The gospel according to Ian Grant

For a man whose words are his business, Ian Grant's are an agony to watch.

He has been known to stutter so badly he can barely say his name. Sit down with him for a couple of hours and the words spring from his tongue like machine-gun bullets on rapid fire: hundreds of them each minute - destined for your heart and, every so often, getting stuck in the barrel.

But put the former youth evangelist on stage, or on television, or on the radio, and his words ooze like custard: as smooth as Bishop Brian Tamaki's Brylcreem, but without his Old Testament damnation.

A miracle? That's what some say. But Grant's more inclined to concede this is simply the way he learned to talk - while performing.

At 67 he is the perfect antidote to Tamaki - modest shoes, grey hair and a distinct lack of Las Vegas showman. Their end goal may be the same. It's still about saving souls. But Grant's is a pragmatic approach to Christianity. He helps real people survive their time on Earth. And in that he is fast becoming staggeringly successful.

The last time I saw him in the flesh was about 21 years ago. It was a misty spring night at Auckland's Mt Smart Stadium and Grant was on the stage praying for my friend's soul. He was praying for a lot of souls that night and I was praying too. Begging God to haul my friend, whom I had lured along with the promise of a free rock concert, out the front to be "saved".

Grant's outfit Youth for Christ was almost an empire then. He and his wife Mary were riding a wave of evangelical fervour which was washing over willing teenagers of Generation X. The Grants had their own TV show, The Herd, and Campus Life clubs all around the country. Y4C had a kind of cool currency then, which it has long since lost. The recipe seemed simple: find a massive venue, throw in some rock music and the promise of unconditional love and forgiveness, and drug addicts, street kids, and lonely middle-class girls were saved by the bus load.

That two decades later Grant is heading up a different kind of domain - Parents Inc, a major not-for-profit organisation - is not surprising.

"We worked 32 years with young people and we realised that a lot of the teenage problems are really parent ones," he says. "We looked at all our years in working with teenagers and we thought, 'Gee, if only parents had realised this, if only someone had told them this'."

His latest venture is his third book, Growing Great Boys. It's a practical guide for parents, a natural follow-on from the successful Parenting with Confidence seminars. But along the way Grant realised it was partly driven by his own "dad hunger" - a wish to be the dad his own father wasn't.

He grew up in the working-class suburb of Naenae in Wellington, son of a hard-working Scotsman who struggled to come to grips with being a father and a devoted mother who never stopped believing in him.

The stutter, he later learned, can be traced to a particularly nasty female teacher who was co-opted into the classroom when all the male teachers were shipped off to war.

"I've heard they have actually traced quite a few stutterers back to that one class," he says.

"Obviously she didn't like cheeky little boys. We're not going to blame the teacher but she forced us to change hands - she didn't like anybody who used their left hand so they had to swap to the right."

So as little Ian struggled to write with his right hand, his tongue seized. He grew painfully shy and hid his stutter by refusing to talk. His father didn't understand and would lash out in frustration. "I think that sort of bought into my stuttering a bit too with the anger," he remembers.

But his mother continued to look for help. When Ian was about 7, she found a speech therapist who hit on poetry. Stutterers rarely falter when they are singing, and the therapist's hunch was that the same would be true for poetry.

"So I remember being at a concert for the United Nations Children's Fund and I read a little poem, about a guy who got a haircut and didn't want one. It was a funny little poem and I got great applause because all the other performances were ballet and that sort of thing, which bored the audience to tears. I remember thinking, 'Hey I didn't stutter. And people enjoyed it!' And I think a dream was born in my soul. I say to parents now, 'Look for that dream in your kids' because I think that was my dream. I wanted to communicate."

The dream was not realised until he was in his mid 20s, when he noticed a vacancy on the old TVNZ Plain Speaking show, a short, religious programme that came on at four minutes past nine on a Sunday.

"When I went for the audition, I've never forgotten, Yvonne Mackey was the floor manager, and she said to me, 'What's your name?' And I couldn't say my name I was stuttering so badly. She said, 'Do you mind if I ask you are you really auditioning for this programme?' And I managed to stutter out to her, 'Yeah, but I don't stutter when the cameras come on'. And I honour her because she said to me, 'I'm not going to tell anyone, if you are sure', and I auditioned and got selected for the job.

"Now when I'm on a stage or on TV or radio I get locked into my learned way of talking. I joke that that's good because otherwise I'd be in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest TV show in history."

He was involved with Youth for Christ for 32 years. The television show The Herd was born from that, then one day the music got too raucous and the Grants decided it was time for a change.

Initially his latest book was called Growing Boys is Better Than Fixing Men. It didn't make it past the publishers, but the rule is true, says Grant.

"If we don't get them right as kids they cost us millions later on."

Growing Great Boys is an unashamedly non-PC guide to raising boys with Ian and Mary Grant's trademark "how to" style of advice for both mothers and fathers. Each has a defined role to play, he reckons, and if there isn't a dad around he advises mums to go out and adopt someone's.

The book joins volumes already published on raising boys. Aren't we overreacting to an anomalous blip in history when things are actually going okay for the girls?

"Well," says Grant. "I think what happened is boys, when they get into trouble, really get into trouble. I heard someone say in a cynical way, when a girl gets into trouble she gets a baby and care, when a boy gets into trouble he ends up in jail. They're more extreme and they show up quicker in society. I'm glad I wrote my book now, because I think it's the practical stuff that parents need.

"I'm doing quite a lot of conferences for principals in Australia on boys. Their education system too favours girls, which is great in a way but boys are missing out and we've got to balance that."

Even renowned feminist author Doris Lessing noticed it, he says, quoting this passage of hers in his book: "I was in a class of 9- and 10-year-olds, boys and girls, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit, while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."

He writes: "These boy-tendencies towards impulsivity, passion and protectiveness have taken a hammering in the past few decades from a feminist climate that left many men, along with their sons, floundering for an identity and a role in the post-feminist, sexualised culture."

His point is that we have to stop trying to rescue boys from their masculinity while encouraging dads to actually participate as a parent.

"There is a study of men in Australia that shows one third don't talk to their dads at all. Over a third have only put-down talk with their dads and just under a third only talk to their dads about power tools, weather, sport and their job. Only one in 12 Australian men sees their father as an emotional support. I think it's worse in New Zealand.

"I respected my dad but we never had a deep conversation. I want to make the point that I'm not angry with my dad, but when I wrote that book I suddenly realised there was still a hunger. And I get men now, whose fathers are dead like mine is, and they have deep issues with that. We underestimate the power of the parent. I look at little boys in supermarkets whose dads aren't there for them and they have sad eyes because their mothers are doing all the work. They just want their dad to say, 'Hey, you've got what it takes mate'."

It's something that Grant never heard from his own father.

"My mum said it, but my dad never did. I don't know why - maybe he didn't think it was important.

"I think my mother had a dream that she was not going to let her boy hide in a shell. Because I had strong mentors in my life it never became a problem for me. In other words, I accepted that was my dad. He came out from Scotland as a 17-year-old and never learned to parent. I admired the way he provided for us. He worked his guts out providing for us as a family and I admired him for that and these other men filled the gaps of inspiring me and challenging me. So I don't feel robbed. I don't feel angry."

Instead he has focused on building Parents Inc into a force to be reckoned with. Nearly 150,000 parents have been through its seminars, it runs relationship courses, small group training sessions, has teenage life skills programmes in 87 per cent of schools. There's a website where for $25 a pop you can have your parenting problems answered, and a $6 million parenting centre is about to be established in Greenlane.

Nevertheless he says what parents most need is to make time available for their children.

"A family therapist friend said to me the other day, 'You know, if a parent sat at the end of their child's bed each day and debriefed them. And just said, what sort of day was it today, out of 10, and just listened to what was going on in their kids' lives so the kid could see their day in mature eyes,' he reckons 90 per cent of his work with adults would go."

These days Grant's five little grandsons are scattered around the world. Though he thinks he was a good father, Grant reckons he's doing even better as a grandfather.

"I see my little grandsons in the supermarket and they've got sparkly eyes and they know there are three blokes who believe in them. Their two grandfathers and their father."