One of the worst pains for church leaders is to create a system, train the people, launch it, walk away, watch it work, then come back to it later and discover it’s gone—vanished!
Where did it all go? Why isn’t this happening? This unfortunate, yet common occurrence is unsettling at best and disastrous at worst. The problem is, it almost always comes down to leadership. Either it’s you (gulp, hard to admit), or it’s the people who said they’d do it, then never followed up to keep it going.
The hard lesson is: nothing just happens.
Everything we do in ministry takes prayer, planning, preparation, and perspiration.
PRAYER
I’ve been a church planter and pastor, yet my main focus in ministry is men, so I’ll use ministry to men as my example.
The first step to launching anything in church, especially a men’s movement, is prayer. As you talk with God, in your prayer you’re able to dedicate the ministry to Him for His purposes and for His Kingdom to thrive. In my example, building up strong men in the church is the goal.
Praying with others, with your various gifts and abilities, and getting in agreement, brings power. God will lead you and whomever is on your team as you prepare to launch the ministry, even if your entire team consists only of your spouse or child. Through prayer and time spent with Him, your heart will be in the right place to begin your plans for ministry.
Prayer also forms intimacy when praying with others. Pray together with your wife. Pray with your team. Pray with the men who will start the ministry to men with you.
Through prayer, you gain camaraderie with the people you are working with and a sense of connection with the people for whom you are preparing ministry. By praying together, you’re saying to your friends, your family, your team, your volunteers: “None of us are bailing. We're all praying together because we're all in this.”
PLANNING
The next step is planning. First, planning means laying out the course and purpose of the ministry. Routinely ask: “Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be?”
Whatever captures and holds your attention shows what direction to take. In ministering to men, having a solid direction draws in men.
PREPARATION
Once you’ve laid out the direction, it’s time to iron out logistics. If you’re ministering to men, where are you discipling them? How many chairs need to be set out? In what formation should they be set? How do you want to conduct the meeting?
These questions matter because they dictate the environment where discipleship happens. When men are comfortable, they are more open to being discipled and discipling others.
PERSPIRATION
When you are in motion, and the ministry is up and running, the next step is perspiration. Put in the sweat to keep what you started going. Methods can change, but it’s important to keep investing in the ministry.
With a ministry to men—perhaps having huge events or many small groups—it can look easy. But real ministry is built on hard work. I know men who, with the vision of transforming men’s lives to become more like Christ, built a ministry by knocking on doors and calling people. They made things happen just by deciding to put in the work and make things happen.
Nothing just happens.
I’ve found that in a great ministry to men, the goal of becoming more like Christ challenges men to work at it. It’s a goal that isn’t telling men what to do, but rather, helping men find their identity and their place in Christ. And when men become mature in Christ, they accept responsibility.
RESULTS
These principles work for every ministry you launch in your church. I’ll go further with my example. When you build a strong ministry to men, men accept responsibility to minister to their wives and children. Once men are “in Christ,” everything else comes into line. Women benefit from the ministry as much as men.
And when men accept responsibility for their church, volunteerism soars and every ministry of the church benefits.
It’s the same all over the world. In a small Indonesian village on the side of a hill, all the women would get together to cart off the trash pile made by the community. This had been the custom for decades. After CMN planted a ministry to men in the community, the village men accepted responsibility.
One day, as the men watched their wives and mothers preparing to cart the trash, they began to ask each other, “Why do we make women do this?” They took responsibility for the trash from then on, built on the idea of honoring and esteeming a their wives and mothers.
It’s a small story for you and me, but for those women, it was huge. It spoke of the love of Christ. Here’s the point—no leader told those men to help their wives. The men learned through the ministry to men to love their wives as Christ loves the church. Then, with transformed minds and hearts, their actions followed.
A U.S. pastor friend called me recently. “I’ve never had this happen before,” he said, “but yesterday after service, some woman stopped me in the hallway at church and said, ‘What have you done to my husband? ‘He’s just not the same man. He’s a good man now. I can hardly believe it. Thank you!”
Through prayer, planning, preparation and perspiration, you can have strong ministries in the local church. When you do ministry to men with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, you can build a strong men’s movement that transforms men, changes families, strengthens the church, and extends the kingdom of heaven.
Dr. Paul Louis Cole, president of the Christian Men’s Network, is a church planter and former pastor who conducts a podcast, BraveMen, and has a weekly Brave Men Motivational for men and men’s leaders.
Listen to the BraveMen podcast.
Subscribe to the BraveMen Motivational.
MajoringInMen.com is a FREE foundational online course developed from more than forty years of study. It is designed to build a powerful men's movement in the local church and is brought to you by the most widely used men's discipleship resource in the world.
Christian Men's Network is a ministry birthed in 1977 by a pastor, Edwin Louis Cole, out of the local church, and continues to be presided over by pastors and to operate locally under the auspices of local churches.
To learn more about resources for building strong men in your church, visit Christian Men's Network at www.cmn.men
