My first pastor did something during a worship service one Sunday I’ll never forget. Placing a chair on the stage, he said to us, “Imagine that Jesus is sitting here watching us worship Him. How would you react knowing He was here, physically present?” I confess that during the rest of the service, I kept glancing furtively at that (empty) chair.

I relived that memory after reading David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church, and thought about the very serious issue of what churches can do to encourage more men to become active participants in worship and ministry. In his book, Murrow takes a no-stone-unturned approach—including a challenge to men to reclaim the décor of the sanctuary from the women who’ve had free rein to put things up that appeal to them.

Murrow believes this is all part of cultivating “a healthy masculine spirit” in the Church. “A man must sense, from the moment he walks in, that church is not just for Grandma, it’s something for him,” he writes. “It can’t feel like a ladies’ club. The quilted banners, fresh flowers and boxes of Kleenex in our sanctuaries make a statement.”

In an interview, Murrow told me that men ought to feel just as free to make their own statement as the women have done. “I mean, why can’t the sanctuary look like a hunting lodge? Why can’t we mount deer heads around the sanctuary? Why are quilted banners holier than God’s created animals?” he wondered. “We don’t ask those questions.”

Well, maybe deer heads would work in Anchorage, Alaska, where Murrow lives. But I don’t know if they would work in North Vancouver, where I live. And even if the men I know did try to make their sanctuaries more welcoming to unchurched men on the North Shore, what would they put in? Canucks jerseys? Starbucks coffee mugs? Pictures of Whistler and Hawaii? 2010 Winter Olympics logos? Marijuana plants?

If it were up to me, I’d make the sanctuary look like a library or bookstore. But that’s the problem. It is not “my” sanctuary. It is God’s house. Everything about the temple of the Lord that Solomon built spoke to the glory of God. Nothing in it spoke to the glory of Solomon. He built his own palace to do that.

Speaking through Isaiah, the Lord declared that “my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7, NIV). Not a ladies’ club, a hunting lodge or a library, but a place where all His people could come and enter into communion with Him. Worship should never become a comfort zone, because of what it is—a divine encounter between a people of unclean lips and a holy and awesome God (Isaiah 6:1-6, NIV).

No, what will really make the difference in men’s lives is not a man-friendly sanctuary but rather—and I know Murrow would agree with this—a masculine Jesus. We must counter the familiar feminized image of Jesus “meek and mild” with the power of His masculinity: a man who was bold, assertive and sometimes downright offensive in His honesty, but who was also compassionate, protective and loyal.

It is only when we lift this Jesus up that He will draw all men to Himself (John 12:32, NIV).