Where Are All The Mighty Men?

By Konnor Massa, Resonate Moscow 

About a year ago, I woke up and attended a prayer meeting. It was a weekly time my then friend, now fiance, Chelsy, had created and invited people to, where we could pray for nations all around the world where the Gospel isn’t freely proclaimed. As per usual, when names and videos started to pop up on Zoom, I realized that I was the only guy there—again. The rest of the people going to the Lord in prayer and advocating for people all around the world to know Him were single women. Each and every one of them.

 See, the thing is, this isn’t an individual occurrence and it isn’t an outlier. When I first moved to join a team working internationally, there was only one other single man on the team, the rest were married couples or single women (before I moved, single women had outnumbered single men 3 to 1).  Again, when I made the decision to join a church planting team, in our first meeting I looked around to see who had made the decision to pick up and move for the sake of the Gospel, and the only other single man I saw was a staff member—every other face on the call (besides our SP and a married couple) was a single woman, stepping up to answer the call that God and our church had made for workers to enter the harvest field. 

 So, Chelsy came to me and said she wanted to talk about how the single men all around her were failing to lead out, avoiding the hard things, and being timid to take up their cross and join in the work, I had no leg to stand on. I had no list of single men who were leading out around us, and even when I could think of a name, it seemed so insignificant when compared to the number of single women I saw stepping into ministry alongside me each and every day. 

Here is the honest truth: single men—we are failing. We are failing and we don’t even have the self-awareness to figure it out ourselves—instead we are being told by the women around us. How are we failing you ask? Are we not leading, protecting and providing well? What are we missing? 

First and foremost, we aren’t showing up. It’s really hard to step into responsibility and leadership in the way God has commanded us when we aren’t even in the room. When prayer gatherings are happening, when church plant teams are forming, when someone asks for new ready leaders to multiply out and get in the game, our hands are the last ones in the air to volunteer. Don’t worry though, as we dodge responsibility like Adam did in the Garden, our sisters are showing up; they are leading in our place, even when they don’t want to.  

 Secondly, we aren’t speaking up. When we see injustice, we too often remain silent while our sisters cry out with voices of empathy, championing change. To quote my fiance (ya, I talk about her a lot, mostly cause she is smarter than me), “You cannot be a mighty man if I have to constantly remind you to use your voice on behalf of the orphan, the widow, the poor in spirit. If I have to continue to organize the prayer groups. If I have to remind you that there are millions of people dying everyday never knowing the name of Jesus and that you should have an issue with that.”

 Thirdly, when we do show up and do speak out we are doing so timidly. When I first decided to move overseas, and even when I first joined a church planting team, it wasn’t because I was the first to volunteer—it was because someone approached me and recruited me. Again, I don’t think I am an outlier here. I think of my experience in endless conversations with leaders of men where the question was always “how do I get my guys to engage? How do I get them to step into leadership when they have no interest in leading out?” I think of the times that I have had to approach guys, to rally the troops and say “hey it is time to get in the game,” or the conversations I have had with my friends planting churches about how they have tried to get guys on their staff teams, but those young mobile men weren’t willing to put their yes on the table; Meanwhile women in their cities were chomping at the bit, excited for the opportunity to see God move in a new place.

So what do we do about it? What do we do when our sisters are calling us out and asking for more from us than we are currently living in to? 

First of all, we start showing up. If you have the time in your schedule (and most of you do, you are just prioritizing late nights on an xbox over your God given responsibilities to the Church, but that is another topic for another blog post) you should go to the things that your brothers and sisters organize that expand the Kingdom of God and build up the Church. Romans 12:1 says that we are to be a living sacrifice, and that doesn’t mean just with the time that is convenient for us, or for the time where we feel most “filled up,” it means our lives are not our own and we give everything for the cause of Christ—and that means we show up for things. We are in the room.

Second of all, we start speaking up. That means we don't just quietly start attending prayer meetings—although we should attend them—it means we start actively contributing to things that lead to the health and flourishing of our local church, the global Church, and the world. It isn’t enough to just be in the room, we have to be active in the room. That means no more passive sitting, and no more mumbled prayers at prayer meetings. I will caveat this here. I am not saying you should go to the prayer meeting that a woman in our church leads, start praying louder, and ask her if you can take over (if you are going to my fiance’s prayer meeting, good luck cause she will put you right back in your place). What I am saying is that scripture is clear. There are no passive participants in the work of the Church; 1 Peter 2:5 says that we are like bricks in a spiritual house—that means we have to do our part to help hold the structure up or it doesn’t get stacked any higher than us. 

Finally, it means we start leading out. So much of the reason we aren’t the first ones to sign up for the next church plant, or fill out the Village Leader application seems to be an aversion to self sacrifice. I have a newsflash for you men, the call to follow Christ is a call to self sacrifice and the call to Biblical manhood doubles down on it. In Luke 9:23, Jesus says that following Him means self denial and cross bearing. While that is a call to all disciples, Ephesians 5 takes this self sacrifice and makes it clear that being willing to lay down your life is an integral part of the man’s role in life and marriage. So, if you are averse to self sacrifice, not only are you being disobedient generally right now in not following the command of Christ to die to yourself, you are setting yourself up to never live in to what God is calling you to do in marriage and in your life as a man in the Church. If this continues, you will remain what Matt Chandler calls a “neat Christian boy,” little boys who learned how to shave and never lived into the call of Christ to die to themselves both in their daily lives and especially towards their wives. You will be the kind of men that I warn women away from dating because you refuse to step into all that God is calling you to be. Now don’t lose sight, the main point here isn’t getting your poop in a group and finding a wife someday, it is obedience to Christ, but one thing I guarantee you will reap if you continue in your disobedience is a long life of rejection by Godly women, or a marriage floundering under your poor leadership and a love that isn’t willing to self sacrifice—not to mention missing out on what Jesus calls abiding in his love through obedience to his commandments in John 15:10. 

So, men of Resonate, or just men who generally read blogs from the church online, it is time to step up. The call from God is clear, it is time to be obedient.