A Men’s Ministry Men Want to Know (Part 2) – Groupthink: Why Local Church Men’s Ministries are Ineffective

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The previous post in this series has been incorporated into Part 2 of my online article, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Men.”

I published the following paragraph on the internet on September 16, 2015, over seven years ago. It is the closing paragraph in a post entitled “The Misery of Modern Men.” The paragraph summarized the sorry state of manhood in America. At the time, some may have thought I was exaggerating the problem with American men. But since then, the chaos caused by men has only increased. Here is the paragraph.

“Nihilism oozes through the minds of more and more men like a slow moving sludge seeking the lowest sewer. Truth be told, the day is coming when we will look back on our time with this wistful hope: if only men did act like they were just animals it would be an improvement. Even animals treat their own better than the way these men do.”

Now fast forward to one of the dozens of mass shootings, almost all caused by men, that have happened since then.

May 24, 2022, Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas

By now everyone reading this has heard of the tragic mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

On May 24, 2022, 18 year old Salvador Ramos entered the school and committed one of the most evil, vile, and senseless acts in the history of America. He shot 34 innocent children and 2 adults in two adjoining classrooms, killing 19 of the children and both of the adults, along with wounding 17 other children. The shootings lasted for more than an hour.

But just as shocking as the murders in Uvalde themselves was the fact that Ramos’ intermittent shooting lasted 74 minutes after first responders arrived. Instead of going immediately into the classrooms and neutralizing the gunman as their protocol mandated they do, law enforcement officers waited in the school corridors and outside the school until finally, mercifully, members of the United States Border Patrol opened the unlocked door, entered the classroom, and killed the shooter.

In all, over 360 officers, including high-ranking police officers, experienced Texas state troopers, police academy instructors, Border Patrol elite tactical agents — even federal SWAT specialists, stood paralyzed for over an hour as they heard the gunman shooting the students inside the two classrooms. Outside, parents pleaded with the officers to let them go in themselves and subdue the gunman, but were restrained from doing so. Even 911 calls pleading for help from children inside the classrooms fell on deaf ears.

This all happened in spite of Texas’ official active shooter protocol that requires every individual officer, local, state, or federal, responding to an active shooter to immediately engage the gunman without waiting for orders or backup.

Every one of those 360 officers had been trained in that protocol and knew what they were supposed to do, especially the very first officers to arrive at the scene. All it would have taken was for one officer to do what the protocol said he was supposed to do and immediately break into the classroom and kill the shooter. Just one. But not one did…for 74 minutes.

I am telling this story because, like Salvador Ramos and the first responders at Robb Elementary School, something similar is happening with local church men’s ministries and the aimless, rootless, and destructive men we are supposed to be reaching.

Local church men’s ministries are standing by, paralyzed and ineffective, as they witness the decades-long degradation of men in America and the trail of pain and suffering they are leaving behind them.

True, Salvador Ramos is an example America’s nihilistic male culture that I have written about.

But the first responders to Ramos’ massacre are also examples. They are examples of what we as men’s ministry leaders are not to do in response to our degraded male culture. Just as the first responders to Robb Elementary School – along with the hundreds of responders who arrived after them – went against their protocol and instead stood by and did nothing while a great tragedy was taking place, so local church men’s ministries are ignoring their “protocol” and instead stand paralyzed and ineffective while hundreds of thousands of men like Salvador Ramos live out their destructive lives.

I make this accusation about local church men’s ministries not because I disdain them, but because I love them. Indeed, I firmly believe that they are America’s last and best hope for genuine revival and reformation among men.

Local church men’s ministries can be great. They can be amazing. But instead of the vibrant and culture transforming men’s ministries I know they can be, and the Bible says they should be, I have observed over the years several problems local church men’s ministries have that mitigate their effectiveness. Here are some of them:

• Local church men’s ministries sometimes do not even exist in local churches.
• When they do exist, they are almost always invisible to the local community.
• They often lack direction.
• They can be hidebound.
• They usually emphasize being without doing.
• They don’t define the practice of the love of Christ.
• They rarely expect sacrifice.
• They don’t understand the role of good works in the Christian life.
• They have a lowly view of themselves.

But there is one problem in particular that local church men’s ministries grapple with and that is the problem of groupthink.

Groupthink: the key problem at Robb Elementary School

What we witnessed with how the law enforcement officers failed to respond properly to Salvador Ramos at Robb Elementary School was a classic example of groupthink and its consequences.

Groupthink is a debilitating psychological phenomenon that can take hold on a group of people and make them, and the people who follow after them, captive, sometimes for hundreds of years, to a prevailing, but obviously wrong, conviction. Succumbing to groupthink makes us weak and vulnerable. It makes us us ineffective. It can even force us to abandon our convictions.

Here are two definitions of groupthink, one from Wikipedia and one from Psychology Today:

1. “Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs. This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. Groupthink is a construct of social psychology, but has an extensive reach and influences literature in the fields of communication studies, political science, management, and organizational theory, as well as important aspects of deviant religious cult behavior.” Wikipedia
2. “Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people makes irrational or non-optimal decisions spurred by the urge to conform or the belief that dissent is impossible. The problematic or premature consensus that is characteristic of groupthink may be fueled by a particular agenda—or it may be due to group members valuing harmony and coherence above critical thought.” Psychology Today

Now that we know what groupthink is, let’s do a mind experiment.

Imagine that you are the 361st law officer to arrive at Robb Elementary School that fateful day. You hear the sporadic gunshots coming from the two adjacent classrooms. You know the gunshots mean children are still being murdered. You see the children’s parents standing outside the school pleading for someone to go in and save them. And you know that the protocol you were given in your law enforcement training demands that you run into the classrooms and engage the gunman without waiting for orders or backup. But you also see hundreds of officers, many of them your superiors, standing around and doing nothing.

What would you do? Would you do what your protocol tells you to do and go in and subdue the gunman without waiting for backup or permission? Or would you submit to groupthink by following the example of everyone else and do nothing for 74 minutes so you don’t rock the boat?

As you do this mind experiment, what you are wrestling with is the power of groupthink. It would take immense courage to say that 360 of your fellow officers are wrong and instead obey your protocol. But that is what you would have to do to save the lives of those children.

Of course, you would have to risk your life to save them. But you would have already demonstrated courage by breaking out of the groupthink that turned 360 law enforcement officers into cowards.

Groupthink: the key problem with local church men’s ministries

I have taken pains in this post and in my last post to describe the serious moral declension modern men are experiencing because it is easy for those of us involved in men’s ministry to think that we bear no responsibility for that declension. After all, it is secular culture’s rebellion against God that has caused that decline, isn’t it?

And so we form our local church men’s ministries as isolated social islands in the midst of a sea of men who are lost and hopelessly enslaved to their lusts. We watch from the safety of our church parking lots as across the street marriages dissolve, men forsake their sons, and fatherless boys grow up to sire and abandon more fatherless boys. This happens because those men across the street from our church parking lots think that whatever is happening in “that church over there” has nothing to do with them as men.

In desperation, we turn to our politicians to do something about the spiraling crime those fatherless boys across the street commit without thinking for a minute that maybe our local church men’s ministries could themselves be the real source of peace, safety and healing in our communities.

And all the while we completely ignore our “protocol” because we think it is irrelevant to the situation at hand, if we think about it at all.

Yes, to a great extent unbelievers are responsible for the moral chaos around us. But, like the first responders in Uvalde, Texas, the Bible says that we Christian men also bear responsibility for that decline. To paraphrase Paul, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of us” (Romans 2:24).

When a culture in which believers live descends into the moral abyss and believers themselves become objects of disdain, along with the God they worship, it is because they are not following their “protocol,” and as a result, they have lost their influence. ‘You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor?” (Matthew 5:13). Or, to put it another way, believers have no WOW! Factor.

As long as we do not follow our protocol, we will be hopelessly ineffective and irrelevant…tasteless.

Men, we have been paralyzed by our groupthink: “It’s all their fault and there is nothing we can do, except hunker down with some other Christian men in our little local church men’s ministry and live out our lives the best we can.”

Hogwash. God has given us clear and specific instructions for what to do in a situation like this. Those instructions are our protocol. All we need is for men to break out of their hypnotic groupthink and say, “Hey, guys. Here is what we need to do. It’s written right here in the Bible in black and white. Let’s go do it.”

Just one warning: doing it may cost you your life.

So what is the protocol? I will discuss that in my next post.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

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