Men, if you’re like me, you’re so involved with work, family and church that you have little time to develop lasting male friendships. For example, last December I noticed that I had been ignoring my guy friendships. So I made a list of ten of my friends and resolved to go to lunch at least once with each of them in 2019. It’s eleven months later and I’ve eaten lunch with exactly two of them.
Today’s adult male lives in a friendship desert. In a Boston Globe article entitled “The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.”1 Billy Baker writes, “In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.”
So what can men do to build strong male friendships? In his article, Billy Baker makes two recommendations. First:
Build your male friendships on a shared activity.
Writes Mr. Baker:
In February at a conference in Boston, a researcher from Britain’s University of Oxford presented study results that most guys understand intuitively: Men need an activity together to make and keep a bond…. We need to go through something together. That’s why, studies have shown, men tend to make their deepest friends through periods of intense engagement, like school or military service or sports.
I saw this male relationship reality in action as a pastor doing marriage counseling. I could easily get the wife to talk while sitting across a desk from me in a counseling session. But often the husband would just sit silently with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. To get him to talk, I’d invite him to go hiking with me in the foothills of the Rockies. As we hiked together, the husband would inevitably begin to open up, often with dramatic results.
Here’s Billy Baker’s second recommendation for how men can build male relationships:
Make your shared activity a regular event.
The best way for men to forge and maintain friendships is through built-in regularity – something that is always on schedule.
Team sports is a great example of a regular shared activity that builds strong male friendships.
Another great example of a regular shared activity that builds strong male friendships is men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents!
You knew that was coming, didn’t you? But it’s very true. All men involved in men’s team ministry build great male friendships because they are on a team with a fantastic common goal: obeying God by serving a widow, widower, or single parent. They meet regularly once a month for years. They do male-centric things together around their care receiver’s home. They pray together. They laugh together. They plan together. They sweat over projects together.
In short, they experience and express the love of Christ together.
So if your church does not have a men’s team ministry to its widowed and single parents, consider starting one. It will not only benefit your widowed and single parents. It will also benefit your men by helping them develop male friendships and live longer, healthier lives.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
For the past sixteen years New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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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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