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Number
126
24 Leadership Ideas For Your Men’s Ministry
by Patrick Morley
I usually do the closing session at the end of our 2 ½ day Leadership Training Center course in Orlando, “Building a Sustainable Men’s Ministry.” It’s what I think still needs to be said after everything has been said. You may find it helpful to consider and discuss these ideas with your leadership team.
- What your ministry to men looks like 10 years from now will mostly be decided by the time you get home. You will step back into a rapidly moving stream. If you have not made up your mind, it will be hard to come back to it. What is your vision or dream? Have you made up your mind to follow God’s calling no matter what?
- Set an appointment within one week to begin implementation. If you are not prepared to invest 10 years of hard work into building a men’s discipleship ministry in your church, it would be better for the movement if you stop before you start. Each time a ministry starts and fails, it’s like a little inoculation. The next time someone wants to give it a shot, the institutional memory says, “We’ve tried that before. It didn’t work.” After three or four rounds, it’s dead for a long, long time.
- Think about how to make your ministry to men an all-inclusive, intergenerational, interdisciplinary template that overlays all the programs in your church. If you have 100 men in your church, then the size of your men’s ministry is 100. Meet with the youth, children’s, and women’s ministries periodically to point everyone in the same direction.
- The most important thing you can do for men is to help them change the core affections of their hearts. For you? Attend to the core affections of your own heart. Minister out of the overflow of your own expanding relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus. If you can’t, you must go into a quiet wood and stay there until you hear his voice, see his face, feel the warmth of his embrace, and feel the salty taste of repentant tears running down your face.
- Do fewer things better.
- Our job is not to produce a particular outcome. Our job is to be faithful to our call.
- Repetition is reputation. Repeat your idea (vision, dream, purpose) in every meeting.
- Men can already see your strengths, so reveal your weaknesses. God uses the weak things of this world for His glory. Make a seminal decision to be transparent. Vulnerability leads to transformation.
- Make yourself dispensable. My organizing philosophical metaphor for leadership is, “The architect does not have to occupy the building for the building to stand.” Develop leaders who can exceed you in ministry. Constantly spread the vision and allow the Holy Spirit to draw new leaders to your efforts.
- Do each thing to appeal to the men you have and the men you want to have.
- The most powerful force in the world is a relationship (love). Build around relationships, not programs. The relationship is the task. If it’s not going as well as you had hoped with your men, don’t get angry. Love them more. Small groups rock.
- Plodders win, not at first, but ultimately, and after the hare has quit.
- Managing expectations: All disappointment is the result of unmet expectations. It takes a long time to make a disciple. It is trench work. It requires a gritty, flinty-foreheaded kind of leader who will grab a shovel, get in the ditch, and grind it out. Richard Foster said, “Our tendency is to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.” Academic research shows that it takes about ten years to do anything of note. Think in terms of what you want to do over the next ten years.
- Evangelism must be central to your plan. The best method of evangelism is the one you will use. It will make some people uncomfortable: Woman to Moody, “I don’t like the way you do that.” “Neither do I. How do you do it?” said he. “Well, I don’t,” said she. “I like the way I’m doing it a whole lot better than the way you’re not.”
- As the leader you will receive both more credit and more blame than you deserve. Deal with it.
- Do not teach men to be better. Call them to join the cause of the gospel of Jesus Christ and to live in the shadow of that call.
- When you think about “what’s happening” what do you see? If you see the present you are naturally operational. If you see the future you are naturally visionary. Both are needed. Sometimes we must substitute discipline for a lack of natural interest.
- What kind of men are we trying to produce? Disciples, not workers. Most men don’t have enough Jesus for themselves, much less to give away. Help men fill up to the overflow in their relationship with Jesus. At a point, they will feel compelled to serve Him.
- Focusing question: If we know that we will only have a man and his family for, say, five years, what are the lessons so important to build into his life that if he should leave without them, we would have failed that man? This, then, becomes the discipleship curriculum.
- Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
- Zechariah 4:10 says, “Do not despise the small beginning, for the eyes of the Lord rejoice to see the work begin.” “All God’s giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on His power and presence to be with them.” Hudson Taylor.
- Not even God can change the direction of a stationary object. Get moving and help other men get moving. Do something.
- Planning without prayer is presumption. Prayer without planning is presumption.
- “Go and make disciples.” If the Great Commission is true, our plans are not too big; they are too small. Surrender yourself to do something great for God.
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