Ministry To Men

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Let's face it. The American church caters to women. Walk into any typical church today and you will notice some of the following things:

1) Decorative paintings
2) Floral arrangements
3) Love songs to Jesus
4) Flowery furniture and accessories
5) Quilts and banners and bows
6) And other miscellaneous things.

Now, don't misunderstand me, I don't believe these things are bad or that we need to trash all this stuff. What I am saying, is that we are inadvertently repelling men.

Compare the following lyrics of worship songs:

"A mighty fortress is our God! A bulwark never failing." - A Mighty Fortress is Our God

"I'm feeling like the eagle that rises. Flies above the earth and it's troubles." - Abba Father

The first song, written by Martin Luther focuses in on God and applies terms that a man can identify with: Fortress. Bulwark. Strong terms that men can identify with. The second song focuses in on feelings and emotions. Notice the very second word of the song is "feeling" and how that relates to things that are immediately surrounding the song writer. Again, nothing wrong with that, but from a man's perspective he just isn't comfortable singing love songs to Jesus.


That's my personal peeve, and thankfully our worship music at RCC fits the bill, but when I was in college we would always make fun of the brand spankin' new worship songs that would come in. We often made up our own lyrics such as "I want to buy you a rose Jesus".

Anyways, we're missing men in today's church. I used to have a ton of statistics on this matter, but you don't need stats to look around and see that only a few men are coming to church and getting involved.

This was further proven to me during this last church leadership election. Absolutely no man would stand up and be "Chairman of the board" and we only had 1 addition to our elders. But we had about 15 women want to be deaconesses (and power to them!) This isn't just a problem in our church, but nationwide. Men are no longer coming to the church and we need to find a way to get them here. Even better, go out and get them.

Promise Keepers is an excellent program designed to disciple men. More churches need to get involved in this great program. They have an excellent article on this subject that you can read here. They say it a lot better than I can.

How about the Football night bible study. Watch the game, bible study at halftime, finish the game. Complete with pizza and *gasp* beer.

If I didn't know Jesus that would get me to church!

1 comments:

MKB said...

Sounds good to me... Oh... I can't come. :-(