This and previous posts in this series have been incorporated into the Introduction of my online article, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Men.”
Arriving in Broomfield, Colorado in 1999: a new opportunity to start another men’s team ministry
As we have seen in my previous posts, 1999 wasn’t exactly a banner year for men’s ministry in America. By then Promise Keepers was in rapid decline, which was validated by its cancellation of the Millennial March that was supposed to take place on New Years Eve at all 50 state capitals.
I, on the other hand, was extremely optimistic about men’s ministry. I had just arrived at my new pastorate in Broomfield, Colorado and I was eager to get settled into my new church.
After a few months, I began talking to my board and other leaders in the church about the possibility of starting a men’s team ministry for our widows and single moms. I shared how God had blessed the men’s team ministry in my previous church and how much the widows, single moms, and the men involved in men’s team ministry enjoyed it. It didn’t take long for the entire church to catch the vision and for the board to give me an enthusiastic yes.
One change I made in the men’s team ministry model for my church in Broomfield was to reduce the frequency of service days from three hours on two Saturday mornings a month to three hours on one Saturday morning a month. Having lived in three large cities for many years (Los Angeles, Dallas, and Houston), I knew that the pace of life in suburban metro areas was much more hectic than it had been in Quincy, Illinois.
The change turned out to be a good decision. As the ministry developed in Broomfield, I could see that the less frequent service days didn’t impact the quality of the ministry and kept the men fresh for long term ministry.
The response to my appeal to the men of the church for volunteers was excellent. Out of a congregation of 250, 40 men volunteered for the ministry, enough for ten teams of four men each.
“There is no unmet pressing need in our church”
“There shall be no poor nor beggar among you: that the Lord thy God may bless you.” Deuteronomy 15:4
“There were no needy people among them.” Acts 4:34
“Let our people learn to engage in good deeds, to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful.” Titus 3:14
With ten teams, we had enough to provide a team for every widow and single mom in our church who needed and wanted one. We launched into the ministry with great eagerness and, as the months went by, I was not disappointed.
In fact, the ministry was so successful, after several months of faithful service, I could stand up in the pulpit one Sunday morning and make the following announcement: “Because of our men’s team ministry to our widows and single moms, to the best of my knowledge, there is no unmet pressing need in our church.”
What a blessing it was to be able to say that. When a men’s ministry eradicates all the pressing needs in their church, it has really accomplished something.
But it wasn’t just the fact that the pressing needs of our widows and single moms were being met, it was also the quality of relationships that were being developed and the testimony in the community that our teams and their care receivers had. We were experiencing the reality of the love of Christ in our congregation, the “fruit” that Paul mentions in Titus 3:14.
Here are some examples:
The divorcee who had lost her son at sea
One of the first things I noticed about men’s team ministry is that the practice of a team meeting in the home of their care receiver every month on a regular basis provides opportunities for the team members to learn things about their care receiver that they might never have known by simply seeing her at church every week.
For example, a care receiver that one of our teams worked with, I’ll call her “Mary,” was a divorcee who struggled with depression. Over the course of several months, Mary’s team learned that she had a son who, while working on a fishing boat in the Pacific, fell overboard and was never found. She told them that she dreamed all the time about him coming home and knocking at her door.
Her team learned something new about Mary that they had never known before, even though they had known her for years.
Eventually Mary developed terminal cancer and her team faithfully walked with her through that trial until she died.
Those men would not have come to know Mary the way they did, and Mary would not have had the kind of care from the church that she had, without our men’s team ministry.
The neighbor who went door to door begging her other neighbors to come meet her team
Our youth pastor, a young single woman, had a team assigned to her. One day she asked her neighbor, a single mom with two teen boys, if she would like to share her team with her. After explaining what her team did, her neighbor eagerly said yes.
Several months later, our youth pastor’s neighbor asked us if we would start a Bible study in her home. (She grew up in a Christian home, but had gotten away from the Lord.) Then she went door to door on her block and begged her neighbors to come to the Bible study. She told us she said to them, “You’ve got to meet these guys. You’ll never believe what they do for me!”
I call that reaction “the woman at the well effect” (John 4:28-20) and it illustrates how observable and public the love of Christ becomes when teams of men serve widows, single moms and fatherless children.
A basement rental unit for a divorcee and single mom
Some of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with men’s team ministry have been watching teams develop real compassion for for their care receivers that motivates them to do amazing things on their behalf.
I have already mentioned in a previous post how one team in my first men’s team ministry built a habitat for humanity home for their care receiver, a single mother of three children.
Something similar happened in this second men’s team ministry.
One of our teams had been assigned to “Joan,” a long time divorcee who had raised a daughter on an executive assistant’s salary. Over the years she saved enough money to purchase a small home. But she didn’t realize how expensive maintaining a home could be and began gradually depleting her remaining savings.
Eventually, Joan’s team learned about her financial situation. Realizing she had an unfinished basement, the team volunteered to put in a rental unit for her to supplement her income. Joan had enough in savings to cover the cost of the required materials and the men donated their time and labor. The project took a year and a half, but they succeeded in installing a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom.
The speechless McDonald’s counter worker
To increase the public exposure of our men’s team ministry, we began meeting at a McDonalds on our service day at 7 am before we split up into our teams and went out to serve our care receivers. But because we needed some privacy, we met in the playground area of the McDonalds, which created quite a spectacle: 40 grown men sitting in little chairs in an indoor playground.
After months of doing this, “Lucy,” who worked behind the counter, asked us who we were and what we were doing. When I told her, she said she was a single mother and asked if she could have a team come over.
I told her we would be delighted to serve her. So the next month we formed a team for Lucy, showed up at her home, and did some projects for her. When we asked her what she would like us to do for her the following month, she couldn’t believe we were coming back. She began crying so hard, she couldn’t talk.
The elderly widow who insisted I meet her doctor
“Eunice” was an elderly widow and a long time member of our church, so it was natural for us to assign a team to her. Since she heated her mobile home during our long, cold Denver winters with firewood, one of the first projects my team (I was a member of her team) did was cut and stack two cords of wood for her. (One cord of wood is 4 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 8 feet long.)
We did several other projects for her over the course of a few months until one day, Eunice called the church to ask for a ride to her doctor’s office to see her for a sinus infection. I was free that afternoon, so I volunteered to take her.
We waited together in the clinic until her name was called, and to my surprise, when it was, she asked me to come with her and meet her doctor. I demurred, but she insisted. Finally, I relented and sheepishly went with her into the exam room.
When her doctor came in, he looked at Eunice and then pointed to me and asked her, “Who is he?”
“Oh, this is my pastor!” she said excitedly. “He is on my team of four men from church. They come out to my home once every month and do whatever needs to be done around my home!” Then she proceeded to list all of the projects we had done for her.
While she was rambling on and on about her team, the doctor just stood there akimbo and looked back and forth at us. When she finally finished, he paused for a couple of seconds and looked at both of us again. Then he shook his head and said, “I have never seen anything like this in my life!”
Inviting me into a medical exam room may have been extreme, but Eunice illustrates an important point: Men’s team ministry to widows, single moms, and fatherless children gives these dear care receivers a bullhorn for the gospel. They regularly brag to everyone they know — their friends, their neighbors, their relatives, their fellow workers — about their church’s men’s team ministry and how their team expresses the love of Christ to them through regular, committed service.
“Pastor, this is so biblical. Why don’t other churches do this?”
It is not just care receivers who get excited about men’s team ministry. Care givers get excited about it too. In fact, when men experience in practice what the love of Christ looks like in relation to the widows and single moms in their church, they get downright passionate about it.
That passion spilled out one Saturday morning when my team was painting Eunice’s porch. One of my men suddenly put his paintbrush down, turned around and said, “Pastor, this is so biblical. Why don’t other churches do this?”
I turned to him and shrugged my shoulders, “I don’t know,” was all I said.
We returned to painting Eunice’s porch, but the seed had been sown.
“Why don’t other churches do this?” I thought. I decided right then and there that I was going to pray seriously that other churches would.
Hiking along the Mesa Trail and praying over the Promise Keepers burned over district
The Mesa Trail is one of my all time favorite Colorado hiking trails. It begins at El Dorado Canyon near where I live and runs seven miles north along the base of the Rockies all the way to the Flat Irons and Chautauqua Park in the heart of Boulder. Along the way, there are beautiful vantage points that overlook Boulder and the northern suburbs of Denver. The whole area is what the locals call “the front range.” It wasn’t long after I moved to Broomfield that I began hiking this trail on a weekly basis.
After that experience on Eunice’s porch, I decided to combine my love for hiking the Mesa Trail with my burden to pray for opportunities to share the vision of men’s team ministry to widows, single moms and fatherless children with churches in my area. Whenever I came to an outcropping that gave me a good view of the front range, I would stop and pray for God to grant me favor in the eyes of pastors in the communities I could see.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this particular section of the front range that I was praying over was also the Promise Keepers burned over district. In fact, at the northern end of the Mesa Trail, one can look right down on CU Boulder’s campus and on the very stadium where Promise Keepers started.
I didn’t have to wait long for the Lord to answer my prayer.
A surprise answer to prayer through a neighbor down the street
Soon after I started praying on the Mesa Trail, I was out on my front lawn when my neighbor, John, who lived in the house two doors down, walked over to talk with me. We had met briefly before, but I didn’t know much about him other than that he was a part time pastor in Boulder.
“Hi, Herb,” John said smiling as he walked up to me. “I’ve been thinking. We don’t know each other very well. I was wondering if you would like to go out to breakfast with me tomorrow morning.”
“Wow! Nice neighbor,” I thought. I told him I would love to do that.
So the next morning we met for breakfast and had a great time of fellowship. As we talked, I shared excitedly with John about how God had blessed the men’s team ministries in my past two churches.
Later that evening John called me. “Herb, I’ve been invited to speak to a men’s group in Boulder tomorrow morning. But I’m wondering if you would speak instead of me and share what we talked about this morning.”
It was late at night and I didn’t have time to properly prepare, but I jumped at the opportunity anyway and said yes.
The Boulder Men’s Fellowship
John picked me up at 6:00 am the next morning. As we drove, I had a picture in my mind of a small group of men sitting around a table at a restaurant like Denny’s. But when we arrived at the meeting, I discovered something quite different. To my surprise, it was the Boulder Men’s Fellowship.
I had never heard of the Boulder Men’s Fellowship before, but I learned that it was a group of about forty men from churches all over the front range who had been meeting every Friday morning for twenty years.
Suddenly I realized that God had specifically answered my prayer and had given me a wide open door to talk about men’s team ministry to the exact kind of audience I had prayed for.
John introduced me to the MC for the meeting, who told me that they would begin with singing and then he would introduce me and give me twenty minutes to speak.
It is extremely unusual for me to do any speaking without detailed preparation, but I had a quiet confidence that morning that the Lord had put me there and that He would give me the right words to say.
And he did.
When it was my turn to speak, I introduced myself and explained how I had used teams of men to serve widows, single moms, and fatherless children in my pastorates. Then I told story after story of how the ministry impacted both the widows and single moms, as well as the men who served them.
When I finished and sat down, there was complete silence in the room. And then something remarkable happened. One by one the men stood up, some with tears running down their faces, and said that God had spoken to them that morning and that they needed to do this ministry in their churches.
Then, after the meeting finished, men began coming up to me individually. One of them said to me, “I’ve been attending this fellowship for twenty years and I have never seen these men respond this way before.”
Saturday morning, June 15, 2002
Another gentleman spoke with me and asked if I could come and speak to the men in his church about men’s team ministry. I said I would be glad to and asked him when he wanted me to come.
“I want you to come Saturday morning, June 15,” he said, without any hesitation.
I agreed to go and we shared our contact information. But I thought the date was odd because, at the time, it was quite a ways off. He was very specific and confident, though, that that was the exact date he wanted me to speak on.
June 15, 2002, it turned out, would become much more than just a speaking engagement at a local men’s group. It would be the date God welded together in my mind a tragic event in my extended family with my thoughts on men’s team ministry to widows, single moms, and fatherless children.
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.
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