THE “MARKETING MESSAGE” OF MEN’S DISCIPLESHIP I am often struck with the difficulty of messaging “men’s discipleship.” What does it look like? If I were to ask you to support children in poverty, I could easily show you a picture of a poor child. If I were to ask you to help dig wells for clean water, I could show you village women gathered around a pump with fresh, clear water pouring into their pots. There would be happy smiles and palpable joy. We need to address all those social Issues. I’m all in. But here’s the thing: The best way to address every social, physical and spiritual ill in the world is to disciple men. Sounds a little self-serving coming from a ministry focused on men, right? It’s really not. Here’s why. A few years before I came to Man in the Mirror, I ran the daily operations for a 700-bed homeless shelter in Orlando. Yes, seven hundred. We had capacity for 500 men in a large open pavilion 30 with a heated concrete floor and 200 beds in dorms and bedrooms for families. In dealing with the thousands of people during my tenure there was one common theme: men were failing. It was rare that an intact family came into the shelter. Often, frightened women were coming to us escaping domestic violence. Many men were exiting the county jail system and entering our shelter. Chronic joblessness, poor education and preventable diseases like diabetes were rampant. Almost every difficulty faced—with the exception of mental illness—could be traced back to one thing: a man had failed. He had failed himself, his wife, his kids and everyone else who had ever relied on him. We live in the richest country on earth, with more accumulated wealth than at any other time or place in history. Yet people are living in homeless shelters, suffering in poverty and dying of preventable diseases. Here is the answer: When you disciple a man you affect three things: his happiness, his family and his wallet. Discipling a man affects his happiness. When a man knows and is following Christ, he is becoming the man he was created to be. The more deeply his relationship with God, the better he understands and can apply Scripture, the more fulfilled his life will be. Even a man who is suffering can be happy when his hope is found in Christ. Discipled men are happy men. (Psalm 28:7) Discipling a man affects his family. When a man understands what Christ did for him, he begins to live sacrificially for his family. His own good takes second place to his It’s Tricky
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