Adam’s sin in that moment was passivity. Then I think we see we still see the ripple effects of that now with men. Passivity is one of the two extremes that men can go to, either just sort of sitting back and letting their wife be the leader, which is exhausting for a woman in a marriage to have a passive husband or, you know, obviously the opposite of that, which is the aggressive domineering, bad, bad man in a relationship.

And so we're calling men to be what God created them to be, to work alongside of a wife if God calls them to marriage. God doesn't call every man in to marriage. We have to recognize that as well. There's a lot of single guys out there who as you know, Paul said that can be a blessing as well as far as his being in ministry. So I think we're encouraging men to be godly men who love their wives well. Who live for the purposes of the gospel to follow Christ and to help other people know him. And that starts in the home. The man has to be the family shepherd first before he can go out there and tend the culture and build a career and all those kinds of things.

Pat Morley:

I would append to that as well. I had a young man that asked me if I would meet with him, and I did. On our fourth meeting, he walked in, he sat down and he stared at me for a few seconds trying to decide if he was really going to say what he wanted to say.

Marlin Detweiler:

It was too late. You were going to ask him. You were going to not let him go until he did, I'm sure!

Pat Morley:

Well, he he ended up blurting out he said, “I have a mediocre relationship with God, a mediocre business and a mediocre marriage.” And then he just sat back. Wow. And so why did it take so long? Well, he's just shared the most intimate details of his life. I mean, no man fails on purpose, right? No man wakes up in the morning and says, “ I wonder what I can do today to let God down and irritate my wife?” Well, actually, some probably do ask that question. But, you know, generally speaking, what can I do? Why do I irritate my wife or neglect my kids? And yet every day, you know, men are doing this and so they need they need encouragement, they need hope, and they need the right instruction as well.

There's a tendency sometimes to say, well, you just trust Jesus. Well, yeah, you trust Jesus. But it's Proverbs 3:5-6, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, which implies that you have acquired an understanding upon which you then entrust to the Lord. Is that trust in the Lord and, you know, not be stupid. We're in discipleship.

We see this all the time, you know, evangelism without discipleship is cruel. We see this all the time that men get sort of enlisted into the kingdom and issued a rifle. But then nobody ever teaches them how to clean and shoot. And so they on the day of battle, they get slaughtered. And so we're trying to do something about that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, as you know, our work is primarily with children in the age of kindergarten through 12th grade. What thoughts do you have for fathers seeking to raise godly children?

Pat Morley:

All right. Well, Brett, it's your turn.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah.

Brett Clemmer:

Yeah. Well, as a user of Veritas materials as we homeschool our kids. And my kids are in their twenties now. We loved homeschooling. There's, there's a picture in the dictionary under the heading woman least likely to ever homeschool her kids and my wife's head shot is there.

Marlin Detweiler:

You know, I have thousands of women saying that!

Brett Clemmer:

I'm sure. I'm sure! But she but she was obedient to what she felt called to do. And we had a great experience with both our kids doing that. But, you know, I think as a dad who helped his wife homeschool his kids and, you know, I was working. So my wife was really the primary homeschool.

She was the superintendent of the school and the principal. I was the vice principal. You know, the vice principal was the one that meets out the discipline right. But, you know, the other thing is for us, there were certain you know, one of the reasons my wife didn't want to homeschool is because she didn't feel adequate. She didn't graduate from college.

And so there were things that I was better at than she was and that we went out and got help for the other things. Like I was the math and science guy and she was more the English and social studies stuff and all the stuff related to that.

And then we really plugged into local groups of homeschoolers and got a lot of enhancements from those relationships, did a lot of stuff with other families that homeschooled socially. And field trips and longer than just a day field trips to go see things. We were also blessed. I hit the father-in-law lottery and had a great father-in-law who loves history. So he would he would do stuff with our kids. He was not local. But for instance, we met in Washington, D.C. once. First, we wore our wives out and then we wore our kids out. And then the last day, he and I just did all the history stuff and were excited about it.

I loved being involved in the education of our kids. Were not the kind of family that set up a classroom with desks and a whiteboard. You know, we weren't that kind of homeschool family. We were a lot more sort of set deadlines, meet objectives and help the kids figure out how they were going to get there.

When my kids got to college, it was no different. Like they had they had had a lot of autonomy for a long time. So while their classmates were struggling without structure, you know, the structure that they were used to, our kids were just like, “Well, I've always had to figure out what I have to do and what I have to get it done by and how I'm going to get there.” And so they just did it.

So our kids, both did great in college. I tease my wife all the time. She didn't graduate from college. Our daughter graduated with a degree in math with a focus on discrete analysis. And our son was a philosophy major with a minor in entrepreneurship. So they're both highly, highly successful kids these days doing their work.

Marlin Detweiler:

So Pat, what would you like to add to that?

Pat Morley:

Well, Marlin, a couple of thoughts that would be hopefully encouraging suggestions, practical ideas that would be encouraging because they are practical for the dads that might tune in or might hear about them from their spouses later. I was extremely busy with building my empire as a young man. And I had the advantage of at that point of still knowing everything.

But one day I realized that I was giving the best of me to other people. And you had referenced it a little bit earlier. I came up with this question, “Who's going to be crying at my funeral?” as a result of my wife challenging me with that. I’m not going to ruin a $1,000,000 child over a $300 table that's the exact quote. And, you know, they were putting scratches on the table, playing, doing things that kids do. I'm a contemplative by nature. So I thought about it. And so I decided that I was going to prioritize everything that I do based on who going to be crying at my funeral.

Men, if you're listening, I'd encourage you to think about that or come up with your own way of saying it. But just think about who are the people that really matter and then prioritize based on that. And then secondly, make that philosophy actionable. So one thing I did, I've written about this extensively in my different books, but one thing that I think is really meaningful is we have three children. I decided to start taking one of our children out to dinner on a date. Basically every Tuesday night I would take one of the children out. We go get something to eat, maybe like a Chuck E. Cheese. And then we go either play video games or go carts. Sometimes go to maybe get some ice cream and after I had done that for a few years, I realized, you know, it was basically the only time I really have any meaningful conversation with our children beyond discussing what to do with the dishes after dinner and things like that. It was on those date nights. I still refer back to those date nights as being a very powerful and, well, not powerful, but a meaningful, meaningful time, something where they remember that they actually got to know their dad as a human being rather than as the dispenser of discipline and also the leadership of the family. And so, yeah, that's just one idea.

Marlin Detweiler:

We have this has been wonderful and I have so many questions I would have to ask, but we've run out of time. But I want to encourage those of you that are listening here with Pat and Brett to go to the website Man in the Mirror, look at the possibilities and realize that where are you are is probably not very far from an opportunity to connect.

And it's a great way for men to be with men in a godly way for the sake of themselves, for the sake of their marriages, for the sake of their families, their cultures and churches. And it really has been a wonderful work, and we're so thankful to be able to have this time and let other people know about it that may not have heard about it.

Thank you for joining us.

Brett Clemmer:

Thanks for having us.

Pat Morley:

Thank you, Marlin, it was really nice to see you again. And to all of your viewers and listeners, anything we can do to help you become more effective as a man and we would love to walk alongside with you and help you if we can.

Marlin Detweiler:

Thank you very much. Folks, you have been with us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you once again.