In what ways does your church help people become awesome in the their day-to-day living? Too often churches help people be awesome at church. When to show up, where to volunteer next, what to give.
But try it another way. Let’s insert specific words and see what we get.
- “We help Fathers be awesome at….”
- “We help Husbands be awesome at….”
- “We help Men be awesome at….”
Does your church have a process for helping men become better fathers and husbands? Before you nod your head affirmatively to that statement, thinking that you have Sunday sermons AND men’s ministries, factor in these considerations:
Do you have a process in place that is designed to create better husbands, fathers, men? A monthly or quarterly men’s group is not a process, it’s an event. Even a series of events is not a process; it’s a series of events. Most men’s ministries revolve around special speakers, activities or retreats, or handyman outreaches. While well-intended, these are typically more of a baiting exercise hoping to allure men to come to something they might be interested in.
A process is a specifically designed course with a specifically designed outcome. Events are random exposures with unclear outcomes or no particular expectation of outcomes. The most common expectation of men’s ministries is that men will attend men’s ministries. It’s a process intended to create attendees, not men.
Your church can create a process of making men awesome at prayer, awesome at worship, awesome at raising their children, awesome at being the head of their house, and awesome at leading your church community. A process is a specifically designed course with a specifically designed outcome. What is your designed course for working with men to make them awesome at loving God? Following Christ? Being led by the Spirit? A specifically designed course will take any man from any starting point and over the next two years fully equip him in one or more areas of being awesome at ____________.
How is a man going to be awesome at praying if you don’t pray? How is a man going to be awesome at being a husband if the best you can do is offer a yearly weekend retreat on The 5 Love Languages? Designing a process has to be more specific and more results-oriented. Trying harder and guesswork are not a process.
Lastly, I suspect part of the problem is that churches don’t know what kind of men they want. The modern culture has create an ideology of men as simple minded, one-dimensional, and mostly under-developed frat boys. And the modern man often lives up to that stereotype. But the Body of Christ is the community where people are created to live in the Kingdom. The Body of Christ is the community of the Spirit, where we are equipping and edifying the saints, being grown into the unity and knowledge of the perfect man, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph 4). The task of the church is helping men be awesome at growing into Christ.
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