Men's Ministry is Pathetic

I have been kicking this topic around for a while now. I've mentioned it to some friends and they are universally in agreement. So here goes.
Men's Ministry is pathetic. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C
Right out of the gate, let me be clear about one thing; I am currently not a member or regular attender of any church. So this rant is not aimed at one church men's group. It's the cumulative observations of 40 years of church attendance, with about 25 of those years involved in some way, with whatever passed as a men's ministry at whichever church I was attending at the moment. Now for the record, I am not a church hopper. Not counting the years I was a resident student at Liberty University and attended TRBC, I have been a member of only four churches in forty years of Christianity. So I am a pretty solid attender who tends to put down roots. On the one hand this means I have not experienced very many different men's ministries. On the other it means I don't let petty things run me off easily and so I tend to overlook most minor shortcomings.
That said...I have to state...men's ministry is pathetic.
Let me explain.
Men's ministry and women's ministry are two very very different things. They have entirely different aims and goals and approaches. Let me sum them up for you.
Women's ministry is about;
     *It's hard work being a mom
     *It's hard work being a wife
     *It's hard work being a godly woman
     *My butt is big / my boobs have started to droop / my kids irritate me / my husband sucks as a spiritual leader/ I have crows feet.
     * I wish I'd finished college and become a professional and had a life outside these ungrateful kids and this spiritually lame husband
     * In my heart I know I was called to ministry and the entire men-dominated religious establishment is against the idea. Except for Beth Moore. Because Beth Moore is too shrill for them to put in her place and besides...she makes a truckload of money for the SBC who owns Lifeway bookstores.
    Therefore...in light of the above truths, women's ministry is all about helping women cope with the innate difficulties of simply being a women with all that stuff going on. The implied message is "You are doing it all so well. If only your husband was a better man of God"
Conversely; Men's ministry is about;
      * You suck as a spiritual leader
      * You are selfish
      * You aren't manly enough. (Okay actually they never say that. because most men's ministry leaders are barely men themselves.)
      * You are too testosterone laden. Too quick to hunt and fish and burp in public.
      * You are a lousy husband / father / friend / church member / employee / employer
      * You are not "Christlike" (a catch-all phrase that is open to definition depending on the crowd and can mean anything the speaker wants it to mean.)
Basically, men's ministry is built on the premise that whatever it is you are doing in your life, your job, your home, your church, your bedroom, your garage and behind the wheel of your car...you are doing it WRONG.
Where women's ministry is all about helping women "cope" with just being a woman; Men's ministry is all about making you feel awful for even being a man.
Therefore; I hate men's ministry. I hate it. I know it's a strong word, but I can't use obscenities here.
I hate it because it is always...always taught by some wimpy, waxed-lipped metrosexual guy with perfect hair. A guy who has never had a problem in his entire life. A guy whose biggest failure in life was not remembering that his wife was gluten free when he was making her those crepes on day one of their anniversary month celebration.
They always teach the same trifling lessons. Husbandship as viewed in Ephesians. Loving our wives as Christ loved the church. Not falling for the sin of David. Avoiding porn. Watching our temper while we drive.
They always latch on to the same tired themes. Let's have a bonfire and cook hamburgers! Yippee Ky-ay!
Let's have a golf tournament this summer. Let's have a workday at the home of the single mom down the street.
Zzzzzzzzzzz
How about we host our own MMA tournament? How about we get together and go to a Pro Wrestling show or a boxing match? How about we forgo hamburgers / hot dogs / brats and eat a salad now and then?

More than anything...how about we stop pretending.

How about we stop pretending that we have the easier job in the marriage? (It's equally hard to be married...man or women)
How about we stop pretending that nobody in our midst is hurting, cries tears that nobody sees, feels like a failure or has given up hope?
How about we throw out the phony, perfect leaders that somehow got stuck with us and we with them, and let someone run a men's group who has some dirt under his nails and smells like sweat and sawdust.
How about a man teaches a few lessons about divorce, and single fatherhood, and failure, and loneliness, and broken dreams, and the fears of being a dad, and a husband.
How about we stop reading every book on the market written by some guy we'll never meet, and start teaching ourselves real honest-to-God Apologetics, and Bible study techniques, and we start giving all the real men in our midst the opportunity to teach the other real men in our midst.
How about we talk about how very hard and how very scary it is to try to live like Paul charged us with living in Ephesians. How hard it is to love our wives...or anyone...as Christ loved the Church. How scary and risky it is to "give ourselves for them".
How about we discuss the real hurts and pains in our lives and team up with other men who feel the same way and pray prayers that pour out of broken, frail hearts instead of spiritual John Waynes. How about we stop with the Jedi Mind tricks of convincing each other to simply grab the latest trends in Christendom, and we get back to the icy headwaters of real, Biblical Christianity?
I have been holding this in since I started re-editing my divorced dads book (Sometimes Daddies Cry) and realizing how little men's groups really deeply care for hurting men. How they avoid divorced men like the plague. How they don't know the first thing about what a divorced dad feels and they don't want to know.
It makes me mad. Because men are slipping through the cracks each day and the men's "pastor" merely bids them adieu.
Men's ministry is an afterthought in the emasculated church of today. And everyone is paying for it. Men's ministry that makes you apologize for being a man does a disservice to men...and women...who hope to find a biblical example of a godly man only to discover that he has been neutered and covered over. Their frustration can't be hidden forever and it ends up showing itself in the fact that the divorce rate is as high or higher in churches, than out of church.
Men are so confused. Their God-given "wiring" tells them to do and say and act one way. The perfect-coiffed pretty-boy men's pastor tells him all that stuff is wrong, and he needs to be a soft, mushy wimp who sits down to pee.
Women are "wired" by the same God, and their wiring desires something God engineered. The very thing that modern men's ministry seeks to eliminate.
So men go, they eat, they exchange business cards and they go home bamfoozled and confused.
And if they were hurting when they got there, they leave even more hurting. Because underneath it all...hurting is not allowed.
Because Men's Ministry is Pathetic.

Gimme That Old Time Religion--Conclusion...You Need Jesus

I suppose if I thought about it long enough I could come up with another dozen or so defining items about "Old Time Religion". But it would become extraneous at some point. I think I covered the items I wanted to cover. Except one. It's been a few days since I wrote and it's given me time to contemplate. And in my contemplation I came up with one more item. You'd think this one would be a given, and an assumed part of even the most contemporary Faith gatherings today, but it's not...and that's the real problem.

It's Jesus.

When I was a boy, growing up in church, (for the record, I'm 49...I was a boy growing up in church in the 70's and early 80's) Jesus was the central figure. Jesus was the Son of God. The Savior. The Sacrifice, The Beloved Son. The Returning King. I started attending that church in 1973. I was almost 10 years old. I will tell you without blinking that during the roughly 15 years I attended that church--and the Christian School they operated--I learned real, honest to goodness Theology.

I learned that Jesus was God Incarnate. Very God of Very God. I couldn't fully explain it then, and I can only explain it a little better now, after graduating with a Bachelors in Religion. But I knew He was totally God and totally man. He was Holy. He was deity.

I learned that Jesus was the only way to Heaven. The only means of salvation. The only path to a relationship with God. There were not a lot of other paths. Jesus was not an inclusivist. Nor was I. Nor am I now.

I learned that there was a literal hell. Some of the descriptives were symbolic or metaphoric, but Hell is real and what makes it terrifying is not the torture described in the Bible. It's not the pain or the fire (which some claim does not exist...and I understand their claims) What makes Hell so terrifying and awful and frightening is that it is the one place in the universe from which God has totally withdrawn Himself, His Grace, His Mercy and His influence on the actions of men and the spirit world. If we think our society has been declining in recent years, and if we (rightly) make the correlation between the absence of a recognition of God in our society to that decline...imagine a world where nothing holds back the evil hearts of men. Imagine a place where God's Grace, Holiness, Mercy, Image, and Presence are totally withdrawn, and the evil in the heart of man is unbridled. That...is Hell.

I learned that Jesus loved us so much that He died a horrible, painful, unimaginable death. He did this willingly, and purposefully. It wasn't a tragic ending that caught Him by surprise. He wasn't a great teacher who got caught in the crossfire of the Jewish Religious Establishment and the Roman Empire.

I learned that Jesus made the claim about Himself, "I am THE way THE truth and THE life. NO MAN comes to the Father unless they come through me!" (John 14:6) I learned that God the Father established this truth and verified it and holds this true. He has not changed His mind. He has not remodeled the path and made it wider.

I learned that Jesus was the "Soon Coming King". His return is imminent and He is not coming as a Lamb this time. He is coming as a conqueror. He is coming to do terrible business with those who reject Him and stand against Him.

More than anything...I learned that Jesus was the only means of change, of redemption, of renewal, of rest and rejuvenation. Not social platforms, not "engagement" (a term that makes me throw up in my mouth a little) not out-of-sequence discipleship where you skip over the head-on-collision moment with Jesus and get right into the training part and hope that somehow the soul catches on to what is missing. He supersedes "equipping" people who barely know Him. He is far more glorious and majestic than the weak worded worship songs that speak of Him like He is a teen heartthrob.

Jesus was and is God in human skin. And He was not to be trifled with. He was gentle to those who needed gentleness...because they were already broken. But He was tough as nails and unbending in the truth of who He was. He never watered down the message. He never told the sinners, "It's okay...just try harder next time". He gently told them "Stop trying! You can't do this...you need me!" At this news the broken soul fell down before him and declared themselves unworthy. There was a sorrowful, repentant moment where they bowed their hearts for certain and their knees quite often. They had what has become my favorite term...a head-on-collision with the Christ of God. They did not come slowly to a crossroads so much as they smashed into a cross. They climbed from the wreckage realizing that they could not take one more step without making a lifetime, permanent decision to accept or reject this man. This bloodied, beaten, carved-like-a-side-of-beef man who claimed to be God. They had no options for negotiation. They could not hold up Buddha or Mohammad, or Vishnu, or Confucius or Freud, or Kant, or Bill Nye the Science guy an equal to this man they stood face to face with, or a way to refute His claims. It was Jesus or NO ONE.

That is the basis of the theology I was raised with. Yes...a lot of ancillary, unnecessary, personal preferences were included and they morphed from conviction to doctrine. But they never changed the essence. They never wavered from the belief that "Jesus is the Answer, for the world today, above Him there's no other. For Jesus is The Way"

Today's Gospel has moved far afield from that belief. On the far side of the spectrum lie (pun intended) the Emergents and their nonsense, Non-Theology. Preaching a barely necessary Jesus to an already-good-enough crowd. Church is a social gathering and a place to remember liturgy or listen to Tom Petty suddenly sanctified as Sacred Music, because it makes something twinge in our hearts. So does a Monet, but we don't hang one in the sanctuary and genuflect to it.

The Emergent Jesus is unnecessary because they have done away with Hell. To get to that fallacy they had to do away with inerrancy. From there...you have a religion of your own creation.

The less-than-Emergent "Contemporaries" are slightly better. They believe in Salvation. They believe in an inerrant scripture and a necessary experience with Jesus. They just don't believe you have to do that first. They spend weeks, months, or even years on social gospel issues or Christian-life Self Improvement. How to wear your armor better or be a better tither, or pray more. But they don't begin their doctrine with the head-on-collision with Jesus that is so clearly depicted in the Gospels. As best I can determine, they teach far more than they preach. As best as I can deduce, they build their evangelistic vision on the premise that "If we teach from the pulpit as if everyone listening is already a Christian, the ones who aren't will someday see some magical difference between themselves and the others in the church and they'll simply bow their heads at that moment and accept Jesus and have their salvation moment. But we don't "do" altar calls and we don't make clear cut distinctions between "saved" and "lost" because we don't want folks getting uncomfortable and leaving (with their checkbooks). Jesus in this genre has been rendered a necessary disturbance. "Please go somewhere and get saved and then come join our "fellowship" " (And bring your checkbook)

The fundie Jesus is still out there. Angry and miserable and hating us all for what we made Him endure. But that is fading and the inroads made by the grace teachings of Brennan Manning and Chuck Swindoll, to name a few, have quieted that storm quite a bit.

But the fact is that Jesus has been mollified.  The modernists have neutered Him where His claims to exclusivity are concerned. They have created a dozen paths to replace His claim as the only way. They have removed Hell, claiming that  loving God would not do such a thing. If He were merely loving perhaps, but He is also Holy. And He is Just. And a Holy, Just, God can...and must...render judgment, and consequence for sin. He may not surrender any of His attributes or He ceases to be God. He lovingly provided an escape mechanism through Jesus' work on the Cross, but for that to be an authentic substitutionary sacrifice it must be willingly accepted. Not granted in a random manner to all...whether they ask or not.

They have removed the head-on-collision moment with Jesus and replaced it with a high five. A group hug with Buddha, Mohammad, Confuscious, Vishnu, Crystals, Stars, moon gods, nature and...for good measure...Carl Sagan. Nobody wins unless we all win, so they rewrote the rules and decided we all win. The only way to achieve that was to denigrate the authority of God Himself and violate the Person and Deity and Exclusivity of Jesus Christ.

I certainly didn't learn this in the Baptist Church I grew up in. Where Old Time Religion was taught...not merely preached. Where wreckage was strewn from those collisions, but rescue was offered at the altar. Where stories of the impact of that collision were told through tears and with great passion. And where we believed so much in what had happened to us through the work of the Cross that we told others at every chance.

They were far from perfect. But 30 years later I realize they were far closer than I gave them credit. Because people came there seeking, and seldom left wondering where the answer was.  If they walked out of that building after 90 minutes, and they didn't know absolutely that they needed Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God...they did so willingly, and could no longer claim ignorance.

Methods could be improved. That is eternally true. But the message cannot be improved upon. It doesn't need to be.

As long as the Message is Jesus.