When was the last time that there were more men interested in Christianity than women? Not in the early church; not in the medieval church; not in the 18th century revivals; certainly not in the 20th century. The real question is whether this has even happened before. In all my travels, from Egypt to Argentina, I’ve always noted the same thing in churches: there are more women than men. The current rise in religious interest among men may not be unique, but it is anomalous.
We should infer something from this: God is doing something extraordinary at the moment. We should also feel compelled to act. Unusual times mean unusual opportunities.
But before jump-starting new initiatives, a problem to be confronted. The evangelical church in most cases is currently unprepared to be fishers of men. There are five symptoms of this.
First, evangelical churches are out of fashion. For decades, we’ve been moving toward informality, egalitarianism, and anything dubbed as “contemporary”. This is the opposite direction that young men are travelling. They hunger for formality, hierarchy, and the past. This explains why so many searching young men are by-passing the doors of Baptists and Presbyterians for Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
Second, our men’s material is ineffective. Most books and courses produced for Christian men should have the subtitle “for dummies” attached to them. We have been acting as if all men are cut from the same cloth as Homer Simpson. But this isn’t the case for men who are drinking the milk of Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Tom Holland. They may not be academics, but they are thinkers. One of the few benefits of the digital age has been the way in which podcasts have elevated the intellectual appetites of Millennial and Gen Z men.
Third, we’re embarrassed to acknowledge maleness. This is a bigger problem in the UK than the US. For decades, we’ve been trying to erase as many of the distinctives of each sex as possible. This has left us unable, even unwilling, to address men in particular. We feel the same discomfort when someone speaks directly to men that we feel when someone drops a racist comment. Thus, to avoid awkwardness, we choose silence.
Fourth, the church has become more emasculated than it realises. A typical evangelical worship service provides ample evidence. A lot of men no more want to sing dewy-eyed love anthems than they want to watch rom-coms. Likewise, they get tired of each and every sermon being a form of pop psychology. Men want truth; they want to be reasoned with; they want a king that is worthy of self-sacrifice. Not enough evangelical churches provide this.
Finally, men’s ministry is typically the weakest part of a church’s discipleship ministry. Most churches invest heavily in children and youth work. Women are remarkable for their spontaneous abilities to gather and organise. Men? Not so. Left to themselves they roll apart like marbles on the floor. Sadly, most churches do little to gather them.
So, the problem: on the one hand, there is a dramatic rise of religious interest among men on both sides of the Atlantic; on the other, evangelical churches are negligently unfit to engage with these men.
How can this change? After three years of reflection and finally writing a book, here are my suggestions for making disciples of religiously curious men.
First, the church needs to help men escape the spiritual black hole that is modernity. Men today feel as if they are living in a cultural wasteland. They are not delusional. All of the great Christian cultural critics of the last three generations have more or less said so much.
Modernity is like a cancer eating itself up from the inside. A lot of guys are feeling the symptoms of this. They are fed up with materialism, individualism, consumerism, egalitarianism, liberalism, digitalism, capitalism, and progressivism. They want something better to make sense of their lives and to fill their souls with purpose.
The opportunity here for Christians should be obvious. The same gospel that offered an exit out of paganism also offers an exit out of modernism. The church needs to help men find this door.
Second, we need to brandish the credentials of tradition. For years, evangelicals have been trying to use the authority of science and psychology to validate the truth claims of the Bible. We have been assiduous in our attempts to demonstrate that the gospel is neither anti-science nor emotionally harmful.
We need now to realise that a lot of young men are not that bothered by evolution and not that interested in psychology. Their interest is in tradition. They want to dig up the floorboards of the past to figure out what was underneath it.
Christians don’t need to be intimidated or annoyed by this. We can comfortably talk about Aristotle and Aquinas, Plato and Paul, Cicero and Calvin. The roots of our faith go as far back as Abraham - and beyond. We need to get better at exhibiting the richness of this tradition in order to attract more men into our evangelical churches.
Third, we need to remove both the intellectual and non-intellectual barriers to faith. Men don’t have one type of religious need; they have many. Some need to be prompted to think; others need to be stung by truth; others need their imaginations baptised; others need to be liberated from their isolation. Kierkegaard famously spoke of three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Modern men need to be brought through a similar circuit of experiences.
How will this happen? It’s time for men’s ministries to regear themselves to make tools more suited for modern men. Not every man wants to talk about father wounds around a campfire. A growing number want to grapple with Stoicism or dismantle what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine”.
Fourth, we need confidence in the durability and relevance of the gospel. The same power of God unto salvation in Paul’s day is the power of God unto salvation today. We must be careful in our cultural apologetics not to become too clever. It’s not the wisdom of the world that converts sinners; it’s the foolishness of the cross. This never changes.
Fifth, we need to tell men to go to church. So many guys are listening to podcasts and reading books in isolation. Inevitably, this means they are filtering their religious interests through a consumerist mindset. They want God on demand, on their terms, at their convenience. This is not the path of genuine discipleship. If guys want to find truth, they need to go where Truth discloses Himself. That’s not YouTube, Spotify, or X. It’s church. The message of Jesus cannot be abstracted from the people of Jesus. When it comes to Christianity, there is no Deliveroo option. To meet with Jesus, we must be willing to take a seat at His table.
Joe Barnard is Minister of Holyrood Evangelical Church in Edinburgh and Executive Director, Cross Training Ministries For more on reaching modern men, see Joe Barnard’s new book, The Road Back to God: Faith for Men Dissatisfied by the Modern World (Christian Focus Publications) or follow his men's ministry at www.xtrainingministries.com.
