Men

5 Reasons Men’s Ministry Is So Hard

Unlike the other sub-groups in the church (children, teens, college kids, singles, women) most men are not motivated to come to church activities because they want to be with their friends. Kids and teens are often bored and want to hang out with their church friends. Singles want to find a mate. Women are naturally motivated to connect with other women. But men’s hard wiring takes us in the opposite direction–towards independence and isolation. Though we need connection with brothers at the spiritual level, being with friends is just not a strong motivation for most men–so they don’t show up just because a men’s event is planned.

Your men’s event takes men away from their homes. Many men already feel guilty about being away from home so much to do their jobs. Church ministries to women, teens, and children do not have to overcome this obstacle. To get a man to come to your event, you may have to overcome the guilt and pressure he feels NOT to be away from the family more.

Men spend their days in the work world where products and activities are assigned a bottom-line value. That is how he will see your men’s event. Most Christian men are loyal enough to their church to come to a special event targeted to men. But, it must be of high quality and have high value to him in order for him to come back consistently. It takes a lot of effort to provide well done, high value events for men. Many churches are not willing to invest the resources it takes to do men’s ministry well. The result is that their men don’t come to their men’s events.

For the 21^st century man, time is often the commodity of highest value. An explosion of activities compete for his time, from Karate for his kids to 200 channels on TV, including sports channels that have games nearly 24 hours a day. The length of the American work day is the highest it has ever been, while commuting time is increasing. The 21^st century man has less time that he is willing to devote to a men’s event than ever before.

The availability of graphic pornography at the click of a mouse means that more men are enslaved to secret sins than ever before. They are often not interested in men’s ministry because they feel guilty and fear being found out. As a church, we can not stand idly by and let this happen to our men. We must pay the price to design disciple-making ministries for men that will lead men out of their isolation!

Because building a discipleship ministry for men is so tough

• It can not be done effectively with a half-hearted commitment.
• It can not be done effectively without a wise, carefully thought out strategy.
• It can not be sustained over the long haul without a trained, committed, lay men’s ministry leadership team to lead it.
• It can not be done effectively without an investment of significant resources. Staff time, funding to train the men’s ministry leadership team, leaders who are freed from other church responsibilities, strategic time on the church calendar, funding for a men’s ministry library, funding for speakers and/or retreats, are just some of the resources it will take to be effective. (Now is the time that many church budgets are being formulated; make sure you get the funding you need to do ministry well in the coming year.)
• It can not be done quickly. Pat Morley says it takes 10 years to build a strong, sustainable disciple-making ministry to men in the local church. Only tough, stout-hearted men who know how to persevere need apply for this job!
• It is not for wimps, lightweights, or immature Christians who want instant success. The battle for men’s souls is an all-out war, and it requires an all-out effort!! Dare we give our Lord anything less!!

Called to Sexual Integrity
“One Way God Changes Our Hearts”

Reliable studies indicate that over half of the Christian men in America have a major struggle with the pull of temptation to look at pornography. As Reformed believers, we understand that the only answer to this struggle is the power of the gospel to transform our hearts. We understand that the Biblical approach to the battle with lust is heart transformation, not just superficial behavior modification.

In our last issue we emphasized that the root issue of sexual sin is idolatry. We are looking to the God of sexual pleasure to satisfy our hearts rather than looking to the one who says he is the answer to our deepest longings. But confessing our idolatry is only the starting point for heart transformation. There are many other Biblical principles that reveal how God changes our hearts. We discover, for example, that one way our Lord transforms our hearts is through obedience to Romans 12:9, “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.”

God commands us to do something with our heart. That action is to hate. God wants us to develop a heart-felt hatred of our sexual sin and a passion for sexual purity. The way to hate sin is to realize how much pain and destruction it causes. Joe Dallas, who teaches the Every Man’s Battle Workshop writes:

“You should know by now that sexual sin ravages everyone connected with it. If you’re entertaining lust, you’re dancing on a cliff. Take concrete action now while you can. “Lust, when it is conceived, brings forth sin, and sin brings forth death” (James 1:15.)

To train his heart to hate sexual sin, one man wrote out the following list to meditate upon:

The Price Tag of Sexual Sin

1. The guilt of lust destroys your inner peace and temporarily breaks your communion with God.

“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day and they hid from the LORD God. Genesis 3:8

2. Impurity steals the spiritual growth you need to be the spiritual leader your wife and kids need.

“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

3. Your sexual sin brings shame on the name of Christ. Can God boast to Satan about your sexual purity?

“Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

4. Surrender to lust inflames your sexual desires making it harder to resist temptation next time.

• The more you indulge your lustful appetite the stronger that appetite becomes.
• You are on your way to building a habit that will soon enslave you.
• Each surrender to temptation further entrenches the habit, making it harder to resist next time.
• Every sexual sin adds one more picture to the scrap-book of enticing sexual images stored in your memory and accessible to your sinful nature for awakening lust.

5. Training yourself in sexual indulgence may eventually cost you your wife and children.

• No one goes from winning his sexual battles to committing adultery over night.
• Surrendering to adultery won’t usually happen unless a man is already in the habit of excusing his sin and turning a deaf ear to the promptings of God’s spirit.
• If he commits adultery, his wife has the Biblical right to divorce him. He may lose her and no longer be permitted to live with his children.

Remembering this list is not some magical cure for lust. But obeying God’s command to train our hearts to hate evil is part of the process by which God redeems us. He wants us to hunger and thirst for righteousness and to loathe evil because we know that sin’s wages are always death.

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, FROM THAT NATURE WILL REAP DESTRUCTION; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap life.”

• Job 1:8
• Matt. 5:8

Gal. 6:7-8

Staying Focused On Discipleship
Excerpts from No Man Left Behind (Chapter 5)

To build a sustainable ministry to men, you’ll need a solid foundation. That foundation starts with your focus. Yes, men need to be godly fathers, caring husbands, good stewards, and servant leaders. But what is the core issue? And how can we communicate it to men so they feel valued and inspired? Laying the right foundation can help disengaged men to connect with the ministry of your church.

The Bible tells us, “Go and make disciples–baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Sometimes we get this confused with, “Go and make workers–browbeating them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus said, “Go and make disciples.” That’s interesting, because he could have said anything. He didn’t say, “Go and make worshippers.” He didn’t say, “Go and make workers.” Nor did he say, “Go and make tithers.” Is Jesus interested in worshippers, workers, and tithers? Of course. But he knew we get worshippers, workers, and tithers, by making disciples.

Discipleship is the portal priority through which all the other priorities of the church can be achieved. Only by moving through the discipleship gateway can people truly affect their church and their church affect them.

For instance, how can a man worship a God he doesn’t know? Why would a man want to share his faith if he didn’t understand the Great Commission? How could a man be a good steward if he didn’t understand and believe that everything he has is a gift from God-his time, talent, and treasure? As we disciple men’s hearts, they start to live out of the overflow of their relationship with Christ. Therefore, we can organize these efforts by putting discipleship in the center and drawing arrows out to each of our priorities. (see the diagram below.) These are the outcomes of staying focused on discipleship.

How can a church implement discipleship as the portal priority? The items around the outside of the box represent activities or methods, which a church engages in to help build disciples. (The next diagram illustrates this principle.) Remember these activities are not ends, in themselves, but rather focus on helping people learn or live out what it means to be a disciple.

For more information on how to keep discipleship the portal priority in your men’s ministry, see our next Issue of “Get In the Game” or order No Man Left Behind, from the PCA bookstore by clicking here.

Called to Sexual Integrity
“Understanding How God Redeems Our Sexuality
Through Our Union With Christ: Part 3″

Article originally appeared in “Get in the Game”
a periodic email communication from CEP

May/June 2007 Vol. 3 No.3

Surveys among Christian men routinely indicate that the temptation they struggle with the most is sexual lust. Long-term success in battling this temptation does not come in an easy three step formula. If overcoming sexual impurity were that easy, men would take those three steps and this would not be the huge problem among Christian men that it is.

Genuine success in overcoming sexual impurity only comes through our abiding relationship with Christ. Sexual integrity is a matter of the heart and it is only through our connection with Christ that the spiritual fruit of a pure heart is produced. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man abides in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). He is the source not only of our justification, but of our sanctification, i.e. our growth in holiness.

The classical understanding of how this union with Christ leads to our growth in holiness is that it takes place through repentance, faith, and obedience. These three Biblical concepts may seem familiar to us. But a careful examination of each of these aspects of sanctification yields the rich, practical, Biblical insight our men need to overcome the sexual lust that overpowers them.

True repentance engages our heads (affirmations), our hearts (affections), and our hands (actions). It begins by bringing our sin into the light, confessing it, mentally agreeing with God’s verdict. But, true repentance goes well beyond mental submission to God’ standard; it engages our heart. We become grieved over our sin because it is a personal offense against our God. It is his law that we have broken, his authority we have defied, his name we have dragged through the mud.

Not only that, but in a deeper sense, our surrender to sexual temptation reveals that we really don’t believe I Corinthians 6:13, “But you cannot say that our physical body was made for sexual promiscuity; it was made for God and God is the answer to our deepest longings.” Ed Welch points out, “The true nature of all addictions is that we have chosen to go outside the boundaries of the kingdom of God and look for blessing in the land of idols. In turning to idols, we are saying that we desire something in creation more than we desire the Creator.” (Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave.)Increased consistency in defeating sexual temptation will never come until we address the sin beneath the sin-the way we look to another God to satisfy out heart longings.

Heart Repentance means to:

I. Recognize how inadequate your idol is to truly satisfy your heart.

“Lord, I have foolishly made this good thing absolute. What is this compared to you? It can not bless me, and love me, and help me like you.”

II. Recognize how dangerous your idol is to you. It enslaves and will never be satisfied.

“Lord, why am I giving this such power over me. If I keep doing it, it will lock me in chains. With your help, I will not let this idol jerk me around, as if I were a dog on a leash. This will not be my master. You are my only king.”

III. Recognize how grievous this idol is to Christ.

“Lord, I can’t imagine how repulsive this idol is to you. In yearning for this more than yearning to please you, I have trampled your love for me into the mud. I have gone after another lover and said that you are inadequate to meet my needs.”

Besides tracing sexual sin back to its idolatrous roots, repentance of heart means training our hearts to hate evil. In Romans 12:9, Paul writes, “HATE WHAT IS EVIL; cling to what is good.” Most men neglect this command and vital aspect of genuine repentance; so we will look at it in detail in the next issue of “Get In the Game.”

By Pat Morley, David Delk, and Brett Clemmer

Editor’s note: CEP is partnering with Man in the Mirror to offer the best in training and resources for men’s ministry in local churches. The following is an abridged article used by permission from No Man Left Behind (Moody 2006).

A church was having its annual men’s retreat, with discipleship as the overarching theme. A few of the men from the leadership team became a subcommittee to organize it. They set some goals:

Called to Sexual Integrity
“The Process By Which Our Sexuality Is Redeemed”

Article originally appeared in “Get in the Game”
a periodic email communication from CEP

March/April 2007 Vol. 3 No.2

Christians are those whose sexuality is in the process of being redeemed–set free from the corruption and slavery of our sinful nature. Sexual purity is therefore only possible as the gospel transforms us. This transformation process can be thought of as a spiritual combustion cycle consisting of repentance, faith, and obedience. (From Steve Childers, DMin Course, “Spiritual Dynamics for Leaders”)

Since our sexuality is so deeply rooted in us, this redemption can take a very long time. There are no simplistic answers or easy steps to sexual purity. Such purity is the result of our growth in holiness, what is called our sanctification. That is why real sexual purity only comes from the Biblical growth process of repentance, faith, and obedience. Although these three concepts may seem familiar to us-we often make little progress in our sanctification because we have such a superficial understanding of what they mean.

So, let’s begin with “repentance,” (METANOIA). True repentance engages our head (affirmations), our heart (affections) and our hands (actions.)

Repentance begins with overcoming rationalizations and mentally agreeing with God’s verdict that what we have done is wrong. Here are some of the common excuses for sexual sin that must be exposed to God’s Word: “I can’t help it if I like the shape of the female body,” (see Job 31:1), “the Bible says pre-marital sex is wrong, so anything but intercourse is okay,” (see Ezekiel 23:3, Song of Songs 2:7), “I have to indulge in lustful fantasies and “self-pleasure” to relieve the sexual pressure that builds up every few days,” (see I Cor. 10:13), “I look at porn as a necessary outlet because my wife isn’t interested enough in sex.” (see I Cor. 7:5)

Steve Gallagher points out that sin causes us to suppress the truth and rationalize. “There exists an interesting correlation between a person’s involvement with sin and his awareness of it. The more a person becomes involved in sin, the less he sees it. Sin is a hideous disease that destroys a person’s ability to comprehend its existence. It could be compared to a computer virus that has the ability to hide its presence from the user while it systematically destroys the hard drive.” (At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry.)

Repentance requires us to bring our sin into the light. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” I John 1:8-10. Exposing ourselves to the light means submitting ourselves to God’s judgment concerning our behavior, i.e. agreeing with God’s verdict.

True repentance engages our mind-agreeing with God’s verdict; but it goes beyond the mind to engage the heart. Repentance of heart means grieving over our sin, recognizing that the root sin is spiritual adultery (looking for satisfaction to another god), and learning to hate sexual sin. James describes a repentant attitude when he says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up,” James 4:8-10.

A central part of grieving over our sin is realizing that our sin is personal. We have grieved our God. We have wounded him by our rebellion. It is his face into which we have spit in our defiant rebellion against his law. When David committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband, Uriah, he clearly sinned against two humans. Yet, it is his personal betrayal of his God that looms much larger in his mind. “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight….Hide your face from my sins and blot out all of my iniquity,” Ps 51.

Just as our sin is a personal offense, so our redemption is at a personal cost to our God. It is the blood of his own son. Peter writes, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” I. Peter 1:18-19

Repentance that transforms us begins by agreeing with God’s verdict about our sexual sin. But it goes way beyond that, causing a deep inner sorrow over the wound our rebellion has inflicted on the heart of the God who loves us.

In the next issue, we will continue looking at repentance of heart, as we consider the sin that lies beneath the sin of sexual impurity and examine how to train our hearts to hate evil, which is what Paul commands in Romans 12:9