How God Led Me into Ministry to the Widowed and Single Parents

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[Note: This is a very long post. Sorry. For the two of you who actually read it all the way through, I hope you find it inspiring.]

I got to thinking you might enjoy reading my story on how the Lord led me into men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents. God uses all things to work for our good, Romans 8:28 tells us. Here’s how He’s been working it all out for me.

It all began with a lawnmower and a lawn…

Mowing Grandma Reese’s lawn

“I’m so lonely.”

Grandma Reese loaded me down with guilt, carbs and sugar every time I came in from mowing her lawn. I’d sit down and consume all the waffles, 7 Up and sugar cookies a 14 year old possibly could and then politely excuse myself to walk the four blocks home with a blood glucose level higher than Mt. Everest.

“Please don’t go so soon,” she’d plead. And then she’d say it. “I’m so lonely. Won’t you have another sugar cookie?”

If I had known then what I know now about widows and single moms, I would have stayed longer.

Grandma Reese immigrated from Norway alone at the age of 26. She married, had five children, and then suddenly became a widow and single mother when her husband died at a young age. Somehow, she managed to raise all five of her children well, including my dad, who was the oldest. Sadly, to my knowledge, the Swedish Free Church she attended in downtown Los Angeles had done nothing for her during those years.

Grandma was in her late 80’s when I mowed her lawn every Saturday as a teenager. Each time I did, she would beg me to stay longer and then she would say those terrible words that haunt me every time I see a widow: “I’m so lonely.”

My master’s thesis at Dallas Seminary

By the time I got to Dallas Theological Seminary, I had become interested in the concept of community, which Los Angeles, my hometown, had none of. So I did my master’s thesis on the descriptions of Christian community in the early church found in Acts 2 and 4.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic of widows at the time, but one cannot study those passages without coming away with a conviction that ministry to widows was a top priority in the early church and should be in today’s church as well.

Alice Hamm, a new widow

Soon after I took the pastorate in my first church in Hitchcock, Texas, one of our members, Alice Hamm’s husband, passed away. It was my first experience as a pastor witnessing someone lose a spouse. The death of her husband traumatized Alice. She was inconsolable. I remember being paralyzed with helplessness every time I visited her. Nothing in my seminary education prepared me for that.

Dan Moulder’s death

Dan Moulder, a young man in my church in Illinois, and I were mutual introverts and perfectly content to be around each other and say next to nothing. I remember every Sunday, after the evening service, Dan would silently wait until everyone else had gone and then walk around with me as I closed up the church. Then he would smile and simply say, “Good night, Pastor” and leave.

I watched Dan fall in love with a girl in our church, Theresa, and officiated at their wedding. But then one day the news came that Dan had cancer. The cancer advanced rapidly and, within one year of their wedding, Dan passed away.

We did what all churches do: a funeral, a family meal, cards, flowers. But several months later I paid Theresa a visit and discovered that she had been crying herself to sleep every night on her living room floor. The realization devastated me. “How is it that our church is supposed to be this bastion of love, and yet it has no relevance to Theresa?” I wondered.

I went out and sat in my car and wept. I prayed that God would show me how to minister to Theresa and to all the other widows and single moms that I felt I had failed.

Promise Keepers in Indianapolis

Around the same time that Dan died I had been taking men from our church to Promise Keepers conferences. Each year, on the way back from the conferences, my men would ask me if we could start a men’s ministry. And every year I put them off. I figured the last thing I needed as a pastor was one more responsibility.

Soon after my visit with Theresa, I made another trip with men in our church to a Promise Keepers conference, this time in Indianapolis. I knew they were going to ask me once again to start a men’s ministry, so I decided that while I was at the conference I would pick up material on how to start one.

At the conference I purchased a pamphlet entitled, Sharpening the Focus of Your Men’s Ministry. Sure enough, on our way back home my men asked me once again if we could start a men’s ministry at church. So I told them I would see what I could do.

After we got back, I picked up the pamphlet and started reading it. In the back of the pamphlet were examples of successful men’s ministries. One of the examples described a church that formed their men into teams that adopted groups of widows and single parents in their congregation. The description seemed to leap off the page at me. “This is exactly what Theresa needs!” I thought.

My first men’s team ministry

I took the example I had read in the back of the pamphlet and modified it. Instead of assigning a team to groups of widows and single parents, I decided to assign one team to one care receiver.

I went to the men in our church and asked them what they thought about the idea and they went for it. We had sixteen men sign up. We formed four teams and assigned them to four care receivers; one each for Theresa, a single disabled dad, a single disabled mother, and a single mother on welfare. Then we started serving them in their homes on a regular basis.

The ministry became a huge success. Theresa loved her team and began showing up at church with a smile, something I hadn’t seen her do in a long time. The men became passionate about the ministry. For example, the team assigned to the mother on welfare got her qualified for a Habitat for Humanity home and organized its construction.

Preaching on Jesus’ Last Night Discourses

Soon after starting the men’s team ministry at Lighthouse, I began preaching a series on Jesus’ Last Night Discourses in John 13-16. As I studied the institution of the New Covenant with the giving of the New Commandment in 13:34-37, I realized that I didn’t understand completely what it means to love others the way Christ commands us to. So I decided to meditate on the the topic for a year.

I came to the conclusion that loving others the way Christ has loved us means that we need to identify with them, commit to them and sacrifice for them the way Christ did with us. This was an “aha” moment for me. I realized that loving people in this way was exactly what the Lord had led us to do with our widowed and single parents in our men’s team ministry.

Painting Carol Stechmeyer’s porch

While serving as the pastor of a church in Broomfield, Colorado, I started a men’s team ministry there. Again, it was successful. In fact, it became the strongest ministry in the church. We were able to cover everyone in the church who needed and wanted a team. In both that church and my previous one in Illinois, I could say to my congregations, “I don’t know of a single pressing need going unmet.”

The team I was on (I have been on a team for twenty years now) was assigned to a widow by the name of Carol Stechmeyer. One day we were painting her porch and one of the team members put down his paintbrush, turned around, and said, “Pastor, this is so Biblical. Why don’t other churches do this?”

“I don’t know why,” I said. But God used that question to motivate me to begin praying that He would open up opportunities to share men’s team ministry with other churches.

Speaking at Boulder Men’s Fellowship

A few months later I received an invitation to speak at Boulder Men’s Fellowship, which had been started by Bill McCartney when he was a football coach at University of Colorado Boulder. The group had about 50 men present from churches all around Boulder.

I had twenty minutes to speak on men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents. By the time I finished, the men were in tears. They spontaneously stood and talked about how God had spoken to them. One man told me he had been attending that group for twenty years and had never seen them respond that way before.

My brother-in-law’s funeral

Then, just three months after that speaking engagement in Boulder, my brother-in-law, Roy Dudley, passed away at the age of 48, leaving my sister Dottie with two teenage girls to raise. Dottie asked me to do Roy’s funeral and as I drove my family across the desert in Nevada on my way from Denver to Southern California, I suddenly felt a deep conviction that I should speak on men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents.

At first I thought speaking on that topic would be a really strange thing to do at a funeral and resisted. But the conviction became stronger and stronger, so I finally gave in.

When I got to the funeral, which was held at Fullerton Evangelical Free Church, the chapel was filled to capacity with about 500 people. I could see tables and chairs set up in a room off to the side for the family meal. I couldn’t help but think, “They’re doing a funeral and a family meal. They’re going to send my sister cards and flowers. And then they’re going to forget her and her daughters just like I had done to widows and single moms early on in my ministry, and just like almost every church in America does.”

The irony was that Fullerton EvFree had been founded by the very same Swedish Free Church in downtown Los Angeles Grandma Reese had attended when she became a young widow and single mom!

At the last moment, just before I got up to speak, I misplaced my Bible and notes and had to borrow a Bible from someone else to do the funeral. As I preached without notes, I sensed the Spirit of God carry me along. I explained what men’s team ministry to their widowed and single parents was and asked the church to form a team for my sister and her daughters.

When the service finished, 50 men came forward to volunteer to be on a team! So we formed teams for my sister and others in the church. For 13 years, until Dottie’s daughters grew up and got married and her sons-in-law could serve her, my sister had a team of men faithfully show up at her door one Saturday morning a month for two hours to do whatever needed to be done around her home.

National Coalition of Ministries to Men conference in Indianapolis

A few months after Roy’s funeral I was on the Internet and by chance came across a men’s ministry organization called National Coalition of Ministries to Men (NCMM). The website promoted its annual men’s conference in Indianapolis. As I read about it, I again sensed a deep conviction that I should go. So I signed up for it and went.

There were several hundred men at NCMM’s conference and I didn’t know a single one. At random, I went up to men, introduced myself, and told them about my experience with men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents. All of them had the same response: “This sounds like a great ministry. Nobody is doing this. You should do this ministry.”

The plane ride home

On the flight back to Denver, I sat next to Chris Van Brocklin. It turned out that he had been at the conference! Chris was also the national director for men’s ministry for The Evangelical Free Church of America. After I told Chris my story, in which I mentioned my notes from Roy’s funeral, he asked me to email them to him when I got home. Which I did. A few days after that, Chris emailed me back and asked for permission to send them to all 600 men’s ministry directors in The Evangelical Free Church of America!

“The call” from Los Angeles

At the time, I was candidating to be the senior pastor of a church in Los Angeles. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to move closer to my sister Dottie and her daughters so we could help them after Roy’s death. But when the church called with its decision, I received a jolting surprise. “Herb, we’re not going to call you to be our pastor,” the chairman of the board said. “Instead, we think you should do that men’s team ministry to their widowed and single parents you told us about as a full time ministry.”

I was stunned. I had always thought of myself as a pastor. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But it was becoming so clear that God was leading me in this direction that I realized I would be disobedient if I didn’t do it.

Stepping out in faith

In January of 2003, I and a group of local men formed a board and officially launched New Commandment Men’s Ministries as a non profit 501 c(3). It was scary. As a pastor, I had always had a steady income. But now I had to raise my own.

Everything was new to me and sometimes overwhelming: starting a non profit, getting the word out, developing training material, raising funds. I had only two churches in my former pastorates to point to as successful examples along with my story of how God had called me into men’s team ministry.

An invitation to Iron Sharpens Iron

Brian Doyle was one of the men I had spoken with at the National Coalition of Ministries to Men? conference in Indianapolis. It turned out that he was the founder of Iron Sharpens Iron, a men’s ministry conference in New England known for its equipping workshops.

Chris Van Brocklin, the individual I met on the plane, contacted Brian and suggested that he invite me to do a workshop on men’s team ministry. Brian followed up on the suggestion and asked me to come to New England for what would become the first of over 150 workshops on men’s team ministry that I and my associates have done at Iron Sharpens Iron conferences.

I’ll never forget that first workshop. It was at Bethany Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Right in the middle of the workshop an attendee blurted out, “This has national implications!”

Iron Sharens Iron goes national and so does New Commandment Men’s Ministries

Turns out he was right. A few years after I started doing workshops for Brian in New England, he took the ministry national. The conferences went from six a year to over 40 a year.

Brian has often made the statement that he feels like New Commandment Men’s Ministries and Iron Sharpens Iron were made for each other. I agree. We fit hand in glove. The 75 minute workshop format has been a perfect platform to introduce men to the concept of using teams to serve the widowed and single parents.

Fourteen years and 150 workshops later, there are over 900 churches with men’s team ministries in 49 states, largely because of Iron Sharpens Iron. (We’re still waiting on Delaware.)

New Commandment Men’s Ministries goes international

In 2011, I had the opportunity to do a series of lectures at Baltic Pastoral Institute in Riga, Latvia, at the invitation of Chuck Kelley, President of Bridge Builders International. I was also invited to speak at a Bible institute in Athens, Greece, as well as to a group of pastors in Thessaloniki, Greece. What a privilege that was!

Now there are churches with men’s team ministries in nine countries outside the U. S.: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latvia, Greece, Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Cayman Islands.

Interview on Focus on the Family

Also in 2011, I received one of the greatest honors of my life: the opportunity to be interviewed by Jim Daly on Focus on the Family. The broadcast was heard by over one million listeners. It was a great endorsement for New Commandment Men’s Ministries. The avalanche of publicity resulted in dozens of churches starting men’s team ministries.

National trauma and a national opportunity

Recently America has been experiencing numerous mass shootings and riots. The turmoil has left society groping for answers. It has been New Commandment’s privilege to offer men’s team ministry as one possible solution.

I have made it my goal to help pastors in traumatized communities respond to victims by training the pastors in how to use teams of men to meet long term needs. So far I have done this twice in Ferguson, MO, and once in San Bernardino, CA. I hope to spread the ministry to other areas in need.

Another opportunity as a writer on social media

And finally, in the last three months, New Commandment has greatly increased its Internet footprint with this three-times-a-week blog you are currently reading. The result has been a quintupling of our website traffic!

Beginning in 2017, I hope to expand to podcasts and offer an Internet course on starting men’s team ministries to the widowed and single parents. Stay tuned.

In summary, It is amazing how the Lord has led me into this ministry, given direction, blessed its expansion and provided continued financial support. I can’t imagine doing anything more fulfilling.

To God be the glory!

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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