Call of a Hero: How men can think like Christ
What does it actually mean to “put on the mind of Christ?" Why does it feel like a threat to your life as you know it? We chat about faith as a call to adventure, a way to think like Christ.
ABOUT THIS SERIES: Chris Mann and Dominic de Souza are two movie-loving young dads, who work fulltime with Heroic Men. The ‘mind of Christ’ is not a sermon, but a practical adventure into a heroic identity, a heroic call to action, and a summons to heroic brotherhood. This 3-part conversation challenges you to clear out the stinking thinking between our ears.
By the end of each episode, you’ll be inspired to try the simple prayers we pray, and test out the simple practices we follow. Let’s seek heroism like the saints and stories that matter most, and let’s step up to think and act like Christ.
This first episode of The Mind of Christ for Men, Dominic de Souza and Chris Mann challenge at Christian life like a superhero origin story.
Christ does far more than offer advice like a kindly rabbi. He introduces a new life into the human person. A new set of instincts. A new center of gravity. A new way of being a man.
“There’s a point where something is introduced into his life, and he can no longer be the same,” Dominic says, thinking about Spider-Man, Captain America, and Batman. “And every instinct in them fights against all this change because he knows who he was is going to have to grow, die, or become different.”
There it is. Christianity as disruption. Christianity as the end of business as usual.
The call to heroism arrives at the worst possible time
What does it mean to cultivate the mind of Christ? The hosts head straight into the male panic response.
Men hear the call. Men sense the summons. Men then immediately begin calculating the damage.
What will this require?
How exposed will I become?
How much of my current life survives?
A man reaches a point where he senses he must lead, take a stand, pray, serve, heal, rebuild. But he has zero interior maps for any of it. So he stalls. Or blunders. Or hides behind competence and safety.
“We routinely retreat from this,” Dominic says. “We don’t have a plan because we’ve never had to do any of this before.”
Many men are not apathetic. We often feel outmatched, unconvinced, or on the brink of a path that leads to meaningless pain.
Christ does more than teach ideas
Dominic describes Christ’s arrival in human history almost like a transfusion, or a graft, or a divine bone marrow transplant. Human instincts can get us man as far as survive, protect, provide, avoid stupid risk, keep food on the table, stay breathing.
Then Christ enters the human family and says: there is more. There is life beyond survival.
Chris compares it to The Matrix. A man discovers reality is larger, stranger, and more demanding than he thought. He also discovers he cannot return to the past.
Men inherit a broken script for fatherhood
If men are called to think as Christ thinks, we run straight into the problem of the Father.
Every man arrives with a lived story about fatherhood already lodged in his chest. Some had faithful fathers. Some had providers, ghosts, or tyrants. Some had men who were physically present and spiritually out to get milk.
Chris tells a story about adopted children, each carrying severe trauma around family, standing in church and hearing the words Our Father. “When they hear that God is a father, what on earth goes through their heads?” Chris asks.
What could those words possibly sound like to a child, whose earthly father meant prison, abandonment, chaos, or absence?
We bring our fathers with us into our prayer lifes. Or we bring the wound where a father should have been. Or the pressure to perform for love. Or the long training in earning approval from a man who kept moving the target.
Then we project all of it on God.
The ‘provider trap’ enters the spiritual life
Chris lays out a lesson he learned from his own father: love meant hard work. His father worked hard to provide. Therefore love equaled effort, accomplishment, doing.
“But God doesn’t need me to provide in our relationship,” he says.
Men attempt to pray hard enough, perform hard enough, improve hard enough, suffer hard enough, show up hard enough, until spiritual life becomes another production environment. Another test. Another place where worth must be proven. Another arena where love depends on output.
And then, infuriatingly, Scripture keeps presenting a God who moves first.
“This is the God who comes to us when we don’t have anything to offer,” Chris says, later adding, “My effort determines my worth… and that can be a trap in the spiritual life.”
The prodigal son becomes the measuring rod
If a man wants to know what the Father is like, he must read everything through Christ. Through Christ’s words. Through Christ’s actions. Through Christ’s revelation of the Father.
“If your conception of God does not mesh with that, your conception of God is wrong,” Chris says.
This point of view prevents men from building their spirituality around the image of God as a harsh judge patrolling an ethical obstacle course. Chris shares a comment someone told him: if life were merely a moral test, the most merciful act would be to wait outside the confessional and shoot people on the way out, sending them to heaven before they sinned again.
Which is absurd. But also perfectly logical inside a badly formed theology.
Prayer begins by replacing the noise in your head
How to start fixing this for busy men with budgets and back-breaking daily work?
It doesn’t involve grand spiritual theatrics.
No heroic productivity schedule.
No chest-thumping regimen for elite religious operators.
No fantasy league of masculine holiness.
We all need to start smaller, Chris and Dominic agree. Start with the prayer Christ actually gave us.
“The Our Father,” Dominic says. “You’ve got to pray that one.”
Pray it slowly. Pay attention.
Then add brief, repeatable lines through the day. Chris offers a compact litany he uses when overwhelmed: “God, you are my father. I am your beloved son. You love me and nothing that’s about to happen is gonna change that.”
A prayer like this exposes how much male behavior is driven by fear of failure, fear of exposure, fear of making a mistake and catching catastrophe.
Instead, act from trust you are a beloved son who matters. Act because the Father loves you.
The final note: you loved me first
Dominic describes kneeling after Communion and realizing his prayer had often become a form of self-attention, an inward monitoring of his own feelings. Then he tried something else: picturing Christ before him. Addressing him directly. That created an immediate crisis of shame and unworthiness. He felt unable to look up and meet Christ’s gaze.
A line came to his mind that he uses to get past himself: “Jesus, You loved me first.”
He repeats it until the mental inflammation goes down. Until the false judgment goes away.
As men, we spend immense energy trying to go first. First to prove. First to earn. First to fix. First to become worthy. Christ offers us something far better: the Father has already moved first.
Like our favorite stories, a hero turns around and realizes something new is at work in him. A chance to do something greater. Now the question is: what will you do?
What kind of man will you be?
Next: we look at the world you live in, and how we go to work in it.