The Men’s Ministry I Know (Part 1) – The Men’s Hall of Shame

This post is the first in a series series of posts that have been incorporated into the Introduction of my online article, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Men.”

I have personally experienced both church-wide and dedicated men’s ministries

My life has been massively impacted by two different types men’s ministries. The first one I call “the men’s ministry I didn’t know.” The second one “the men’s ministry I know.”

I wrote about the men’s ministry I didn’t know in a post by that title four years ago. That first inconspicuous but very real men’s ministry was comprised of the godly men who were dispersed throughout the church I grew up in, a church that “reached and utilized” almost all of its men in significant ways.

There were hundreds of them. Everywhere I looked I saw godly, joyful, Spirit filled, biblically literate, wise, well educated, and loving men who were successful as husbands, fathers, and breadwinners. They were deeply involved in our church on all levels. Because I wanted my life to be just like theirs, many of them became my personal role models and mentors who were there for me during my formative years.

The second men’s ministry, the men’s ministry I know, has had similar life-changing impacts on me.

This men’s ministry is the modern American men’s ministry movement of the past thirty years that arose in response to the massive social changes that rocked American culture beginning in the 1960’s and continuing to this day.

I call this men’s ministry the men’s ministry I know because, in contrast to the first men’s ministry where I was an adolescent and more of an observer, as an adult I have been an active participant in the modern men’s ministry movement for many years.

But one might ask, if my experience with the male role models I had in my childhood church was so effective, why have I felt the need to participate in the modern men’s ministry movement? Why not just continue the focus I had as a pastor for the first twenty years of my ministry: that of ministering to men as part of a church-wide ministry?

Dedicated men’s ministries arose as a response to America’s mass male dysfunction

The answer lies in the stratospheric rise in the number of dysfunctional men we are witnessing in our general culture. In addition, an increasing number of Christian men who, having come to faith in Christ, are still struggling with the adverse effects of our decadent culture. Hence the need for the church to address men’s issues in a more purposeful way.

The current abysmal state of American men originated in the 1960’s when our society experienced dramatic – some might even say revolutionary – socio economic convulsions. Prior to that time, the Judeo-Christian worldview with its concomitant ethical standards dominated American culture.

The rejection of the Judeo-Christian worldview and acceptance of a materialistic worldview

Briefly stated, the Judeo-Christian worldview understood the universe to be created and governed by a personal and holy God who communicated to us in history through the Bible and his son, Jesus Christ. Viewed from this perspective, morals were considered absolute in the sense that they were given to us by God and were based on his holy character, not relative in the sense that we make them up ourselves pragmatically as we go.

Consequently, men and women had specific social roles to fulfill that required duty and sacrifice, with men filling the roles of breadwinner and head of the home, and women filling the roles of wife and homemaker. Divorce happened rarely and extramarital sex was considered sinful and shameful. As a result, the vast majority of children in all of America’s social classes grew up in stable, two parent homes. And while lower class children may have been raised in poverty, often the stable marriages they were expected and able to establish enabled them to rise out of it and into the middle class.

But starting in the 60’s, the dominant sway of the Judeo-Christian worldview in American culture began to wane. In its place, a materialistic, godless, and secular worldview became the reigning social paradigm.

As a result, morality came to be seen as relative, not absolute. That is, anyone could do as they pleased, so long as they didn’t hurt anyone else. Predefined social roles for men and women that required duty and sacrifice were now viewed as repressive and antiquated. Instead, self-fulfillment and equality became the modern, “liberating” ethic.

The new materialistic worldview naturally resulted in the sexual revolution

A big part of this new so-called liberation involved sex. The sexual revolution that accompanied this tectonic change in worldviews eschewed the Judeo-Christian sex ethic along with the God who authored it. Rather than limiting sex to the bedrooms of married couples, the new materialistic view of reality meant that any consenting adult could have sex with any other consenting adult any time they wanted, regardless of whether or not they were married.

We are, after all, just glorified animals and nothing more, are we not? Our culture increasingly arrived at that conclusion as a result of its new materialistic outlook. Consequently, sexual identity and sexual fulfillment became one of the key, if not the key, defining elements of what it means to be human because it is the most pleasurable and fulfilling physical experience any person can have.

Some saw “benefits” in the sexual revolution

At first blush, both men and women saw some clear benefits to the disintegration of static morality and social roles in American society.

Freed from the confines of their homes, children, and domineering husbands, suddenly, vast career opportunities began opening up for women that formerly had been the sole domain of men.

With the promise of increased income and financial independence at hand, women no longer felt tethered to their husbands should their marriages sour and fall apart.

Men, too, welcomed the sexual revolution with open arms. Without having to wait until marriage to fulfill their sexual desires, or at least appear to wait until marriage, men increasingly indulged their sexual lusts with abandon.

Even children, it was thought, could benefit from the new morality. With the option of divorce now more readily available and socially acceptable, dysfunctional couples could avoid torturing their children with their ceaseless marital conflicts by simply ending their marriages with the newly passed no-fault divorce laws.

Eventually, the chickens came home to roost

But half a century later, the dark underbelly of America’s intellectual and social paroxysms that began in the 1960’s has become manifestly obvious.

In today’s newly liberated America, marriage has been trashed and children are being increasingly abandoned by their mothers and/or fathers, albeit by their fathers at much higher rates. Men especially began spiraling downward.

The destruction of marriage and family

Let’s first look at the disintegration of marriage by considering this statement from the US Census Bureau:

“Among those ages 18-24, cohabitation is now more prevalent than living with a spouse: 9 percent live with an unmarried partner in 2018, compared to 7 percent who live with a spouse. Fifty years ago, in 1968, living with an unmarried partner was rare. Only 0.1 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds… lived with an unmarried partner, according to the Current Population Survey. In contrast to the rising rates of cohabitation, the proportion of young adults who are married has declined over time. Today, 30 percent of young adults ages 18-34 are married, but 40 years ago, in 1978, 59 percent of young adults were married.” (Emphasis mine.)¹

Now look at the impact that – according to statistics provided by the US Census Bureau – America’s disdain for marriage is having on our children:

21% of children now live with their mother only, a 200% increase from 1968.
4.5% of children live with their father only, a 400% increase from 1968.
4% of children live with someone other than their parent, a 150% increase from 1968.²
48% of fatherless homes in 2014 were headed by never-married mothers, an 800% increase from 1968.³

The abandonment of wives and children

Notice that if you add the statistics together for mother only households (21%) and no parent at all households (4%), you get 25% of all children living without their father or an adult male in the home, or 1 out of 4. What that means is that American men are not only abandoning marriage, they are abandoning their own children as well.

(For an authoritative article on the biological impact fatherless homes have on children, see the the American Academy of Pediatrics study, Father Loss and Child Telomere Length: It concludes that “At 9 years of age, children with father loss have significantly shorter telomeres (14% reduction)…. Telomeres are the protective end caps of chromosomes. They shorten with age and are like a biological clock. Chronic stress is associated with accelerated telomere shortening, adverse health outcomes, and possibly more rapid biological aging.”)

It would be bad enough if the rejection of Judeo-Christian family values was the only male maladaptive behavior brought about by the acceptance of a godless, materialistic worldview. But unfortunately it is just one of a multitude of self-destructive and anti-social behaviors that men have adopted.

The rapid increase of other deviant male behaviors

Consider the percent of people populating the following groups who are men:

Prisoners – 93%
Gang Members – 90%
Murderers – 90%
Mass Murderers – 98%
Rapists – 99%
Drug Dealers – 85%
Drug Abusers – 67%
Homeless Persons – 70%
Suicides – 69%
Alcoholics – 7% (of men; 4% of women)
Watch Porn Weekly – 43% (of men; 9% of women)
Attend College – 40% (of students; women – 60% of students)
Can Work but Don’t Work – 33% (of men)

The development of a permanent generational underclass

It is tempting to look at these statistics on men in a clinical and emotionally detached way. But each one of them represents thousands upon thousands of adults and children whose lives have been upended by the godlessness and moral rootlessness that infects modern American culture in general and especially modern American men.

The result of all this maladaptive male behavior? Hundreds of thousands of women and children living in a permanent underclass marked by generations of poverty, crime, and welfare dependency.

The saddest part about modern men’s deviant behaviors is not only that sociologists do not know how to ameliorate them, along with the resulting cascading problems such behaviors create in the lives of those who interact with men, but that they don’t even have the categories to understand them. The reason is because sociologists and others who try to address these issues are so post-Christian in their assumptions that it is inconceivable to them that the real solutions for these culture-destroying behaviors might actually lie in the spiritual and moral realms.

Such were the cultural circumstances that gave rise to the modern men’s ministry movement. In my next post I will discuss how the modern men’s ministry movement came about.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.