Best of Cerulean Sanctum

The Church’s Missing Men

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For all intents and purposes, the Christian Church in America is not growing. George Barna’s organization has been on top of this plateau for years, so the numbers are easily verifiable. There are some that might even argue that the Church is slipping because the number of unchurched adults is up from 21% in 1991 to 34% today. Men comprise 55% of the unchurched, a number that is made worse when we consider that men are less than 50% of the population (49.2% according to Census estimates.) Worse yet, only 38% of those who claim to be “born again Christians” are men .

These are disturbing numbers and demand some analysis. Why is the Church so disproportionately female? I believe that a partial answer to this is that most men are overwhelmed by the demands currently being placed on them by our culture in general, and Christian churches and parachurch organizations specifically.

To start, men are getting many messages from their churches (and parachurch organizations) that simply do not line up with realistic expectations of home, family, and work. It would be no stretch of the imagination to think that the average Christian man is asked to…

1. Be the primary—and optimally sole—breadwinner

2. Set aside time for marriage enrichment (planned dates, marriage enrichment classes, and couple getaways)

3. Set aside important daily growth and development time with his children (often extending to homeschooling)

4. Perform other husband-related duties at home

5. Be part of a coed Bible study or small group with his wife

6. Be part of a men’s Bible study or small group

7. Maintain a community presence by being actively involved in his local government or community affairs

8. Maintain a daily Bible reading/study time

9. Devote a meaningful amount of time to prayer and meditation

10. Volunteer at his church

I’m certain most people reading this will agree that this list of 10 accurately reflects the reality portrayed to Christian men as being the “godly ideal.” A culling of the present message of family-oriented Christian ministries from radio, TV, Christian bestselling family-oriented books, and pulpit messages will find these ideals repeatedly reinforced, often with the not-so-hidden message being, “If you do not do all these things—and do them well—you are not fulfilling your role as a Christian man.”

But when we consider the ways in which the Church and families are operating in this country, is this a realistic expectation?

Depending on which survey you read, the average American is spending between 47 and 49 hours a week at work. Of those varying figures, there is one agreement: Americans work more hours every year. As companies further downsize and ask more of their workers, this trend shows no sign of letting up.

There is also countercultural pressure from within churches and parachurch organizations (such as Focus on the Family) to give their imprimatur to households in which the father works outside the home as the sole breadwinner while the mother stays at home with the children, preferably homeschooling. ( And though I cannot find exact figures to support this assertion numerically, my personal experience of more than a quarter century in the Church has been that this is true—and growing more widely accepted as the norm.)

Given these two factors, it can be projected that the average Christian father will spend more and more time working, with less time devoted to family life (or any of the other nine items on the list.) This situation is simply not being addressed by church groups, even as the picture of what constitutes a “good, Christian father” is continually expanded to include more “must do’s.”

What comes of this contradicting message is that the other items on the list suffer—often greatly. Since the 1990’s, the emphasis has been on marriage and family time, and for the most part, Christian men have responded to this favorably. Faced with the fact that Christians, even those claiming to be “born again,” are divorcing at rates equal to their secular counterparts, churches and parachurch organizations have gone into overdrive preaching the message of hearth and home. No sane person would argue against this need.

But something has to give, and I believe that it is the spiritual life of men that is in decline. The move of churches away from traditionally teaching through the pulpit and adult Sunday School classes, instead preferring small home group teaching (often led by less experienced leaders), means that men are getting their Christian Education from less reliable and less focused sources. Small groups often trade off teaching and study with relationship building. While making stronger relational ties is an admirable goal, the horizontal cannot supplant the vertical. Yet increasingly, this is the case.

Forced to carve time for more outward, visible proofs of Christian devotion (those most rewarded by Christian society currently), private Bible study and prayer time are becoming luxuries to many Christian men. For all we are asked to do, though, how can fifteen minutes a day in private prayer and Bible study ever hope to ground us deep in the Lord, able to meet the day’s demands? There simply is no possibility that an overcoming Church, grounded in spiritually vital men, will arise in our lifetimes if this is the extent of our personal devotion. What rushes in to fill the vacuum left behind by the loss of a powerful, manly Christianity with teeth is a gentle, emotional, feminized version that men find lacking. Faced with this standard, men become disenchanted. Well-described in the phenomenally popular Wild at Heart book that is the backbone of nearly every Christian men’s group, the resulting spiritual malaise becomes an increasing source of an angst that seemingly has few answers. John Eldredge claims a solution in his book, but his response—go hunt bear with nothing but a pointy stick—ultimately misses the fact that men are not communing with God in any helpful amount because they are being torn in too many directions.

None of this is lost on men. As they find themselves rushing to pursue every “all-important” Christian requirement placed on them, God Himself becomes an option. Can anything but burnout result? Men outside the church see this burden—who can escape its omnipresence—and decide they don’t need to stack their days with any more requirements, so they take a pass. Or in the cases where they do attempt to “walk the Christian walk,” they find a To-do list, eventually fail at meeting the list’s demands, and drift away.

In the midst of all this activity, the vital relationship with Christ is being eroded. Devoid of the deep, abiding presence of the Spirit, Christianity instead becomes a series of manmade attempts to live and minister. Failure is assured. No wonder that many men find more reassurance in the glow of the television tube. At least it makes no demands and does not judge when nothing more can be given.

In the future, I hope to devote a closer look to what I believe is the only real solution to this problem: rethinking how Christians work. With work occupying so much of our daily existence, is there any question that something will suffer from our increasingly vanishing free time? Unless the church and parachurch are actively working to help men come to grips with their employment strain, they should not continue to tie heavy burdens around men’s neck, burdens they cannot adequately fulfill.

For now, though, the call to churches and parachurch organizations is to understand that too much is being asked and no means is given to ease the strain. At a time when everyone feels harried by life’s “necessities,” it is no surprise that men have weighed the current message of the Church and found it wanting.

Update! A 4/20/05 follow-up to this issue is available: Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men.

Whatever Happened to Sin?

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Long time ago, the Garden: the universe was corrupted by two humans who chose sin over the Almighty. God immediately cursed those two, then gave a promise that sin would be dealt with by a perfect sacrifice.

In short, it used to be about sin.

Christians throughout history understood how pervasive sin was. Knew that it was a ball and chain that kept them in bondage. The whole Reformation started because Luther was overcome by his own sinfulness and was begging for release. Sin killed, then killed some more.

It used to be about sin. The freedom we are to proclaim to the captives is freedom from sin. The ancients understood the ugly stain they could not wash out. Seekers wrestled with sin and fell upon God seeking forgiveness from it. The grace that promises to lead us home was offered freely to us when Christ paid our penalty, the penalty of sin. It used to be about sin. Preachers railed against sin. They understood that conversion came only after people understood the depths of their own depravity. Those preachers brought people to the cross, the place where sins were laid down and forgiven. Those converts knew they were saved because that crushing load of sin was removed. They wept over the release from that oppressive taskmaster.

But in churches today, the message has been changed. It is no longer about sin; it is about what we can get from God. Christianity has become the religion of meeting felt needs. Need your car fixed? We Christians can help with that! No one to pal around with? Hey, let’s get a pickup game of basketball going! Can’t walk the walk? No sense feeling guilty about it!

Many seekers, especially in America, don’t want to hear about sin, so our preachers oblige them by not talking about it. “Too scary, too off-putting to people.” “That message doesn’t work anymore.” “You can’t catch flies with vinegar.” So in the place of the message about the depths of sinfulness we all possess, many churches have adopted a message that says, “You are entitled to special treatment, and God is right there to give you anything you think you need.”

Last year, I heard a presentation advertising small groups within a church. This was a multimedia extravaganza that featured numerous real-life stories of people currently attending the church’s small groups. The clip ran almost five minutes, but when it was all said and done, the name of Jesus had never been mentioned. People talked glowingly about what they got from their small groups, but nothing was ever said about triumphing over sin, getting closer to Christ, understanding the Bible, or any of the traditional Christian issues. Instead, we all heard about going to baseball games with others in the group, having someone bring groceries over in a tough time, and the like.

It’s now all about what we can get. Because of this, few people ever talk about sin anymore. I wonder if seekers ever wrestle with their sinfulness. Considering the dearth of time we all claim today, perhaps others simply cannot devote much mental energy to thinking about their own sin since so much time is commanded in getting felt needs met.

The “new” churches that adhere to this self-centered paradigm wrap their evangelistic efforts around conducting felt need analyses or interpreting neighborhood demographic studies rather than working to show people the depths of their depravity and the person who can release that burden, Jesus. We are on the verge of losing the entire sin perspective as we abandon the very core of why Christ came in favor of making everyone happy, lest they find another, more accommodating church to attend.

Jesus said that if He be lifted up, He would draw all men to Him. Are we lifting Him up and showing Him as the Redeemer and the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world? Or have we reduced the Savior to little more than being a sanctified version of Santa, doling out whatever we ask for in the absent shadow of a missing cross?

Joy unspeakable comes from knowing that we will not have to pay the price for sin because Christ already has. In the midst of our endless desire to have our felt needs met, do we still remember this?

Whatever happened to sin?

Raising Up the Broken-down Things of God

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We need a new vision.

If God is going to shake up his people, it has to happen inside the Church.

Recently, God has shown me that whenever a righteous king took over the thrones of Israel and Judah, two things happened:

1. The heathen idols and temples were torn down.
2. The broken-down things of God were raised up again.

I’ve already talked about tearing down idols. Now we need to think about raising up God’s standards again.

1. God’s Word – We have got to start preaching the inerrancy of Scripture and start getting back to the idea that the Bible interprets the Bible. We need to get preaching and teaching back into the pulpit, and I don’t mean this emphasis on topical preaching that we have so easily fallen into.

Correctly handling the word of God is critical, but in most churches anymore the primary teaching is being performed by people who have little or no biblical training, and certainly cannot put together a systematic theology. Poor discipleship is part of this (see below), but the biggest issue is that the very people who are best trained to teach and preach, pastors, have abandoned expository preaching from a set Bible passage and have moved to topical preaching, leaving the less educated small group leaders to handle teaching passages out of the Bible. This is completely backwards. It is far easier for a “layman” to lead a topical Bible study than an inductive, passage-based one.

The result of this is that few people in the seats have a good overview of how Scripture fits together. It is seen as nothing more than a series of sentences in several books that can be pieced together to say something.

Ironically, pastors believe that their teaching is becoming better and better (90%, according to George Barna), but then look at these positive responses from adults who identified themselves as born-again Christians in a poll by George Barna:

– 68% agreed that the Bible says that God helps those who help themselves.
– 53% said that the Holy Spirit does not exist.
– 47% said that Satan does not exist.
– 31% agreed that good people can earn their way into heaven.
– 30% claim that Jesus died, but was never resurrected physically.
– 24% believe that Jesus committed sins.

Does that sound like people are getting Bible-based teaching and preaching? I don’t think that pastors/preachers should be so high on their own opinions of the quality of their teaching and preaching, if these responses are typical.

2. The Holy Spirit – Without the Holy Spirit, NOTHING we do will work. We will wind up with a sad, man-made “attempt” at church, but will lack all the qualities of the New Testament Church. Having given short shrift to the Spirit, we have substituted clever programs, marketing gimmicks, and a million other tricks to hide the fact that the Spirit isn’t here. So much of the preaching we are getting possesses little or no unction of the Holy Spirit. I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe that the Holy Spirit today is only speaking via three points and a conclusion.

When was the last time you saw someone raised from the dead? Has your shadow fallen on the lame and they are healed? Are you operating in the power of the Spirit? I’ve written elsewhere why the Spirit still works today, but what are we doing to cultivate a Spirit-filled life? Do we believe the Bible when it talks about being filled with the Spirit?

3. Holiness/Counterculture – Christians are called to be the “peculiar people,” but increasingly – due largely to churches’ obsession with cultural relevancy – we look exactly like the world. How then are we to model Christ to a dying, sin-obsessed world if we look more like the world than like Christ? People wonder why we don’t see the miracles of the Book of Acts today, and my simple answer is that we are not willing to live lives unadulterated by the world.

4. Community – People talk about community, but most of us still live like islands. With society showing signs of strain (e.g. – three million American white collar jobs will go overseas by 2005, health care costs are punishing families, and culture is becoming increasingly perverse), we Christians have got to find new ways of pursuing community or else we will find our families being taken down one by one. This is increasingly the case, but the churches are doing little to stop it. In my own church it was noted that the number one request by people seeking prayer was for jobs, yet no program was in place within the church to make that happen. If churches are unable to address these issues with cutting edge community approaches, then people are going to lose heart. The lost can spot hypocrisy a mile away, so if the churches can’t model a community that buffers that community from harm, then we’ll be seen as just another option that doesn’t work in reality.

5. Prayer – Prayer makes things happen. A prayerless church is a powerless church. Increasingly, times of focused prayer are falling prey to harried lives, or have been converted into “practicing the presence of God” – an admirable spiritual discipline, but one that was never supposed to supplant focused prayer time.

6. Discipleship/Commitment – When we ask nothing of people, we get nothing. That many churches are asking little or nothing of the people that attend in order to keep from driving them away, we are creating an underclass of quasi-disciples. Rather than diluting the message of the Gospel, I suggest we ratchet up what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Let the Spirit of God convict, rather dilute the qualities of a disciple in order not to lose people. The road is narrow. Are we preaching that?

7. Revelation of Jesus – Can’t we let Jesus be Jesus? Do we not trust Him to draw people to Himself? The truth is that people want Jesus, we need to reveal Him to people and let the Spirit work. Deep inside people I think they know that all this talk about getting our felt needs met pales in comparison with knowing Jesus. Do we really KNOW Jesus? Not merely ABOUT Him, but Him in all His glory? Pastors, preachers, teachers – show us Jesus. He said Himself that eternal life was knowing Him. Why are we so afraid to present Him undiluted to people? Let’s get back to that.

There’s more, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Church, are we willing to go God’s way or are we going to continue to play “church?”