The Men’s Ministry I Know (Part 6)

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

The Marshal fire — that fire in December of 2021 that destroyed over 1,000 homes in Boulder, Lafayette, and Superior, Colorado — left block after block with homes flattened down to their cement basement foundations, with only the occasional charred chimney still standing.

Driving around and surveying the devastation, one can easily remember the vibrant communities that once lived there. But all that is left now are just memories.

A revivalist “burned over district”

Like the burned over subdivisions destroyed by the Marshal fire, it is a sad commentary on Christian revivals that the areas where revivals have occurred are sometimes referred to as “burned over districts.” This was certainly the case for western New York in the early nineteenth century. There religious revivals broke out so often that it eventually became difficult for evangelists to hold any more. This is what the evangelist Charles Finney observed about western New York:

“I found that region of country what, in the western phrase, would be called, a ‘burnt district.’ There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious.” … “It was reported as having been a very extravagant excitement; and resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion. A great many men seemed to be settled in that conviction. Taking what they had seen as a specimen of a revival of religion, they felt justified in opposing anything looking toward the promoting of a revival.”¹

The Denver/Boulder region in 1999 was a men’s ministry burned over district

In a sense, the Denver/Boulder metro area in 1999, the year I moved there to pastor a church, could be described as a burned over district. The national Christian men’s revival that was Promise Keepers had pretty much run its course. While Promise Keepers was still drawing 300,000 to its stadium events nationally in 1999, that number was way down from it previous highs in the mid 1990’s. Suffering massive financial problems and seeing the writing on the wall, PK cancelled its planned millennial march that year. The march was supposed to take place at 50 state capitals on New Year’s Eve. By 1999, PK had even been banned by CU Boulder from using its stadium for future events.

As a result, I arrived in the Denver/Boulder region to find it filled with thousands of men who had attended a Boulder Promise Keepers stadium event and who had experienced “a very extravagant excitement,” but now were left with only memories, along with a question: What do we do now? In addition, there were the hundreds of men who had quit their jobs and careers to work for Promise Keepers at its headquarters in Denver, only to be laid off two or three years later and were now burned out.

Was Promise Keepers all “a mere delusion”?

No, it was not. Here are several reasons why.

The blessings of the Promise Keepers revival

First of all, there were thousands upon thousands of men who came to faith in Christ through Promise Keepers. PK stadium events were possibly the most effective means of evangelizing men in American history.

Promise Keepers also raised the awareness of the need for dedicated men’s ministries in local churches. Whereas men’s ministries in churches were almost unheard of prior to Promise Keepers, following PK they have become quite common.

Additionally, Promise Keepers fostered the birth of dozens of national and regional parachurch men’s ministries that exist to this day. My ministry, New Commandment Men’s Ministries, is one example.

Another result of Promise Keepers is that its stadium events exposed millions of Christian men to contemporary Christian worship. Those men, in turn, took contemporary worship back to their local churches. Rare is the church now that does not have a contemporary worship service.

And finally, Promise Keepers proved to the world that there are millions of Christian men in America “who have not yet bowed the knee to Baal;” that is, they have not bought into the prevailing materialistic worldview.

But if this is so, then why the decline of Promise Keepers?

The decline of Promise Keepers

The fact of the matter is, in spite of all of its success and blessings — in spite of all its “promise,” so to speak — in 1997 Promise Keepers went into a very steep nosedive from which it never recovered. Here are some of the reasons why.

Promise Keepers grew too fast.

Putting together a staff of hundreds in just three or four years and getting it to work in unison proved to be difficult. One staff member told me that it seemed like everyone came on board with their own hidden agendas.

Promise Keepers was personality driven.

Bill McCartney was first and foremost a very successful and famous college football coach who knew how to motivate men to levels of performance they had never dreamed of before. But he had not been trained in ministry or in nonprofit administration. His spiritual depth and influence were wonderful. But some of his ministry decisions seemed impulsive and counterproductive and his board either couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up to him and tell him when they thought he was wrong.

Consequently, Promise Keepers shot itself in the foot more than once.

By holding its national Washington DC conference, called Stand in the Gap and attended by over 600,00 men, in October, 1997, Promise Keepers forced men to choose between attending it and attending the regional stadium events that were also being held that year. In essence, Promise Keepers was competing against itself. The result was less attendance at stadium events and a loss of momentum.

At the same time, Promise Keepers stopped charging for its stadium events, this while also incurring huge costs from Stand in the Gap, creating a severe cash shortage that forced it to lay off hundreds of staff.

Then in 1999, Promise Keepers had to cancel its Millennial March — the march on all fifty state capitals on New Years day, increasing the perception that it was on the ropes.

But the final death knell happened in 2003 when Promise Keepers took a ham-handed approach to racial reconciliation at a stadium event for pastors that resulted in the alienation of thousands of pastors. Losing the trust of its pastors would be the final nail in the PK coffin. (My next post will focus on this topic.)

Promise Keepers never solved its “being instead of doing problem” because it had an inadequate agenda.

Finally, PK never answered the question, “What do we do now?” satisfactorily for its men. Unfortunately, while PK had the answer to this question hidden away in its own literature, it did not take it seriously enough to promote it. Consequently, time and again, men leaving the stadium events knew what kind of men they were supposed to be, but they didn’t know what kinds of things they were supposed to do.

Everything about Promise Keepers was calibrated to impress: the massive stadiums, the huge crowds, the incredible music, and the eloquent speakers. It all added up to an exhilarating experience. This desire to wow people, to overwhelm them with the reality of, not just tens of thousands of Christian men, but hundreds of thousands of Christian men worshipping together in unison, was especially true of Stand in the Gap, the culmination of PK’s stadium events at the National Mall in Washington, DC.

The parallels between Stand in the Gap and the triumphal entry, and what they teach us

In some ways, Stand in the Gap resembled Jesus’ triumphal entry in the gospels.

When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’” So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:29-40)

Here we see several similarities between Stand in the Gap and the triumphal entry. Both Stand in the Gap and the the triumphal entry were the culminations of years of previous grass roots ministry in the countryside of their respective nations. Both drew huge crowds. Both came victoriously to their capital seats of national power. Both were highly emotional, joyous events. Both glorified God. And both got the attention of everyone in their capitals, especially the attention of their political and religious leaders. (But even the triumphal entry wasn’t broadcast live in its entirety by CSPAN to the whole nation of Israel!)

There are other parallels as well. Both Stand in the Gap and the the triumphal entry preceded periods of rapid decline in the respective ministries involved. I’ve already noted what happened to Promise Keepers after Stand in the Gap. So, too, within a week of Jesus’ triumphal entry, almost all of his disciples abandoned him and even the dozen that remained wound up arguing among themselves. Even worse, one of his disciples betrayed Jesus, resulting in his crucifixion. After the triumphal entry, Jerusalem, like Western New York and Boulder/Denver, soon became a “burned over district” filled with discouraged and disappointed disciples.

The problem with having an inadequate agenda

But there is one more parallel I want to point out that teaches us an important lesson. At the triumphal entry, even though Jesus had told his inner circle otherwise, the crowd cheering Jesus on were clueless about God’s full agenda, about some of God’s intentions. They thought Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was the beginning of God’s kingdom on earth at that moment. They thought Jesus, as the Messiah, would simply assume the throne, expel Rome, and rule the world from Jerusalem.

But they were wrong because they had an inadequate understanding of God’s entire agenda; they had no idea of God’s plan to redeem believers through the death of his Son and to form a church that was made up of those believers.

Of course, the crowd at the triumphal entry did understand some parts of God’s agenda correctly: Jesus was indeed the predicted messiah and the future king of Israel who would rule the world, and Jesus was fulfilling prophecy when he entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey. In this sense the crowd rejoicing at Jesus’ triumphal entry was absolutely expressing the right response. But otherwise, they were clueless to the rest of God’s plan.

In the same way, like the disciples at the Triumphal Entry, the attendees at Stand in the Gap had an inadequate agenda. What they were doing was fantastic, but it was also incomplete. The difference, however, is that the crowd at the triumphal entry didn’t fully know God’s agenda because it hadn’t been told to them yet. They had no answer to the question, what do we do now? But the men and their leaders at Stand in the Gap should have known God’s full agenda because it has been clearly given to the church.

The agenda God has given the church

So what is the agenda that God has given the church? Here it is, in all of its majestic simplicity:

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and love one another.” 1 John 3:23

This summary of God’s agenda for Christians that John gives us in 1 John 3:23 is in two parts. The first part covers our relationship with God while the second part covers our relationship with our fellow believers.

Another way of looking at these two parts is the first part covers our spirituality — our salvation and current walk with God through faith in his son, while the second part covers our practice — what we are to do as a result of our salvation and walk with God.

How Promise Keepers interpreted the church’s agenda

We can summarize Promise Keepers’ understanding of the church’s agenda this way:

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and love each other by being a good Christian family man, and by being racially reconciled.”

At its stadium events and at Stand in the Gap, Promise Keepers fulfilled the first half of this agenda brilliantly. Thousands of men came to saving faith in Jesus Christ because of Promise Keepers. In addition, we were exhorted in our spiritual disciplines like prayer, Bible study, and fellowship. We were also encouraged to deal with any ongoing sin in our lives that breaks our fellowship with God.

But with respect to the second half of the church’s agenda, Promise Keepers fell short. PK, like so many men’s ministries, placed a strong emphasis on marriage and family. And following Bill McCartney’s lead, PK also emphasized racial reconciliation. But it ignored a critical part of what it means for believers to love each other.

As a result, we are going to see that, while family relations and race relations are laudable areas to focus on, they represent an inadequate understanding of God’s full agenda for the church, putting the attendees at Promise Keepers events in a similar position to the crowd at the triumphal entry: that of not having an adequate answer to the question, “What do we do now?”

How the early church interpreted its agenda

We can summarize the early church’s understanding of the agenda God gave it this way:

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and start loving each other by first doing whatever it takes to meet the pressing needs of your fellow believers — especially the pressing needs of your widows — with additional applications of what it means to love each other to follow.”

It is true that very early in its history the church had to deal with the thorny issue of race relations. And eventually the church also had much to say about a Christian view of marriage and family. But these, and other “additional applications,” such as the well known “one anothers” in the epistles, were not the first and most important priorities of the church.

Rather, contrary to the way Promise Keepers understood the church’s agenda, the early church’s very first priority was doing whatever it took to make sure every believer had their “pressing needs” met (Titus 3:14) so that it could proudly say to the watching world, “There is no needy person among us.”

“God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.” Acts 4:33-35²

We see the early church reasserting this priority of meeting the pressing needs of its impoverished members, especially its widows, again and again throughout the Book of Acts (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37; 6:1-7; 20:32-35) and, indeed, throughout the rest of the New Testament (Galatians 2:10; James 1:27; 1 Timothy 5:3-16; 1 John 3:16-18; 1 Timothy 6:17-19; Titus 3:14, etc.). It did so because it was inconceivable to them that they could love each other the way they were commanded to while at the same time ignore some of their members who were living in extremis.

In addition, the early church had the example of Jesus on the cross entrusting his mother Mary, herself a widow and single mother, into the care of John. The importance of this act cannot be overstated, for it provided a beautiful example of how Jesus expected the church to care for all of its widows and single moms.

The early church had a clear answer to the question, “What do we do now?”

Thus, following Pentecost, the early church had a clear answer to the question, “What do we do now?” “What we do now,” they realized, “is do whatever it takes to meet the needs of our widows, single moms, fatherless children, and others with long term pressing needs.”

One of the things that separates the triumphal entry (and Stand in the Gap) from Pentecost is that at Pentecost, both God and God’s people had complete and aligning agendas. That is, God’s people knew what God was doing and what God wanted them to do, and then they did it.

This is why we talk about the meetings of the Promise Keepers, but we talk about the acts of the apostles and their disciples. It is also why the triumphal entry and Stand in the Gap burned out, but Pentecost never did.

And the irony of it all, an irony that Promise Keepers never picked up on, is that solving its impoverished believers problem eventually also helped the early church move towards racial reconciliation.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.