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Reviving a Christian giant

The Promise Keepers men's movement, a '90s phenomenon that nearly collapsed under the weight of its own success, has learned to take things more slowly.

By RODNEY THRASH
Published August 19, 2005

Men, more than 10,000 of them, will file into an Orlando basketball arena tonight. But not for a game.

For a revival.

"We are in a semiconscious state," said Steve Chavis, spokesman for the Promise Keepers, a Christian men's group and host of tonight's gathering. "We got here by playing the world's game. We got here by marginalizing our faith to a couple of hours on the weekend. We got here by not studying our Bibles."

Chavis said it is time for an "Awakening," the theme of this year's rally. It is taken from a scripture in the New Testament, Romans 13:11.

"The hour has come to wake up from your slumber."

That message is as much for the Orlando audience as it is for the Promise Keepers, the organization.

Once the fastest-growing Christian men's movement, its national prominence has waned since 1998, when one of the group's founders announced in St. Petersburg that the Promise Keepers was on the verge of financial ruin.

Attendance at conferences plummeted. The venues changed from places as large as the ThunderDome (now Tropicana Field), the site of a 1995 meeting, to small arenas. The leadership of the organization changed.

Now, the group is embarking on its most ambitious schedule since 1999: six months, two countries, 21 cities. Two stops, Nashville and Mobile, Ala., have already sold out. Tonight's place, the T.D. Waterhouse Center in Orlando, is close to selling out.

"Our desire is to deepen our influence in men's lives around the world," Chavis said.

Ten years ago this month, it made that dent right here in St. Petersburg.

The Rev. Kenneth Boaz was sitting on the main floor of the ThunderDome that summer day in 1995.

"I remember turning my back and looking out over the expanse of men," said Boaz, 57. "Of the excitement in their faces, their hands waving toward the Lord way up high and many of them with tears running down their cheeks."

"There were (nearly) 50,000 men," said Dana Hardee, 58, of Land O'Lakes.

Some came in their Sunday best. Others in shorts, T-shirts and caps. Fathers brought their sons.

They listened as gospel artists lifted their voices in testimony. They sat entranced as preachers told them the godly definition of real men, not the world's view.

"The world says to be a man you have to say yes," said Danny Bennett, 37, minister of education at Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater. Bennett attended conferences in St. Petersburg and Jacksonville. "Anyone can say yes to something. You want drugs. You want to cheat on your marriage.

"A real man is someone who loves unconditionally, who loves his wife, who loves God, a servant leader, which is exactly who Jesus was."

Drug addicts said they were healed. Men whose marriages were on the rocks said relationships were mended. And some of those who had never known Christ accepted him as their Lord and personal savior.

"I call it a spiritual marker in my life in renewing my commitment to Christ and renewing my commitment to my wife and kids," Bennett said.

So how did a group with so much impact falter?

Chavis said the organization was too successful too fast.

At the group's first meeting in Boulder, Colo., in 1991, there were 4,200 men. Five years later, attendance at 22 stadiums was 1.1-million.

"That pace could not be sustained," Chavis said. "At least not by us."

Co-founder David B. Wardell said it was something else.

"I think it was an issue of good stewardship," he said. "God only allows you so much. You need to be good stewards of what he allows. When we don't take that seriously as an organization, God removes the anointing."

That anointing was removed in 1997.

More than 600,000 men were at a Promise Keepers "Stand in the Gap" Rally on the Mall in Washington D.C., when co-founder and former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney made an announcement: The 1998 and 1999 conferences would be free. He thought the $55 the organization charged for admission to conferences was cost-prohibitive to lower-income men, men the group wanted to reach. He also thought donations would sustain a multimillion-dollar operation.

They did not.

"Where's the checkbook on a Saturday afternoon?" asked Hardee, the Land O'Lakes man who attended the 1995 revival. "In the mall."

Hardee, who left his job and took a $15,000 pay cut to become a state volunteer recruiter for Promise Keepers in 1996, was let go two years later as part of nationwide layoffs.

Around the same time, attendance at conferences fell sharply. The 1998 conference at Houlihan's Stadium in Tampa drew fewer than 22,000 men - not even half of the nearly 50,000 who attended the 1995 rally in St. Petersburg.

Men like Boaz could not make subsequent Promise Keepers revivals. Not because they lost interest, but because they were trying to implement what they gained from the conferences at their own churches.

"Rallies are good, but once you've learned from the rally, you take what you've learned and you give it away," said Boaz, who attended the 1995 gathering in St. Petersburg. "You don't have to keep going to the rally."

In January, he started his own church, International Church of Clearwater. The name of the church's men's ministry is Men of Promise.

"What is Promise Keepers? We never hear about them anymore."

Wardell gets comments like that a lot.

"We're here," he tells those who inquire. "We're alive and well and I hope God will continue to keep his hands on us, but also discipline us."

The Promise Keepers is leaner now.

It once employed more than 500 full-time staffers. Today, there are about 85.

Its budget of $30-million is one-fifth the amount it was during the organization's peak - $150-million.

It reinstituted an admission fee for its conferences in 2000.

The leadership evolved, starting in 2003. McCartney resigned as president. He could not be reached for this story. Thomas Fortson, the organization's chief financial officer since 1996, was named his successor. Earlier this year, he broke ground when he named a woman to his former post. The group has weathered criticism since its founding that it is homophobic and misogynistic.

Attendance still hasn't reached the figures of the 1990s, but that, Chavis said, doesn't matter as much anymore.

"We are not preoccupied with the numbers," he said. "We manage the numbers."

What matters most is winning lost souls and making men better Christians, better husbands and better fathers.

"Our focus," he said, "is serving men around the world."

-- Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com

Promise Keepers: The Awakening, 6:30 p.m. today and Saturday, T.D. Waterhouse Center, 600 W Amelia St., Orlando. $89 for adults, $69 for youths 18 and younger. (407) 849-2020.

[Last modified August 18, 2005, 10:21:03]