Several years ago, I watched a local television talk show about men who had attended a seminar with Robert Bly, author of “Iron John.” I thought, now I’ll get to see what the men’s movement is all about. These local guys will give it to me straight.
But I was struck by how confused the men were. As if in a recovery group, they shared their stories of disappointment and pain.
But they never got beyond them–except to say, “It’s been great sharing.”
There must be more to being a healthy man, I thought, than saying how disappointed you are.
This yearning has caused the male-identity search to spread to the Christian arena. This year more than 250,000 men participated in Promise Keepers weekends in Boulder, Colorado, and other cities. But this is more than a reaction to prevailing secular winds. This Christian men’s movement is an artesian well bursting through all the loose places on the surface of our country. It’s a gusher not created by human engineering. It’s nothing less than the Spirit of God at work.
I’ve always wondered why the church had such tremendous ministries to women, students, and children but nothing to men. When I connect with other guys, I feel fulfilled, vision-oriented, energetic. As I saw what was happening in our culture, a dream began to take shape: Wouldn’t it be great to gather a hundred guys who enjoyed being men? And wouldn’t it be great to do it in the local church?
RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE
Not knowing where to begin, I decided to preach a series on the family and to start with men. What began as three messages on what it means to be a man turned out to be eight. I can’t explain why, but the topic connected powerfully with our congregation. The feeling on those Sunday mornings was electric. I could sense people leaning forward to listen.
The normal number of requests for sermon tapes (from our homespun tape ministry) was thirty or forty per week. The weeks I spoke on the principles of masculinity, the requests shot up to three hundred (which says more about their hunger than about my preaching). But I couldn’t continue preaching about men forever.
As an aside, on the last Sunday, I said, “I’ll be here at the church next Saturday morning at 9:00. If you’re a man and you’re interested in discussing more on what it means to be a man, show up then, and we’ll talk some more.”
You have to understand what I had just asked of our men. Oregon and Washington are the 49th and 50th states in church attendance per capita. This is a put-me-on-my-acreage-and-let-me-be-a-pioneer culture. Saturday mornings are especially sacrosanct in Oregon. I expected maybe ten or twelve guys.
The next Saturday, three hundred men showed up. I was flabbergasted. We stayed till noon, and before everyone left, I said, “We’re going to start a men’s ministry. You’re telling us that much.”
PREPARE, PREPARE, PREPARE
Something worthwhile is worth getting ready for. In creating a ministry to men, we did not want a false start. The quickest way to a false start was to say, “Let’s get on the bandwagon and get some guys together and have a few donuts and see how long we can last.”
Something substantive would take leadership.
But I knew I couldn’t lead the ministry. As a pastor, I was too busy already. I began to pray and committed myself to find two or three lay leaders with the vision.
Two guys in their upper thirties, who were best buddies, emerged. One is more an upfront person; the other more behind-the-scenes. Both are rock-solid believers, and their friendship has been a salvation in rough water, so they understand the power of male friendship.
Those two lay leaders, a staff pastor who would oversee the ministry, and I attended a Promise Keepers weekend in Boulder, Colorado. The rally and worship with 50,000 men were breathtaking; the spiritual fireworks were spectacular. The most helpful part, though, was the three-day leadership conference prior to the weekend rally. The training provided us with the vision for our ministry.
During that week, our group kept saying, “This is great, but how would this fit in our church?” We didn’t want to copy Promise Keepers, though that organization provided some excellent resource material; we wanted to be Good Shepherd Community Church. God changes history when the little people in the little places do what they should. We wanted to be God’s men in little Gresham.
So, we looked a little further and dug a little deeper. We also profited greatly from Cross Trainer in Des Moines, Iowa, a ministry that has effectively brought together men from many denominations.
TAKING THE HIGH GROUND
The fall before our January kickoff, we invited twelve to fifteen men to a series of planning meetings. Some were senior-aged men, some in their middle forties, some CEO-types, some blue-collar men. They helped us form our purpose and our plans for a kickoff event.
Our culture keeps punching at men. We felt the best way to motivate a man is to point to the high ground and say, “That’s what the Lord wants of us, and none of us is there yet. Let’s lock arms and lean into the wind and climb that mountain together.”
We didn’t want to heap guilt on men or pressure them into accountability groups. The key for us was affirmation and acceptance: let’s learn to be men together. Our purpose statement: to point men to the High Ground of God’s intentions in their relationship with him, with one another, in their homes, their church, and their world by providing biblical teaching, strong encouragement, motivating challenges, and mutual accountability.
For the kickoff, we landed a well-known speaker for a Friday night and Saturday conference. Men lined up to register ahead of time. We even sold gift certificates to the women in our church, saying, “Guys, this is what we’re planning (a bunch of us are coming). By the way–daughters, wives, moms–if you want your guy to be here, pay for it and give the registration certificate as a gift.”
Men responded, and a surprisingly large number showed up for the kickoff event held in our church.
PLATOONING
It’s okay to go to a battalion meeting, but most combat takes place in the platoons. At the end of our opening weekend, we announced, “We’re going to get together every Tuesday morning at 6:15 at the church.” In our planning phase, we had decided we needed to funnel the men into smaller groups, but we wanted to offer them freedom to make that decision at their own pace.
We called these Tuesday morning meetings “High Ground” because we live in Oregon where everybody loves to go to the mountains. Here is how we did it last spring:
From 6:15 to 6:30, men arrived and hung out, eating donuts (non-fat, of course) and drinking coffee. From 6:30 to 6:55, an instructor, usually I or another staff member, taught. One morning, for example, I told about one of my best friends who died, while I knelt beside him in the woods, on opening morning of hunting season in Oregon. He left behind a 17-year-old son, a 13-year-old daughter, and an 8-year-old son. I asked the question, “Now that his life was over, what had he done that really mattered?” In his case, he’d left a powerful legacy. He was committed wholeheartedly both to his family and to God’s family.
After the twenty-five-minute talk, we dismissed the group, giving the men four options:
Leave. Some men need to get to work; others were not yet comfortable with the intimacy of a smaller group. We’d say, “It’s not even 7:00 a.m.; you can still get to work on time. But if you’d like to stay, here are other options, which will take only thirty minutes.”
Attend a newcomers’ group. This is an informal time when men get oriented to the group, meet leaders, and ask questions.
Attend a “Bull Pen.” These are informal groups (10 to 15 men each) offering the opportunity to discuss the morning’s topic. Men can just sit and soak in the conversation or jump into the discussion. Each group has a leader with prepared questions from the morning’s talk.
Join a 4-A Team. These groups of two to five men meet once a week (on Tuesday mornings or at another time). This is clearly the next level of commitment, and we want all our men to end up here. We tell them that the highest ground is deep friendship with another man.
The goal is to become accountable with the other members of the 4-A team. The understood rule: confidentiality, which allows men to talk about tough issues.
The next Tuesday after our kickoff weekend, more than a third of those conference attenders showed up bright and early. We met every Tuesday morning until the first of June. (In Oregon, summers are off limits. You don’t fight it; you join it.)
LEARNING TO SWIM
Our ministry to men is young; we’re just wading into the water. But several principles have helped us.
Model both failure and conviction.
Last spring, I told our men one of my big failures with my first-born son:
“I had never been a dad before; my son had never been a son before; we were going to school together. One time he made the mistake of violating the two rules of my home of origin: Don’t sass your mom; don’t sass your dad. When he did, my hand ‘involuntarily’ hit him in the chest. I say involuntarily because it happened before I knew it was happening. I knocked him backward over the couch.
“As he fell, I realized what I had done, so I fell with him. As we lay on the ground, I began crying and said, ‘Could you possibly forgive me?'”
That story provided a teaching moment for our men. Father failures, leadership failures, husband failures–every man has failed, so they can identify with failure. Men’s speakers must be able to say, “Here’s what happened to me. I often blow it.”
But transparency isn’t enough; you’ve got to model open conviction, the commitment to grow beyond the failure and in Christ. Both emphases must be there.
Know the men you’re trying to reach.
We continually remind our men that they have a choice: we want them to move to the 4-A teams, but they might need to test the waters, and they might not end up staying on the first 4-A Team they choose. Some men’s ministries, however, demand high commitment up front. For instance, men won’t be allowed to attend unless they bring at least one friend and commit to attending each session for the entire year.
The difference in commitment is the result of a difference, I believe, in culture. A more white-collar congregation might rise to an upfront call for high-level commitment; they may not feel threatened by it because, as CEO-types, they’ve been taking on challenges their entire lives.
But for other congregations, a more open-ended approach, where men are allowed to proceed at their own pace, seems to work better. The point is, each church needs to evaluate its locale in order to create the right program to reach its men.
One myth of men’s ministry is that men won’t join. They will join, if it’s not forced and if the cause is big enough.
Ease men into deeper relationships.
We tell the men in our 4-A groups to temper their expectations, that it is not a miracle group. It’s a group of guys committed to one another’s best interest. It’s not a pass-fail test.
At the beginning of each new group we suggest that the men make a list of four questions, personal and specific, they want to be asked each week. Then, they may hand that list to someone in their group the next time they meet.
This helps to short-circuit the awkwardness that can plague the early stages of intimacy. And it allows for those incredibly bonding “Oh, you too? I thought I was the only one” kind of moments.
Speak to their issues.
It sounds obvious, but men need to hear about men. We try to speak to the issue of fathering, for example. Recently, to do that, I told our men about my youngest boy:
“My youngest son is the third of three boys. The first two are high-powered; the third is not any less high-powered, but he’s the third out of three. By the time you’ve had a brother who’s All-Conference this and another brother who’s All-Conference that, there’s not much left for you to do.
“As a father, I worried about our caboose. He is the most sensitive of the three. To encourage him, I spent a lot of time with him in the outdoors–camping, hunting, fishing. Anybody who has spent time in the outdoors knows that a pocketknife is essential gear–the man with the best blade gets the job done. So, whenever you’re setting up camp, you’re always looking for the knife.
“My son Ryan had a pocketknife that became his identity. His older brothers always had to ask him to use the knife as we were setting up camp. That became his status in the tribe. He was the man with the blade.
“My birthday came around one year, and my family was planning a party for me. Earlier in the afternoon, my youngest walked into my office at home where I was studying. At first I didn’t hear him; I felt him–I could sense his presence–and I turned around.
“He had chosen this moment because he wanted to give me a birthday present but not at the birthday party. He wanted it to be just me and him. He handed me a present, and I opened it–it was his knife. As my eyes lifted to his, his eyes looked into mine. This was one of those rare moments when the spirit meets the spirit, with no verbal way to communicate adequately the deep feeling between you.”
The story provided the foundation for other men to ask questions about their father and how they’re fathering.
Train leaders.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my sex. I am crushingly aware of how inadequate most of us are, on our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us.”
We believe the leaders of men must be men who are confident of their masculinity. Our leaders must be able to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a man?” If a leader can’t answer that, he certainly can’t help other men celebrate their masculinity.
For us, the answer to that question lies in the Creation account and other key scriptures. We believe God holds a man responsible for those near and dear to him. A married man is called to give himself up so his wife can be the woman God intended her to be.
In addition, male leaders must be secure enough in the grace of God to share their failures because that’s what opens up the hearts of men.
MODELING MASCULINITY
Garrison Keillor says manhood, once an opportunity for achievement, is now an obstacle to be overcome. That’s why today, more than ever, men need to know masculinity is to be celebrated. They’ll follow anybody who says, “I’m glad you’re a man, and I respect you for being one.”
A pastor doesn’t have to be the athletic, outdoor type to lead men. The real muscle of a man is not on his shoulders or in his biceps. It’s in his heart, in his character.
One man I would follow to the ends of the earth, in fact, has always doubted his masculinity. His father never approved of him, and his mother was a perfectionist. But I’d follow that guy anywhere because he’s authentic, a man who is committed in his heart to do right by God.
That kind of modeling gives men permission to be men. They want to know it’s not only okay to be a man, it’s critical to be a man. That’s what it takes to reach men.
4A
Essential qualities in ministry to men
In our 4-A Teams, we emphasize four principles that make it possible for deeper relationships to develop among men.
Acceptance: We choose to accept each other as we are, no conditions. Our group meets under an understood rule of confidentiality. What is said here, stays here.
Affirmation: We commit to encouraging each other. Our relationships will be other-centered. We will be honest with each other but careful to build up, not tear down.
Accountability: We will hold one another accountable in spiritual growth. Our goal is to become godly men. We want to talk about the tough issues and grow together in Christ.
Authority: We recognize the need to be under the authority of Christ and his Word. Before we can be leaders we need to learn to submit to his leadership in our lives.
Copyright 1994 Stu Weber
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
