The Men’s Ministry I Know (Part 4)

This and previous posts in this series have been incorporated into the Introduction of my online article, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Men.”

What’s the big deal?

Okay, we’ve seen how modern men’s ministry is making the mistake of not distinguishing between what Christian men are supposed to be as opposed to what Christian men are supposed to do. So what? What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that the entire future of Christianity in America depends on men’s ministry getting this right, that’s the big deal.

I’m going to give you an example of what happened when just one pastor made this mistake of confusing being with doing. Then I’m going to give you another example of how a major men’s ministry made this same mistake, even though it knew better, but this time it had national repercussions. I’ll start with the pastor first.

I am that pastor.

Meet Dan and Teresa, a young, happily married couple who changed the course of my ministry forever

Dan was a funny guy. He was an civil engineer and he had an engineer’s personality: shy and difficult to talk to. He hardly ever said a word. After I officiated his wedding to Teresa, Dan developed a peculiar habit. Every Sunday evening following church, he would wait until everyone had left. Then, without saying a word, he would silently walk around the church with me while I locked up. When I finished, he would smile and say “Goodnight Pastor,” and leave.

That was it, Sunday evening after Sunday evening. It was as if the Spirit of God was telling me, “Take note of this man. I don’t want you to forget him. I’m going to use Dan to teach you something.”

Then God did something with Dan that was totally unexpected. Shocking even. After several months of that Sunday evening ritual, Dan was diagnosed with terminal metastatic bone cancer and died a few weeks later. He and Teresa had been married barely one year.

Teresa was paralyzed with grief.

As her pastor, I did everything I could to comfort her, but nothing I said or did helped.

I was unprepared to deal with the tragedy of widowhood

Of course, pastors see a lot of death. And eventually I got used to that. But witnessing happily married women like Teresa become widows, sometimes without any warning whatsoever, gutted me. Every. Single. Time.

Maybe I was sick the day this topic was covered, but in my four years of seminary I do not remember any professor giving a lecture on how to minister to widows. And I majored in pastoral ministries! (This is what I wish I had learned in seminary about ministering to widows.)

Each time a woman in my congregation crossed that deep, dark emotional abys into widowhood, I would tell myself, “This time I will do better by her. This time I will be more empathetic. This time I will be more committed. This time I will visit her more often. This time I will spend more time in prayer for her. This time….”

But pastors are busy people. I certainly was. I would visit the grieving widow once, maybe twice. But eventually other ministry pressures would force me to move on, with one more guilt-brick for my pathetic effort loaded into to my emotional backpack.

Our church wasn’t large enough to have a paid congregational pastor, so I tried assigning widows to our deacons, the way many smaller churches often do. After all, serving widows is why the office of deacon was instituted in the first place. My deacons were responsible to call their widows and check on them once a quarter. But I knew the calls were stilted and perfunctory, something to check off their to-do list before an upcoming deacon meeting.

Why the church abandons its widows

In the meantime, I had only a limited awareness of the spiritual battle that Teresa was fighting; indeed, the spiritual battle that all Christian widows fight. It would be years later, after talking with dozens of widows around the country about their experiences, that I gained a deeper understanding of what Christian widows go through when they lose their husbands.

If I were to sum up in one word how Christian widows feel about becoming a widow in their church it would be the word abandoned. I hear it again and again. Believing widows who have faithfully served in their churches, often for their entire adult lives, feel abandon by their fellow believers.

There are several reasons why this is true.

First of all, churches are geared towards families. Why? Because families are the future of the church, aren’t they? Believing this is true, churches organize their budgets, staff, and programs accordingly.

But when a wife looses her husband, she presents at church as just a single person, not as part of a family. Her children are grown and gone. Her husband is gone. It’s just her. Suddenly, everything that seemed relevant to her as a wife seems irrelevant to her as a widow.

Then there is the problem of time that I previously mentioned in another post. Pastors and pastoral staff are busy. So they treat widows as a short term, burdensome problem.

But, as any widow will tell you, widowhood is not a short term problem. The emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and financial issues they face after losing their husbands are long term, often lasting years and even decades. Churches are not set up to address such long term needs.

Another problem is cultural. American culture does not facilitate spontaneous interaction between unrelated individuals on a daily basis. Instead, we socialize, especially in suburban America, in isolated “bubbles;” there is our home bubble, our neighborhood bubble, our work bubble, our church bubble, our hobby bubble, etc.

Because we normally socialize only in our bubbles, we frequently do not learn what is going on in the other bubbles a widow is involved in. We just see her at church in our church bubble and assume she is fine.

But the real problem is biblical: biblical ignorance and biblical disobedience.

Sadly, there is widespread ignorance among Christians, even among pastors, about the importance the Word of God gives to ministering to widows. I could easily give you forty biblical passages, some of them very long, that teach about the importance of meeting the needs of widows. The office of deacon was instituted specifically to minister to widows. James writes that the highest expression of our faith is to visit widows and orphans in their distress. Paul gives extensive instructions in 1 Timothy 5 about which widows should be put on the church’s support list. I could go on.

But even worse, there is also willful disobedience to the Word of God on the part of the church when it comes to how it treats its widows. For example, how many churches do you know that actually have a “widows list” as described in 1 Timothy 5?

These failures on the part of the church are not inconsequential for widows. Rather, they are extremely detrimental to them because they contradict the practice of love of Christ, and that at their greatest time of need.

My second visit with Teresa was my breaking point

All of these issues surrounding widows came crashing down on me when I made my second follow-up visit to Teresa’s home a few months after Dan died.

I parked in Teresa’s driveway, walked up to her house, and knocked on the door. Teresa opened the door and greeted me with a forced smile tacked onto an ashen face. I walked into her barely lit living room and sat down. The one lamp fighting the darkness was the only light turned on in the entire house.

As I sat and talked with Teresa, I learned something tragic. Every night since Dan died she had cried herself to sleep on the hardwood floor in that living room. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in her bedroom because it reminded her too much of Dan. She had been doing this for several weeks.

Suddenly, deep conviction pierced my heart. Our church was supposed to be this great bastion of love, the very love of Christ in fact, and yet our paltry practice of this love had no relevance at all to this desperate young widow sitting in front of me contorted with grief.

I managed to blurt out a few more shallow words of comfort, closed with a quick prayer, and then fled to my car in the driveway. There I pounded the steering wheel and wept. I had failed Teresa and I had failed Dan. One more abandoned widow. “Lord, show me how to minister to this woman!” I cried out.

How the being vs. doing problem affects widows

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was struggling with the being vs. doing problem. Our church leadership was completely focused on being the kind of men we were supposed to be, but not on doing the kind of things we were supposed to do.

I met the biblical qualifications for an elder and my deacons met the biblical qualifications for deacons. In fact, there were many men in our church that met all the qualifications for both deacons and elders.

But we were ignoring the things we were supposed to do. For example, we were excelling at being good family men, but failing to do what we were supposed to do for our widows, not to mention our single moms, and our fatherless children.

Or, to use the analogy I used in my previous post, we were qualifying our leadership to be fighter jet pilots, but we were not getting into our fighter jets and risking our lives for a greater purpose.

And what were we supposed to do for these dear people in our church? The Bible says we were supposed to guarantee their wellbeing by laying down our lives for them.

Here is a fourth reading of 1 John 3:16, but with expanded context:

We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters. But whoever has worldly goods and sees his brother or sister in need, and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God remain in him? Little children, let’s not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. (1 John 3:16-18)

By focusing only on marriage and family in our church – on what we were supposed to be as good husbands and fathers – our men were marginalizing those not in a family at all, even though they were a part of the family of God. We were loving them in word only, but not in deed. How cruel.

But how could we change? Little did I know the answer would be found at a Promise Keeper’s stadium event.

And that brings me to my second example; the major men’s ministry that confused what Christian men are supposed to be with what Christian men are supposed to do, even though it knew better.

That major men’s ministry is Promise Keepers.

The rise of Promise Keepers

Late last year, on the morning of December 30, 2021, an unseasonably hot, 90 mile an hour windstorm tore out of Eldorado Canyon, where the Rockies meet the high plains just a few miles south of Boulder, Colorado, and a few miles north of my home.

That hurricane force windstorm caught a spark, fanned it into flames, and then dragged them east across the crispy dry shortgrass on the southern edge of Boulder County until they reached the densely populated Denver suburbs of Superior and Lewisville.

I watched my TV in horror as Jeff Todd, my friend, neighbor and a reporter for Denver’s local CBS affiliate, CBS4, reported on what would be one of the defining stories of his career: the destruction by fire of over 1,000 homes in less than twelve hours.

The exact cause of the Marshall Fire, as it is called, hasn’t been determined yet. But one leading theory is that an unseen subterranean coal seam fire in the area, one that started in a coal mine almost 140 years ago and has been smoldering underground ever since, made its way to the surface and became the source of that inferno.

The Marshal Fire was not the first fire of enormous consequence to race out of Boulder County, Colorado and gain national attention. Another inferno, this one spiritual in nature, was sparked thirty years earlier by Bill McCartney, a CU Boulder Buffs football coach. (Read my interview with Bill McCartney.)

A smoldering spiritual coal seam that exploded into flame

That spark burst into flame and exploded almost overnight into a nationwide movement of the Spirit of God among hundreds of thousands of Christian men who, like that smoldering coal seem, had themselves been smoldering for decades with holy discontent just beneath everyone’s radar.

For many conservative Christian men in the early 90’s, the modern godless American culture growing around them like kudzu had become unrecognizable. It felt at the time like our spiritual lives were being strangled to death, creating a siege mentality in our ranks. All that was needed was someone with spiritual passion and vision who could tap into this massive discontent and give it expression. Bill McCartney was God’s man to do just that.

It took just one spark: Coach Bill McCartney

Bill McCartney rose to fame, not as a spiritual leader, but as a college football coach who turned the so-so CU Buffs football program into a football powerhouse that went all the way to the national championship in 1990. But that was just one of Coach McCartney’s many accomplishments as CU’s head football coach.

To quote from CU’s Athletic Hall of Fame, “Bill McCartney first set foot on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder in June 1982; little did he know at the time that almost 13 years later he would retire as the winningest coach in CU football history. “Mac” was 93-55-5 in 13 seasons at the reins of the Buffaloes, guiding the program to its first national championship in football in 1990 and to more bowl games, nine, than any before him. He coached Colorado to three Big Eight titles, 10 consecutive winning seasons in league competition and a 58-29-4 mark in conference play, all of which remain school bests.”¹

However, Bill McCartney was not just a football coach, he was a Christian football coach who proclaimed his faith on and off the field every chance he got. Having just won the national college football championship in 1990, “Coach” sensed that he could use his growing fame and influence to further the cause of Christ on a national scale.

Promise Keepers is born

During a fateful car ride from Boulder to Colorado Springs, while Coach talked with Dave Wardell, a gymnastics coach at CU Boulder, along with two other men, they came across the idea of holding Christian men’s rallies in football stadiums that would focus on men keeping their promises, their promises to their wives, their children, to God, and to their church.

As the four men talked about the possibilities of utilizing the increasingly popular form of contemporary worship being implemented in churches, along with testimonies from leading Christians, and compelling preaching from well-known pastors, they sensed the Spirit of God leading them to start a new men’s ministry organization, Promise Keepers.

Thus, on December 3, 1990, Promise Keepers was officially founded. The first stadium event, held at CU Boulder’s event center in 1991, drew 4,200 men. Promise Keepers continued to host stadium events in Colorado each year until 1994, when it held 7 stadium events in 7 cities around the country and drew 278,000 men.

The spiritual inferno that was Promise Keepers in the 90’s

By 1995 PK stadium events had spread to 13 cities and was consistently garnering national headlines.² By 1996, PK held events in 20 stadiums, and in 1997, besides its stadium events, Promise Keepers hosted “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Attendance estimates at Stand in the Gap range from 600,000 to over one million men.

All in all, an estimated total of 7 million men attended PK stadium events and the national mall event during the 90s. At its height, PK’s annual budget was over 100 million dollars and it boasted a full time staff of more than 300.³

One of those 7 million attendees was myself.

My Promise Keepers experience

At the time all of this was happening with Promise Keepers, I was serving as the pastor of my church in Quincy, Illinois, the same church that Dan and Teresa attended. Having heard reports of the success Promise Keepers was having around the country, I began taking vans of men from my church to the conferences, starting in 1995 with PK’s Indianapolis stadium event at the RCA Dome.

If you combined a raucous NFL football game with a Billy Graham crusade, along with a rock concert, a 50,000 voice all male choir singing at the top of their lungs, throw in a half-time locker room style exhortation from Coach Bill McCartney himself, then add some of the greatest preaching in America, along with testimonies from major Christian athletes, all of this encapsulated in 17 hours over two days, you get an idea of what Promise Keepers stadium events were like.

Like being in heaven itself

PK stadium events were like nothing any of us Christian men had ever experienced anywhere else, like being in heaven itself. I personally witnessed thousands of men come to Christ at the four stadium events I attended from 1995 to 1998. I also saw thousands of Christian men rededicate their lives to Christ.

It felt like, finally, something was happening, some huge work of the Spirit was responding to the tsunami that was secular American culture.

Unfortunately, that feeling would prove to be transient in nature. The reason is because Promise Keepers did not adequately answer this question: what now?

The being vs. doing problem rears its head for Promise Keepers

I am going to quote 2 Timothy 3:16-18, an important biblical passage that relates to men’s ministry and to what Promise Keepers was attempting to do. But I am going to leave something out. Read the quote and then guess what it is that I left out.

From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

Did you guess what it is that I left out?

What I left out is the ending: …so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Promise Keepers was great at making men “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” It was great at “teaching” all of the “God-breathed Scripture.” It was great at “rebuking” us for our unrepented sin. It was great at “correcting” us in our relationships, It was great at “training us in righteousness,” such as how to maintain sexual purity through accountability groups. But 1 Timothy 3:16-18 teaches that all of this is “so that” we will be “equipped for every good work.”

But at no time do I ever recall any emphasis on being thoroughly equipped for every good work. What are these good works that we are supposed to do?

There was nothing at all at any PK event that I attended about good works. Nothing. It was all about being, but nothing about doing.

What do we do now?

“What do we do now?” That was the question on everyone’s mind in our church van as we drove home to Quincy from our first PK event. As we talked about what we had just experienced, someone had a suggestion.

“Pastor, we need to start a men’s ministry at our church.” I agreed. But then I thought, “How in the world do I do men’s ministry and how do I find time to do it? Just what I need, one more responsibility.”

The next year I made another trip with my men to PK’s second conference at Indianapolis’ RCA Dome. We still hadn’t gotten a men’s ministry off the ground at our church and I knew my men were going to get all fired up at the conference again and want to start one. So I decided that during a break I would browse the conference book center PK had set up down on the football field.

The answer to PK’s being vs doing problem was hiding in plain sight.

As I browsed the various items PK was selling, I came across a pamphlet entitled, “Focusing Your Men’s Ministry.” I bought it, shoved it into my conference tote bag, and promptly forgot about it until a few weeks after the conference.

Little did I know the impact something in that pamphlet would have on me, on Teresa, and on thousands of men, widows, single moms, and fatherless children for decades to come.

As we drove home after that second PK event, sure enough, one of my men asked me again if we could start a men’s ministry.

“Yes. This time we will do something. I promise.”

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.