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Mel Mullen on Becoming a Man After His Father's Funeral

From the show · October 27, 2026 · Andrew Rocha

Pastor Mel Mullen was thirty-two, sitting in the back corner of a car with his brothers and sisters, climbing through the Rogers Pass on the way to his father's funeral. A few days earlier his sister had called from Victoria to tell him their dad had taken his own life.

Somewhere around the fourth bridge, Mel started talking. He told his siblings, "I'm just like my dad. I got the same problems as my dad."

On paper he had everything a man is supposed to have. When he told me the story on this week's episode, he put it this way: "I was a father, I had two children, I was a husband, I was a pastor, I was a leader, but I described myself in my book as not being a man."

I first read that sentence in his book. That book helped me work out where I wanted my life to go and what I wanted it centred on.

Who Mel Mullen is

Mel and his wife Heather co-founded Home Church in Red Deer in 1972, starting with a small group of young people. Today the church has over one hundred locations around the world, their son Jachin and his wife Becca lead it, and Mel and Heather still guide the vision and travel to the locations. Mel started preaching at nineteen and has been at it for about sixty years. He's written several books, including Be a Man, Experience Jesus and His Church, and his newest, You Choose.

None of that came from a head start. Mel's father ended up in a mental institution when Mel was about five. His mother raised five kids, and the government gave her $27 a month. People from church dropped off food and hand-me-down clothes.

"We didn't know that we were poor, but we were poor," he told me. "But we had a wonderful life in spite of all that."

His mother eventually brought his father home for a healing crusade at their church. Mel still remembers the evening the evangelist called his dad forward. His father went back to work for the next 35 years. Mel calls him a good man who took the family to church and provided for them. But he also calls him an absentee dad, someone who "did not know how to really father his children," because nobody had fathered him either.

Free, but empty

On that drive through the mountains, Mel cried out to God and asked to be set free from what was in his family tree. He can't fully explain what happened next. He describes it as a radical experience, and he says that by the end of it he was free.

Then he added, "I was free, but I was empty."

He explained it like this. "The job of a father is to take the baby boy and through the process of mentorship turn that baby boy into a man. And that had not happened to me."

So he was a young pastor and a young dad, insecure on the inside, with no one showing him what to do with it. He came home from the funeral with one decision made. "I've got to work on me because I can't help you if I don't fix me."

That started a two-year process of change, and it became Be a Man.

The title comes from an old story. In 1 Kings 2, King David is dying, and he calls in his son Solomon for one last talk. He tells him, "be you strong therefore, and show yourself a man." The family was anything but calm. In the chapter just before, another of David's sons, Adonijah, had declared himself king, with the army commander Joab and Abiathar the priest backing him. Solomon was about to inherit a kingdom and some very hard decisions along with it.

Mel's reading of that charge is simple. Being a man means taking responsibility and making the hard calls in your home and your work, even when nobody taught you how.

Honouring a father you don't want to copy

This part of the conversation was personal for me.

My dad's father was in and out of a psych ward and in and out of prison, and eventually the marriage ended. My dad would joke that he was raised by John Wayne. When I first read Mel's book, I thought about my dad and his dad and how many of the same patterns ran down that line.

So I asked Mel how he got free of his father's story without resenting him for it.

He started with honour. "You got to honour the person through who you were, you know, conceived," he said. He talked about the good things his father did, the 35 years of work and the Sundays at church. Then he drew the line in one sentence:

"I honour my father, but I don't want to be like my father."

"I think that's kind of where it starts," he said. You can be grateful for the people who raised you and still decide that some of what they handed down stops with you. And my guess is you already know which pieces those are in your own family.

From the back seat to the front seat

The second chapter of Mel's book asks a blunt question: what's wrong with me? He admitted that looking that hard at yourself can be depressing.

For him, the answer was confidence. He was fearful and insecure as a young leader. When the city's pastors got together, he'd slip into a corner and leave early. He started reading Robert Schuller's Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking and Norman Vincent Peale, and he went looking for men he wanted to be like, including his own pastor, Mel Davis, and C. Peter Wagner.

Then he did something very practical. He took small cards and wrote a statement on the front and a Bible verse on the back.

"God has big plans for me," with Jeremiah 29:11 on the back.

"Greatness is my future," with Genesis 12:2.

"I am who God says I am."

He was honest about how those first cards felt. "Now I didn't feel that way, but I made the statement."

Over time he wrote 31 of them, one for every day of the month. They're printed at the back of You Choose. His advice is to read all 31 every day for 31 days, and to keep going for three or four months.

When I asked him what the cards actually did, he said, "You say it again and you say it again and you say it again until one day you stand up and you believe what you said."

It changed how he showed up. "I moved from the back seat to the front seat," he told me. He started taking charge of his family and his church, and he became a positive person.

When fear looks like confidence

My version of Mel's problem looked different from the outside.

I knew I had fear too. It came out as false confidence, and a lot of it was ego. When I felt like I didn't have control, anger was sometimes how I tried to get it back.

I asked Mel what he'd say to someone like that, who knows they're holding up a shell.

He pointed to another of his cards, "I am who God says I am," and then said this: "Life is all about the stance you take and the position you take and the decisions you make."

Why writing it down helps

Mel's cards are built on Scripture, and that's the heart of them for him. But it's worth knowing that psychologists have studied something related.

In a 2014 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, psychologists Cohen and Sherman looked at what they call self-affirmation. The interventions they reviewed "typically have people write about core personal values," and they found that "timely affirmations have been shown to improve education, health, and relationship outcomes." In some studies the benefits lasted months or even years.

That's a different exercise from Mel's, and I don't want to blur the two. But both put down in writing what's true and what matters to you, and both ask you to come back to it when life tells you otherwise.

A phone call that turned into fifty years

There's a lot more in this episode that I'm not going to spoil here.

There's the story of how Home Church started. Mel and Heather were heading home from a trip to Japan when Dr. John Lucas called from Calgary and asked him to go to Red Deer and start a Jesus People church. Mel's answer was "No, but I'll give you 30 days." You can guess how that went.

There's the phone call from a pastor friend that led to Mel and Heather adopting their daughter. And there's You Choose, the book he spent eight years writing for 16 to 24 year olds, built on the idea that the decisions you make in those years shape the rest of your life.

At the end of every conversation I ask the same question: what does happiness look like to you? Mel started with God. "Happiness is knowing God. Happiness is serving God." Then he added that happiness is "having peace with God and peace with yourself," and pointed me to Matthew 5. The Greek word behind "blessed" in the Beatitudes, makarios, can also be translated "happy".

Try this: one card, 31 days

Here's a small way to start, borrowed from Mel.

Take an index card. On the front, write one sentence about the person you want to become, in the present tense, even if it doesn't feel true yet. On the back, write the verse or value it stands on. Read it every morning for the next 31 days. Mel says he'd be glad to share his 31 confessions with anyone who wants them, and you can find him at melmullen.com.

If you'd like a place to work out what that sentence should be, my free goal-setting guide walks through the Six Fs: finances, family, friends, faith, fitness and freedom. You can get it here.

So what's the first sentence you'd write on your card?

Listen to the full episode of The Currency of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. If this was useful, send it to someone who could use it.

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