You understand the value of getting the boys of your church thrive.
You want your church to have an efficient, sustainable men’s ministry.
You know that constructing such a ministry goes to take an enormous effort. And you already feel stretched in 15 different directions. So, what do you have to do?
According to a broad range of men’s ministry experts, including men who’ve led transformative men’s ministries for years, it’s good to take a strategic approach, and your strategy needs to incorporate six elements. Here they’re.
1. Commit to being “all in” on your men.
The foundation of your strategy must be a realization that you simply will not be constructing a ministry. You are constructing men.
That takes time. It takes commitment. And it requires visible support from every pastor, especially the senior pastor.
“Men have to know that they matter,” says Jeff Springer of Suit Up Ministries, who served because the Minister of Men for 16 years at a United Methodist Church in Texas. During Sunday morning worship, he continues, the pastor must tell the boys that they’re necessary to their wives, their families, their friends and coworkers, their church . . . and their pastor.
Men want to hook up with their pastor, adds Rick Wertz of Faithful Fathering. He encourages pastors to have interaction one-on-one with their men and “be real” with them at every opportunity.
Getting to know your pastor is great. What’s more necessary to a person, nevertheless, is knowing that his pastor and his church are committed to investing in him, not only for a short while but for the long haul.
After all, the mission of the church is to make disciples, and making disciples is a strategic enterprise.
2. Build a team of men to guide your men.
While pastors have to exhibit visible support for men’s ministry, they don’t need to guide every aspect of a men’s ministry. Most churches with successful men’s ministries have a team leadership approach.
Brett Clemmer, president of Man within the Mirror, recommends that a pastor builds a leadership team made up of men who’re enthusiastic about men’s discipleship. Wertz suggests that the members of that team reflect the demographics of the boys within the church.
Springer suggests that the leader of that team be someone on staff, to make it clear that the church is investing in its men and to stop disruption if a lay leader gets burned out or moves away. He adds that the leader must be enthusiastic about seeing the boys of the church grow in Christ and must relate well to other men.
Finding a staff person with the mandatory skills, passion, and bandwidth is hard in most churches, say Wertz and Clemmer. They argue that the very best alternative is a passionate layman who has the support and encouragement of the pastor or pastoral team.
Continuity on the boys’s leadership team from 12 months to 12 months is sweet. But so is change within the makeup of the team, especially when the brand new leaders are men who’ve been discipled within the church and now are desperate to disciple others.
3. Get to know your church’s men.
There isn’t any cookie-cutter approach to effective men’s ministry. Your men’s ministry must meet the needs of the boys in your church. To understand those needs, your leadership team must get to know the boys of your church at a deep level.
That generally is a challenge because many men are reluctant to disclose much about themselves. “Ask a person how he’s doing, and he’ll inform you he’s positive,” says David Dusek, founding father of Rough Cut Men. “He’s not positive. He’s got issues. But he doesn’t have anyone to confer with about them because he doesn’t trust anybody.”
To construct friendships, and trust, with the boys of your church, your leadership team must engage with them outside of Sunday morning and out of doors of the standard men’s events. Real connections are forged in the actual world, with its day-to-day challenges and issues.
It will take time for the standard man to start to open up about what’s really happening in his life. And you will need to make sure that your conversation is surrounded by complete confidentiality.
“When you sit down with other guys, they need to feel that you simply’re in a spiritual Humvee,” he says. “The windows are bulletproof. It’s soundproofed so you may have an authentic conversation.”
Confidentiality, adds Craig Fry of Christ Led Communities, must be in place at every men’s event, function, and meeting. Men need assurance that each group is a closed group where they will have deep conversations. “If guys will not be confident that stuff will stay within the room, they will not be going to open up,” he says. “They will stay on the surface, and on the sidelines.”
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/digitalskillet
4. Focus on critical issues facing your men.
Men are busy. They have many responsibilities and carry many burdens. If a ministry, even one designed for them, doesn’t make a big difference of their lives, then men won’t stick with it.
One option to make your men’s ministry relevant to your men is to deal with essentially the most relevant issues faced by your men. But a 24-year-old single guy is prone to face different issues than a 55-year-old man with two adult children and two teenaged stepkids. On which issues should your men’s ministry focus?
Springer argues that fatherhood must be one in every of them. “I don’t think that you would be able to have a comprehensive men’s ministry without specializing in fatherhood,” he says. Even if a person is just not a father immediately, Springer continues, he will probably be a father, or father figure, sooner or later in his life.
Wertz agrees. Fatherhood is relevant to each man, he says, because every man is a son of an earthly father and a heavenly Father. When acting within the role of a father or father figure, most men pay an excessive amount of attention to their very own earthly father – either emulating him or attempting to do the alternative of what he did – and never enough time studying and understanding how their heavenly Father operates.
In addition to establishing a biblical model for fatherhood, a men’s ministry can provide opportunities for more “seasoned” men to act spiritual fathers to younger men, says Wertz. Some churches schedule regular dinner nights for men, where roundtable discussions with younger and older men occur. Older men don’t have to have all of the answers, but they definitely have experiences from which younger men can learn.
Be sure not to disregard other issues raised by the boys of your church during your conversations with them. If a difficulty is significant to only a handful of your men, then search for opportunities to get those men together. A number of minutes after a much bigger men’s event is just not enough; give those men enough time not only to grapple with the problem but additionally to get to know one another.
5. Choose approaches that help men develop strong friendships.
Men crave authentic connections with other men, but such connections are getting rarer. According to a 2021 survey of U.S. adults, the standard man has only a handful of close friends; nearly one in six has none. When a person struggles with sin or seems like a failure in some a part of his life, he’s unlikely to confide within the few male friends that he has.
Those who lead Christian men have to prioritize a commitment to constructing deep and lasting friendships amongst those men, says former NFL quarterback Jeff Kemp, who has spent the last 20 years strengthening marriages and families with organizations resembling FamilyLife. Jesus spent three years constructing strong friendships along with his disciples, Kemp continues, and that close-knit group modified the world.
“We have to get better and revive the varieties of friendships that Jesus intends us to have,” adds Kemp.
Clemmer agrees that strong friendships between men are key. “If you desire to sustain life change in your men, it’s good to connect them into meaningful relationships with other men,” he says.
6. Set strategic goals and formulate a plan to attain them.
A pastor may consider discipleship to be the suitable strategic goal for his church’s men’s ministry. Fry argues that discipleship doesn’t go deep enough.
The right goal, he says, is to make disciple-makers. When that’s your goal, your approach should center on a small group of men who meet usually for an prolonged time frame, probably several years. Those men will lead the trouble to make the following round of disciple-makers.
It’s what Fry calls a “deep” approach, adding that Jesus modeled this approach 2,000 years ago. The alternative is a “wide” approach, where a church offers events of interest to many men after which encourages each man to search out an affinity group amongst a subset of attendees.
Clemmer asserts that a church doesn’t have to choose from going wide and going deep but can do each. When you assess your men, you may determine where each is spiritually and shape your ministry elements across the needs of your men. The goal, he says, is to construct a process that provides every man a discipleship pathway towards spiritual maturity.
Photo Credit: Erika Giraud/Unsplash
Source: https://www.christianity.com/wiki/christian-life/critical-elements-of-your-mens-ministry-strategy.html
