When was the last time that there have been more men fascinated about Christianity than women? Not within the early church; not within the medieval church; not within the 18th century revivals; actually not within the twentieth century. The real query is whether or not this has even happened before. In all my travels, from Egypt to Argentina, I’ve at all times noted the identical thing in churches: there are more women than men. The current rise in religious interest amongst men is probably not unique, but it surely is anomalous.
We should infer something from this: God is doing something extraordinary for the time being. We must also feel compelled to act. Unusual times mean unusual opportunities.
But before jump-starting latest initiatives, an issue to be confronted. The evangelical church most often is currently unprepared to be fishers of men. There are five symptoms of this.
First, evangelical churches are out of fashion. For a long time, we’ve been moving toward informality, egalitarianism, and anything dubbed as “contemporary”. This is the wrong way that young men are travelling. They hunger for formality, hierarchy, and the past. This explains why so many searching young men are by-passing the doors of Baptists and Presbyterians for Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
Second, our men’s material is ineffective. Most books and courses produced for Christian men must have the subtitle “for dummies” attached to them. We have been acting as if all men are cut from the identical cloth as Homer Simpson. But this isn’t the case for men who’re drinking the milk of Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Tom Holland. They is probably not academics, but they’re thinkers. One of the few advantages of the digital age has been the way in which through which podcasts have elevated the mental appetites of Millennial and Gen Z men.
Third, we’re embarrassed to acknowledge maleness. This is a much bigger problem within the UK than the US. For a long time, we’ve been attempting to erase as lots of the distinctives of every sex as possible. This has left us unable, even unwilling, to deal with men specifically. We feel the identical discomfort when someone speaks on to men that we feel when someone drops a racist comment. Thus, to avoid awkwardness, we decide silence.
Fourth, the church has turn out to be more emasculated than it realises. A typical evangelical worship service provides ample evidence. A number of men no more wish to sing dewy-eyed love anthems than they need to look at rom-coms. Likewise, they get uninterested in every sermon being a type of pop psychology. Men want truth; they wish to be reasoned with; they need a king that’s worthy of self-sacrifice. Not enough evangelical churches provide this.
Finally, men’s ministry is usually the weakest a part of a church’s discipleship ministry. Most churches invest heavily in children and youth work. Women are remarkable for his or her spontaneous abilities to assemble and organise. Men? Not so. Left to themselves they roll apart like marbles on the ground. Sadly, most churches do little to assemble them.
So, the issue: on the one hand, there may be a dramatic rise of spiritual interest amongst men on each side of the Atlantic; on the opposite, evangelical churches are negligently unfit to have interaction with these men.
How can this alteration? After three years of reflection and eventually writing a book, listed below are my suggestions for making disciples of religiously curious men.
First, the church needs to assist men escape the spiritual black hole that’s modernity. Men today feel as in the event that they reside in a cultural wasteland. They are usually not delusional. All of the good Christian cultural critics of the last three generations have kind of said a lot.
Modernity is sort of a cancer eating itself up from the within. A number of guys are feeling the symptoms of this. They are fed up with materialism, individualism, consumerism, egalitarianism, liberalism, digitalism, capitalism, and progressivism. They want something higher to make sense of their lives and to fill their souls with purpose.
The opportunity here for Christians ought to be obvious. The same gospel that offered an exit out of paganism also offers an exit out of modernism. The church needs to assist men find this door.
Second, we’d like to brandish the credentials of tradition. For years, evangelicals have been attempting to use the authority of science and psychology to validate the reality claims of the Bible. We have been assiduous in our attempts to reveal that the gospel is neither anti-science nor emotionally harmful.
We need now to understand that lots of young men are usually not that bothered by evolution and never that fascinated about psychology. Their interest is in tradition. They wish to dig up the floorboards of the past to work out what was underneath it.
Christians don’t should be intimidated or annoyed by this. We can comfortably discuss Aristotle and Aquinas, Plato and Paul, Cicero and Calvin. The roots of our faith go way back to Abraham – and beyond. We must get well at exhibiting the richness of this tradition in an effort to attract more men into our evangelical churches.
Third, we’d like to remove each the mental and non-intellectual barriers to faith. Men don’t have one style of religious need; they’ve many. Some should be prompted to think; others should be stung by truth; others need their imaginations baptised; others should be liberated from their isolation. Kierkegaard famously spoke of three stages of life: the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious. Modern men should be brought through an analogous circuit of experiences.
How will this occur? It’s time for men’s ministries to regear themselves to make tools more fitted to modern men. Not every man desires to discuss father wounds around a campfire. A growing number wish to grapple with Stoicism or dismantle what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine”.
Fourth, we’d like confidence in the sturdiness and relevance of the gospel. The same power of God unto salvation in Paul’s day is the ability of God unto salvation today. We should be careful in our cultural apologetics to not turn out to be too clever. It’s not the wisdom of the world that converts sinners; it’s the foolishness of the cross. This never changes.
Fifth, we’d like to inform men to go to church. So many guys are listening to podcasts and reading books in isolation. Inevitably, this implies they’re filtering their religious interests through a consumerist mindset. They want God on demand, on their terms, at their convenience. This will not be the trail of real discipleship. If guys want to seek out truth, they should go where Truth discloses Himself. That’s not YouTube, Spotify, or X. It’s church. The message of Jesus can’t be abstracted from the people of Jesus. When it involves Christianity, there is no such thing as a Deliveroo option. To meet with Jesus, we should be willing to sit down at His table.
Joe Barnard is Minister of Holyrood Evangelical Church in Edinburgh and Executive Director, Cross Training Ministries For more on reaching modern men, see Joe Barnard’s latest book, The Road Back to God: Faith for Men Dissatisfied by the Modern World (Christian Focus Publications) or follow his men’s ministry at www.xtrainingministries.com.
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