Saturday, May 9, 1998

Before there was Promise Keepers, Ed Cole was telling men to get their acts together

By Selwyn Crawford / The Dallas Morning News

SOUTHLAKE, Texas -- For many Christians and non-Christians alike, the list of men's ministries begins and ends with Promise Keepers.

But years before Bill McCartney gave up his prosperous football coaching career to run the popular Colorado-based organization, a Dallas native named Edwin Louis Cole was issuing in-your-face challenges to men: Stand up. Be faithful to God, your families and yourselves.

To the Rev. Cole, founder and president of Christian Men's Network, such discipline is the key to the world's future; its absence, he believes, is the reason for what he sees as the world's moral backsliding.

"Manhood and Christlikeness are synonymous," Cole said during an interview at his ministry's year-old headquarters. "God holds the man responsible. Our world is being cursed by fatherlessness."

He believes the decline began in the 1960s with the hippie generation.

"Men wanted to be free to be promiscuous," he said. "But women did not approve of men's double-standard, and they rejected it. That started a rebellion against men."

Cole is nothing if not direct. The 75-year-old describes his style as confrontational. He believes that helps explain why his 17-year-old ministry has not been as prominent as Promise Keepers. He said he believes that men are not blessed by God for the same reasons that the children of Israel did not at once inherit the land of Canaan: lust, idolatry, sexual sin, tempting God, murmuring.

Cole talks bluntly about premarital and extramarital sex, masturbation, pornography, immoral thoughts, and financial and spiritual irresponsibility.

"When you tell the truth, it is confrontational," he said. "All I tell them is the truth."

Those who know him acknowledge that with Cole, what you see is what you get. And then some.

"His trademark has been that he's very honest," said J. Lee Grady, executive editor of Charisma magazine. "He's good about getting guys to stand up and say, ÔLet's get open about lust, and let's get open about pornography.' Guys come away from those seminars talking about being faithful to their wives and sexual purity."

McCartney credits Cole with paving the way for Promise Keepers and other men's ministries.

"For me personally, he's a mentor," McCartney said. "I like everything about him. I like his style, his spirit, his longevity. He's unrelenting, persevering."

Brian Peterson, editor of New Man magazine, said he has long heard Cole referred to as the father of the Christian men's movement. The title is well-deserved, he said.

"Cole is a very masculine man," Peterson said. "Men can really identify with him because of his very straight, direct approach. Men like that."

Peterson and others said Cole's ministry seems to have accomplished from Day One what many others could not.

"Ed Cole has this incredible appeal to men of all races and nationalities," Peterson said. "It's amazing how well he was able to relate to men who were Hispanic, who were African-American and, of course, white men. I haven't really seen that kind of cross-racial fellowship."

McCartney said that is one way to know Cole is "for real because men of color trust him. You don't come by that easily. You have to have a true heart."

Cole, who often has several men of color speak at his events and has published a book aimed at African-American men, acknowledges that his ministry has appeal across racial lines.

"I've never preached racial reconciliation," he said. "I practice it. It doesn't mean anything to talk about it. I've always preached in the inner-city. From the very beginning, I did that."

Cole moved to California with his family when he was 5. He was raised in a Pentecostal home and was ordained as an Assemblies of God minister. But now, he and his men's ministry are nondenominational.

According to a history of Christian Men's Network compiled by the organization, God gave Cole a word for men during a February 1980 retreat in the mountains of Oregon. Two months later, he held a citywide meeting. Thirty-eight men attended.

It was a year before Cole formally launched Christian Men's Network, after another believer told him that "this ministry is running late." Within 24 hours, Cole resigned his pastorate, the chancellorship of a ministerial school in San Diego and all other ministries with which he was affiliated. He bought a typewriter and a four-drawer file and started the ministry in his kitchen. Later he moved to the garage.

Today, with a budget of only $2 million, Christian Men's Network has 17 offices worldwide and a headquarters staff of 24 including Cole's wife, Nancy; his son, Paul Louis Cole; and daughter, Joann Cole Webster, who is executive vice president.

Among the men touched by Cole's ministry is 26-year-old Janno Peenanu of Estonia. Having lived under Soviet communism, Peenanu didn't see a Bible until he was 17. At 18, he became a Christian, and a short time later he saw a smuggled video of one of Cole's services. He subsequently sent off for his books and other tapes, and they changed him.

He translated "Maximized Manhood" into Estonian. "Reading that book and translating it, I realized that I had been cheated all of my life," Peenanu said. "I realized that a man is supposed to be like that: good to his wife, a good father to his children and ... the spiritual leader of his household."

Peenanu, who has never known his father, said he "adopted" Cole.

"I received those books, and all of a sudden I felt like somebody loved me and cared about me," said Peenanu, now a pastor in Estonia and the local CMN rep. "I felt like this was the kind of father I would like to have had."

Webster said she understands what her father's ministry means to men such as Peenanu and others because she was there from the beginning. She said "Maximized Manhood," in which Cole confessed many deficiencies, was a turning point.

"That's where he showed his mistakes," Webster said. "He depreciated his wife. He sacrificed his family on the altar of his ministry. But we never envisioned we'd have an office and people in 17 offices. Now we're seeing the next generation (of godly men) grow up. When you see fruit like that, any woman would get excited."

To Cole, the reason that women are excited and that men's ministries are popular nowadays is simple.

"God created man to be a man and that's all he wants," Cole said. "That's all women want. God wants ... (men) to shape up, and that's why Christian Men's Network is flourishing."

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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