Rebecca Duffett spoke with Anthony Delaney

Rebecca: You also share your testimony in the book. Could you give us a brief version of how you came to faith?

Anthony: I was a policeman in Manchester. I wasn't interested in the things of God at all. I met a girl when I was 21 in a night club and thought she was beautiful. I ended up hanging around 'til New Years Eve when I gave her a big kiss. I got in a fight with her fiancée who turned out not to be happy that I'd just kissed his fiancée. We both got thrown out of the night club.

I subsequently ended up meeting up with this girl again. It turned that she had become a Christian. I tried to get her off God and on to me, but eventually she got me to agree to come and hear a speaker; a guy called Eric Delve who's a great friend of mine now. I heard the message of the gospel. I didn't respond on the night, but I parked it somewhere. I think God put an extra hook somewhere in my heart.

Then some weeks later driving through Manchester in a place called Gorton, on the way to work in the police, I suddenly had a full on vision of the cross listening to a Graham Kendrick song, Servant King, which someone had lent me on a tape. Hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered - it was there and then I had this amazing vision of the cross. Twenty five years ago more or less to the day, actually in the place where now I lead a church i.e. Manchester. We're going to be moving to do church in a fantastic building there in two weeks time, we're going to be moving into Gorton monastery for an Easter journey. I was amazed to discover it's exactly in the same spot that Jesus first revealed himself to me 25 years ago, where I was converted as a police officer. Now I'm leading a fantastic church in the same city with hundreds of people coming along and giving God the glory in that place.

It's been a change in my life; I've travelled the world since in the adventure of following Jesus. I'm out to Haiti next week. We're going out there again with Compassion who does just fantastic work with the poor out in Haiti. That will be my third visit; went out straight after the earthquake. But yeah just following God's adventure for my life and enjoying it everyday.

Rebecca: How many men do you think really have this sort of diamond geezer persona and are actually living it and how many men do you think are actually struggling with a lot of things that you talk about?

Anthony: I think every man struggles within. I think basically most men if they were able to be honest about it, are boys trying to still work out what it is to be a real man. We can't do it without help from God. There's only ever been one perfect man and that was Jesus Christ and all the rest of us are very bad imitations at different levels of that and trying our best to follow him and let him shape us.

I'm not putting myself up as being the ideal man or the perfect man. I wrote this book because my daughter, who's just about ready to turn 21, said that in the church she'd met lots of men who were struggling; especially young men. Men within a fatherless generation of people who often haven't got even a father to be able to look up to and be able to work out what it is to be a man. Women can't help a man in that sense to become a man. It does need older men to be able to mentor and help them along.

I'm finding that through this book people are buying the book and then they're getting together as groups of men and discussing the questions and discussing the chapters of this diamond geezer thing. We call them diamond geezer groups. Through that, they've been helped together to be able to be real about some of these areas in their lives and to encourage one another on towards love and godliness and integrity. It's a journey.

The Bible says, when I see Jesus I'll know him because I'll have been made like him and until then I'm still a big lumpy bit of coal that he's shaping and under the heat and pressure I know that, because he who began a good work in me will complete it. Eventually the diamond's going to shine.

Rebecca: Did you mean for the book to be so relevant to women as well?

Anthony: It's a good knock-on effect. I think a lot of women can't understand why men are like they are to be honest with you. They can see the diamond that is very often there underneath and they want to see that being brought out.

I believe that there's this hungering in a lot of women to see men rise up and be all that they could be, rather than be secular, afraid of commitment and generally weak people. When they see a book that says on the front cover, from my friend J John, that it's a great book for men that women will want to read first; a lot of women are doing that because they believe that men should be what it says on the front, diamond geezers, who are tough, transparent and trusted. They long for men to rise up and be those kinds of men, men of God that it is our inheritance to be. That's why I think a lot of women are buying it for their husbands or for their dads or for their brothers.

I had one lady who read the book and then she said this is great can I have 20 copies; I want to give them to all my brothers, a guy that I work with and to my dad. It's not to beat them up and say, you know we think you're rubbish. It's just to help them to go in some way to another level.

You can buy Diamond Geezers from Cross Rhythms Direct for only £8.54 + p&p.