What Men Really Need From the Church

And welcome back to ClearCast. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman, here with Pastor Dave and my producer, Martin, and special guest, Timothy Deaton. And so we've been talking about how we started with the problem of why men aren't interested in church, and then we moved to how to engage men in the church through the worship service and what that should look like. And then we talked about the—last time we talked about the marks of the church and how— sacraments and discipline and preaching can be an incredibly important tool to engage men and so today we want to talk about how to get men to participate and what kind of a culture would induce men to participate in the church and so pastor dave how do we get people men involved on a church life day-to-day level yeah so i mean May go without saying, but we spent a lot of time talking about worship in the last two episodes. And I really do think that's the first thing that has to, that's going to be the first place you see engagement or involvement, meaningful involvement. You can get a man to come to men's group or you can get a man to come to a cookout or an axe throwing or whatever, you know, guy thing. But in terms of him growing, becoming online and beginning to grow.

Those other things may be the entry points, but worship is going to become preeminent in terms of his involvement. He's not going to be able to grow ultimately into a godly Christian man and find the value in it if worship isn't at the top of his list. Okay, so yeah, we want to start with worship. It's important. As a foundational building block. But if we're going to go beyond worship and the expectation that he's going to be in church, what else would you want to emphasize? Well, if you came back to the sort of ideas around men's ministry right now, there's – it's things like – I would categorize it as being appearance over substance.

It would be what do men in society commune over? Sports, beer, cigars, more recently weightlifting, maybe like niche theology points or something. Maybe it's grilling or smoking meat. There's like, these are the man things that men do. And so the church says, well, I think if we're going to reach men, we need to engage them on this level. I'm not opposed necessarily to any one of those things as being always just bad, but they're shallow. If the best conversation you can have with a guy is about this IPA versus that one, that's pretty shallow and entirely inconsequential when it comes to his spiritual condition and growth.

And the same could be said about sports or weights or any of these other things. Like weightlifting muscles are fake muscles because they have no purpose. If a guy's a brick mason or he goes out and he gets these giant hands and forearms and shoulders, then he got them honestly. He got them by work and they're real muscles that get used. But if they just get – it's like what are we engaging a man about? If we're engaging him about his workout routine and his diet, it's – You can talk to any old buddy about that. You don't have to be a Christian to talk about that and engage on that. But spiritual things generally are substantive and are prioritized substance over appearance. I think that's what's important. I was thinking about an analogy or sort of an example of men doing this. I think if you were to compare men and women, women would care a lot about the appearance of a thing.

And that's intrinsic to their nature. They care about that stuff. Men care, can give on appearance for the substance. We want to know the function. We want to know that it works. And so when the example is like a hot rod, if guys are into racing or they're into cars, they're going to care way more about the performance of the engine and the type of transmission and what kind of cams you've got in the engine and what type of exhaust and what kind of horsepower are you producing. And if you've got all of that stuff dialed in and it's excellent, but... You've got it in a car that's got some bondo on the body and maybe there's a crack across the windshield or there's a dent in the bumper. They don't care. They don't care. They're like, that car's awesome. And the reason is because it's fast. It's actually fast. You can get Mustangs that have six cylinders in them that are not fast. They're economical. And it's like, who buys a Mustang because they want fuel economy? Girls do, actually.

That's who buys six-cylinder Mustangs. But guys want all the – we want the go-fast juice. We want it to – we care about the substance of the thing. The technical term, the go-fast juice. The go-fast juice, that's right. We want turbos and things that whine and whiz when you step on the gas pedal. And if it's inside of a little bit of rust, that's acceptable. So how does a church build out a substantive culture? Yeah, so – Leave aside the appearance of it and go for substance. What's the substance? Well, we've been talking about it here and there sort of along the way. Men want discipleship. They want directness. They want to be told yes and no, and particularly about themselves, about their life. And so I think you do have to push them. You do have to tell them there's areas that they need to grow and they need to improve, and they need to be told why it's important.

And what the consequences of them doing it or not will end up being. And I think also they need to know whether you'll be pleased with them if they don't do it. Meaning you expect them to listen to you. The pastor or an elder, an older, whoever's doing the work, that he's not just giving take it or leave it advice. He expects you to listen to him because he loves you. And young men seem to appreciate that, though it can hurt. In the moment, they go away and they say, I think that guy loves me. I think he wants me to love God. Okay, I'm going to give it a shot. The subtext to some of this, Pastor Dave, would you say that some of it, if you asked a lot of guys, maybe this isn't what they would say. Okay. So if you said, what do you want? It would like, I want somebody to, but the proof is in the results, right? Sometimes we realize what we actually want by the way we respond to things. Yeah. I mean, we want and we want and we want.

But it's like when Scripture says that beauty is fading, but a prudent wife is from the Lord. Well, every man wants a beautiful wife, but he needs a prudent wife. And what he hopes is he'll just get it all, and it'll all be fine, and the beauty won't fade either. But as the years and decades go by, what he needs is a prudent wife. And he'd say, you know what, there's a lot of eye candy. That's not good. Not going to be a good wife, not going to be a good mother. And so when I'm saying like, what do men want? I'm saying you could take sales as an analogy. There are certain approaches to sales. What I find that to be the most effective approach to sales is that the salesman actually cares about the person they're serving and that sometimes they'll say that thing you want is not going to meet your needs the best. Actually, this cheaper thing or this thing that our competitor sells would be better for you.

That that's actually how they will win a long-term customer, even if they don't make the sale right then. And if they have a wise boss, their boss will value that and not punish them for it. Because they realize this is a long-term game and you're creating a trust that's valuable. The customer came in thinking they wanted something or that they needed something. Then they were told, no, that's not what you need. You need this. You're wasting your money on that or whatever the case may be. that that's actually the best sales. You can have all of the marketing. You can have all of the appearance. You can have all the fancy stuff. But if you don't have people who care about the ones buying the product from you, you're cutting across the grain. And so the same in the churches. Well, are men going to come and say, yeah, every week, could you please tell me two or three things that I'm failing at and that I can improve in? And would you follow up in the middle of the week to make sure that I'm not still a big fat loser?

Like, no man has ever come in and asked that type of question. But what they come away with is that when a man does take time and say something about their children's behavior or their wife's countenance or whatever it is that it's observed, they go, so he's watching and he's paying attention and he cares about me. And probably what he's pointing out is not lost on the man who's having it pointed out to him. His kids are unruly. He knows that. And he can either get upset at the guy for pointing it out and saying, hey, there's work here. But over time, you want that young man that you will be thankful for. And he'll say, this guy is not trying to grind me into the ground. And a lot of that has to do actually with how he's approached. If you come and you're just like, well, you're screwing this up. You're a failure. You should know better by now. I've told you before. That's not.

That's not the message entirely. Listen, this is a problem and it's your responsibility. And I'm convinced that God, because God gave you that child or gave you this wife or put you at that job or whatever the circumstances are, you say, I know that God puts you in that situation. And so I know that he will help you be faithful in serving him in that situation. That's my assumption coming into this. So I'm not trying to tell you something I think is impossible because with God, all things are possible. I'm telling you that it's necessary, though, and that you shouldn't neglect it. And let me know if I can help you. If you have questions, if you have insecurities or fears, that's what I'm here for. Come talk to me. Let me know. Yeah, I think that's a big key of like when you talk about if you ask a man what he wants and then like you think about the contrast of that versus what he actually wants, like what he would tell you.

in terms of encouragement, is he would want to be told that he's doing well. But what he actually wants is for someone to know him well enough to see his failures and then to address those failures in a way that gives him hope. Yeah, and I don't think you can undersell that in dealing with men, especially young men. Young men are weak. Yeah. But if they're aware that they're weak, they hide it. But I think a lot of young men are just unaware that they're weak. And so there's a lot of insecurity that goes along with that. And whether that's from not having a dad or having an overbearing mom or just a temperament of personality in them, that if we presume that there's a bunch of stress there and that you can push them as hard as...

your frustration might want to push them, you can push them away. And Paul in his, I believe it was with the Thessalonians, he reminds him, he says, you remember how we proved to be as nursing mothers to you, how you became very dear to us. It's very, I mean, he's describing his work as a man, as an apostle, as a leader in the church, as the work of a nursing mother, tenderly caring for her child. And he says, that's how we were. Now, does that mean that he didn't tell the Thessalonians that they had sins they needed to repent of? Well, no, he did tell them that quite clearly. But he also communicated his love and affection for them. And I think that that's something that's absolutely essential in working with men is that they're not just a project to be worked on. They're not just in the shop to get fixed, but that there is.

There are other men who actually love them, want good things for them, and want to point them in the right direction, but who are not willing or able to do the work for them. And who will follow up if they're not doing their work, whatever that happens to be. So I don't think we can discount the necessity of encouragement. We talked in episode one about... about Mother's Day and Father's Day sermons. And I said, you know, it'd be nice if a little bit of the encouragement for Mother's Day sermons showed up in the Father's Day sermons, the Man Up sermons. And I'm just coming back to that now and saying that is an essential part of ministering to men. If you ignore their weaknesses, they won't bind themselves to you. If you grind them into the ground, they won't bind themselves to you. If you love them and correct them and hug them and...

and encourage them, they'll follow you anywhere. And so those things go together. And I think that it's a hard concept for younger men, especially ones without fathers, to understand that loving men, if you want men to come to your church, you have to love men. Think of the people groups that you struggle to get along with or connect with or like that aren't men or women, but maybe there's a racial component or a socioeconomic component. What is in your heart when they come? You're like, oh, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. You're making me uncomfortable. You're saying weird things. You're acting out of order for how things go here. Well, all of that culminates in them realizing somehow that they're not really loved here because nobody's engaged with them. No one came and talked to them or whatever. They realize it. Well, the same is true of men. If they don't know that you love them.

They're much less likely to come. They're much less likely to listen. And I think that's maybe a way to articulate the problem is that I don't think the church loves men, but they see men as a liability. What a problem to be matched. Yeah. And I don't think that that's – I'm convinced that that is wicked and sinful. Men – because God made men and he declared it very good. man and woman together, both in the garden, very good. We should not take up a position that despises something that God made and declared very good. Now it's marred by sin, both men and women together, and yet we still bear the image of God and are still called to be shepherded and loved and ministered to. Jesus bore with the prostitutes and he bore with the tax collectors and the sinners and the lame and all this other stuff. And so he didn't look at them and go, oh, not you again.

oh, you're going to come in here and cause a problem. Something I think about a lot with what you're talking about is we've talked on past episodes about how we think there are real problems with the manosphere. But if you want to talk about someone who loves men, Jordan Peterson loves men. And you can see it all over him when he talks. And so I think when pastors are concerned about the influence of somebody like Peterson who has... has his problems. He's basically an old-school theological liberal. We should think about if there's more we could do to love men the way that he does, and that that might be compelling to people, and that, like, maybe there's something that he's being drawn to, or that he's drawing people to him in that way. Like, not all goodness, but there's something there. I mean, I'll go so far. I do agree that Jordan Peterson has a sincere concern.

And I don't think, at least when he started out, I don't think he has started out to build his own kingdom. I think he started out looking around and saying, this is screwed up. And I'm going to say it's screwed up. And he found an audience where he wasn't blaming everyone, but he also wasn't saying you're fine the way you are. And so in a general sense, if that's what you mean by love, then yeah, I agree. There are a lot of things missing and he's changed and he's become cynical over the years. But yes, when you love somebody, they know it. It's like, you don't have to tell. I mean, you can tell them, but they realize that you have concern and care for them. And even wicked fathers know how to give good gifts to their children. And the reason is because they love them and they're concerned for them. And if the church is like, well, you're a liability and you're only welcome at the family dinner, as long as you mind your P's and Q's, you don't cause any problems and you don't do anything that's

That's outside of the acceptable boundaries of this place. Then they come away going, well, this is just not a place for me. I'll go somewhere where I am accepted and allowed to interact and to engage. Dave, you commented, you said earlier, just a few minutes ago, you said that they need to, that you can say you love them, but it's more than just that. I agree. But what you seem to be doing, in my opinion. You're almost short selling the fact that the one of the weirdest things at our church, weirder than the fact that we have confession of sin, the weirder than the fact we kneel, the fact that our elders, whenever I get off the phone with you or with Eric, when we say goodbye, you guys always tell us you love us. That's true. Almost without fail. And I think it could feel almost like somebody could say, well, it's just like a routine, but that, that genuine expression of love is in a lot of ways, it's the necessary ingredient to being able to help us. Yeah. And affection. I would say the men of our church also, and we haven't mentioned it, but are affectionate with each other. Hugs, not like just, yeah, bro, not a bro hug, but like a real hug. It's just common. And there are some men who kind of bristle at it and we all just kind of chuckle and hug them anyway.

And over time, they get used to it. But that's sweet. One of the other things that I think is important for engaging men is they have to be given work. If you want men to come to church, they have to have something to do there. If it's just like, just come and just sit, we don't need you for anything. We don't rely on you. Well, if you don't rely on him for anything, you shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't rely on you for much either. So you give them work to do. What's the work to do? I don't know. That's the elders and the pastors and the small group leaders and the older men's job to give them work to do. We showed up to record this morning and I pull in the driveway at 7.15 and there's already a car here. And I'm like, whose car is that? And I'm like, oh, that's the Myers kids.

I'm like, what are the Myers-Van doing here? Well, two or three of their boys are here. They're cleaning the church. They're getting it ready for Sunday. They're running the floor buffer, which is a ton of fun. And they're mopping and they're vacuuming and they're cleaning the glass and taking the trash out and doing all this stuff. It seems menial. It's like, well, what kind of privilege is that? And I'm like, that's a privilege. That's a privilege. Because it's a blessing. It's a privilege because you get to be a blessing to other people. And it's especially sweet because nobody knows who did it. They're just thankful that there's paper towel in the paper towel holder and that the trash isn't overflowing and that all the dirt or whatever that's been tracked on the floor has been cleaned up. And someone went through the sanctuary and threw away last week's bulletins and pens and caps and whatever else was left laying around. That work happens. Nobody sees it, but it's important. It's the kind of work, if it's not done, you'll notice.

Because when you show up and it's like, there's no paper towels in the paper towel holder, it's a problem. And so the work does matter. And our previous, before we bought this building, we rented at a school. And it was a, we had a funny name for it. It was a, we called it the Jim Jewary or the Sanctionasium. And we settled on the Sanctionasium because it had a big stage and it was where they would have assemblies. But they also had their lunch in there. And when we showed up, On Sunday mornings, we could keep our stuff on site, but there were 40 of the big giant folding middle school tables that seat 10 people. 40 of them set up in this room and each of them had 10 chairs at them and we had to move all of it. And then we had to set up worship. Like we had to put our platform up and we had to run our sound equipment and we had to set up enough chairs for our people.

and we had to set up the nursery rooms, and we had to put the sign out front. And there was a ton of work. And then when we were done, we had to put it all back. It was an incredible amount of work. And so we organized, I didn't, one of our elders did, a schedule. And the men who came in to do that came in like an hour, hour and a half before anybody else showed up, because it took that long for three men to come in and do all of this work. And it was the sweetest time of ministry and fellowship for those men. They loved it. They looked forward to it. They would, different teams would create competition. Like, well, we got it done in 45 minutes. Well, we got it, you know, and well, yeah, it took us 47 minutes, but he was 15 minutes late. So, and it was, they loved it. And when we moved into a building where we've got a sanctuary and our chairs stay set up and sound and all of that, they missed it. And it was one of the concerns that we had is that was like the men's

This was the work. Every man was on the ushers. You had your setup crew, your weeks, and you had to be there because if somebody didn't show up, it wasn't going to be ready. It was high commitment. It was high importance, and the men thrived under it. And the sons of the men who would come, they'd bring their kids, and their kids would run around, and they'd push the chairs on the carts, and they were learning to serve the church. And it was just a delight. And what I would tell them is I'd say, and this wasn't original me, someone else told me this in terms of helping people understand the value of their work. He says, listen, if you're ever wondering whether this work is important, whatever section of chairs you set up this morning, I want you to look at all the people who are sitting in those chairs and know that every one of them is a beneficiary of your love and your service. They don't know that you did it, so they don't know to say, to come to you and tell you thank you, but they're the beneficiaries of it.

And it's important work because they would not have anywhere to sit if you hadn't done your work and made it look nice. Didn't just throw it all together last minute. And so I really do think you have to give men work. And I would say it's actually good to start by giving them humble work. Cleaning is a really good place to start because it's low entry. It's not hard. Can you run a vacuum? Do you know how a mop works? Can you use a spray bottle and some paper towels to clean off the mirrors and the windows? Can you take the trash out and put a new bag in? It's pretty simple stuff. You start there. And then as men grow beyond that, there's always more work to do. There's usher's work. There's workday's work. There's ride coordinator work. There's meal coordination. There's repairs around the building that don't wait until a workday. Hey, that light fixture broke. Hey, this doorknob doesn't work anymore. There's all kinds of stuff. And it's like you say, hey, can you help?

Can you help with this? Will you come in and help me? Thank you. You buy him lunch and thank him. Men thrive on that stuff. He loved that stuff. When we bought this building, the whole first year of our men's group, where any of you, I mean, I know you weren't here for that. Tim was here. The whole first year, we didn't have a Bible study. We never cracked our Bibles open. We prayed. What we did is we came every other Wednesday night for an hour and a half, scheduled an hour and a half. Oftentimes, people stayed until it was dark. And we broke up into teams and we just worked on maintenance issues in the building. Clean this. Throw that away. Recaulk that. Replace this thing. Go through and change all of the light bulbs and the ballasts that are burned out throughout the whole building. There are hundreds of light fixtures in this building. We had one week where the library we had inherited in this building was full of like Creflo Dollar and Benny Hinn.

And we were like, I don't think we want this in our church library. And so what we did, we had a dumpster out back where the trash went, and we started a rotation of wheelbarrows of bad books. And we just wheeled them out to the dumpster and threw them away. And we had a crew who was supposed to evaluate every book, hundreds and hundreds of books, of whether we wanted to keep them or not. And if we didn't want them, we'd throw them in the wheelbarrow. And then the kids would wheel the wheelbarrow out, and then they'd throw them all in the dumpster. They loved it. They loved it. And the guys had come, they'd never cocked anything in their lives, and they'd get cocked everywhere, all over them. And it was just a delight. It was just such so much fun. And so you have to give men work, and you have to lead them in it. I think finally, if you really want men to just plug in and settle into the church, the addition to giving them work is that you have to give them authority.

Not just work to do, but then you have to start to, as they're excelling and if they're showing potential and their commitments are growing, then you give them work that they're in charge of. Not just, hey, can you be one of the cleaning crew guys, but can you be in charge of the cleaning crew guys? Can you organize the schedule? Can you train the new people? Can you figure out what to do when somebody is absent? And didn't find a replacement. Or can you correct them if they just aren't doing part of their job? Can you be in charge of that? Can you run the workday? And here's what will happen when you give men those responsibilities. What do you think happens to them? They fail. They fail. They fail. And when they fail, it's imperative that you not take the responsibility away.

Because they want to. That's not what we all want to do when we fail. We're like, well, I just don't want to do that work anymore. I'm not good at it. And if the church is wise, they'll say, no, we need you to do this work. And you screwed it up. And we're all still here alive and breathing. It's okay. Don't do it again. But the one thing you may not do is walk away from the work. Because we need you to do it. Because if you don't do it, then somebody else is going to have to do it. And they're busy doing other things. And so you give them the responsibility. You give them the authority to say yes and to say no.

If you want them to grow in maturity and to plug in, they have to become more and more essential to the goings on. Their commitment levels will go up. They'll say, oh, okay. Far from being a place where I come and just receive. If I come and when I come, they go, I got to be there on time and I got to do this and I need to be preparing for that because if I don't, I'm going to fail. And if I fail, then the men who love me are going to come point out my failures. And that's not fun. And then they're going to expect me to carry on in the work. And really, that's the work that fathers do with sons, but it's the work that church fathers do with their church sons, so to speak. It's really sweet. Men will get involved in that. And then if you want to go axe throwing or if you want to go go-karting or whatever fun things, if you guys want to get together and grill brats and have your fancy beer,

Great. Do that. That's great. That's a nice extra if you get people who are interested in it. We've got guys that get together and we have like a co-ed book club and then there's a men's book club. You used to read history books, now you're reading Calvin? Both. They're both still going. Okay, so there's two of them. And these are the theology kind of geeks that like... that like the niche theology and they like to read. So they're reading history books and they get together and they talk about it and they just started at Calvin's Institute's reading. So they get together and they talk about it and then they eat pancakes and it's just very sweet. And it builds the fellowship and the camaraderie and the commitment of the men. And it also gets work done and they grow as a result of it. And so it's not flashy. I mean, oh.

I think what you should do is start a Calvin's Institute's reading group. If you want men in your church to get engaged, that's what you should do. It's like, huh? I'm like, well, it's working good for us, for the few men who are interested in it. That's their itch that needs to be scratched, and it is something that they'll benefit from, and they'll commit to it. Absolutely, yeah, do that for them. So this is how you get, you love men. That's how you get men engaged in your church. You provide work for them to do. You expect them to do it well. You correct them when they don't. You encourage them along the way. And you rely. You come to rely on them. They become your sons, so you rely on them.