Fortunately, I don’t have many problems with New Commandment Men’s Ministries. Over the last eighteen years, men’s team ministry to their widowed and single parents has been well received and implemented in hundreds of churches around the world.
I have faithful donors who, even in the middle of one of the worst health and economic crises in American history, continue their sacrificial giving.
Even the transition to web based ministry has gone well. Dozens of churches have utilized my online training site, Meeting to Meet Needs. And thousands of people have read these posts.
As a result, thousands of widows and single mothers are being served every month. The men involved are being blessed. Churches are being blessed. People are getting saved. God has indeed blessed men’s team ministry because it is easy, effective, and biblical.
But that last adjective, “biblical,” is also the source of my main problem, and that problem is biblical ignorance. If men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents’ greatest strength is that the Bible tells us again and again that we are to care for these people, then that is also its greatest weakness. Why? Because Christians are almost completely unaware of how much the Bible stresses this subject.
Ignorance of this major emphasis in the Word of God is not just pervasive among Christians in general, but among pastors, Christian educators, and men’s ministry leaders in particular,.
Take, for example, this pastor who began a men’s team ministry in his church. For his monthly devotional hour, before he sent his teams of men out to serve their care receivers, he decided to focus on one passage of scripture each month that talked about widows.
After a couple of years of doing this, he said to me, “I never knew the Bible had so much to say about widows!” I wish this pastor were the exception, but his experience is commonplace. Pastors are simply unaware of – or choose to ignore – the biblical emphasis on widows and orphans.
But it’s not just pastors. Christian college and seminary professors also largely do not teach on this subject. I know I never heard anything about it, and I spent four years as a pastoral ministries major at a leading seminary. Maybe I was sick the day they covered it, but I don’t think so. Instead, it seems that most Christian college and seminary students could echo the following statement someone made to me after one of my seminars: “I went to a Bible college for four years and never knew the Bible taught this.”
The same can be said for men’s ministry. When I began New Commandment Men’s Ministries, I thought the concept of men’s team ministry to their widowed and single parents would spread throughout the men’s ministry movement like wildfire. “It’s so biblical,” men’s ministry leaders have been telling me. But it hasn’t taken hold. Rather, it’s been like trying to start a camp fire with wet wood from a rain soaked forest.
In reality, New Commandment Men’s Ministries shouldn’t be in existence. The biblical teaching about serving widows and orphans is so pervasive, Christians should just get it. But we don’t. And until we do, I will be like “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
Or perhaps I should say, like “the voice of one crying on the Internet.”
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 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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