The postmodern church in America today is on its heels, reeling from culture wars on the outside and from structural resistance and generation gaps within.  All this is magnified by renewed financial pressures as giving has plummeted due to the global economic crisis. Yet, in many churches, attendance and needs are on the rise. Many churches have been squeezed close to, or beyond, the breaking point as staffs are cut and programs unfunded. There has never been, in this writer’s lifetime, a greater need, or opportunity to engage Christina men.

These same pressures have been shared in common by many believers as well, and, men, who normally step in to “fix” things, feel more powerless than ever. We have all, it seems, been placed upon a mandatory fast of sorts, where the once attractive opulence and acquisition has faded to black and white. Many of us seek now only to survive these difficult times. Most guys I know are playing defense. Men, who were content to attend church, and write the check, have become even more disengaged than ever.

For years, I was content to sit in the stands and watch life go by, accompanied by my other male “Jesus fans”. But something was missing…I sensed that my colleagues were being picked off by peripheral and direct hits from some unseen enemy’s artillery…or worse yet, disabled by phantom snipers hidden in the many traps placed in our paths in the great cosmic war against Christian men. This surely had happened to me. But we always had our work and toys to salve our souls.

Sometimes what we don’t know can really hurt us. The Bible teaches us that were all born into an invisible but deadly War, and, like the great and terrible World Wars of the 20th Century that were fought in the arenas of  Land, Sea and Sky, they are being waged today in three battlegrounds against our souls and the souls of those we love.

Like it or not…admit it or not, as long as we have breath, we will struggle against the aligned strategies of World System, Human Carnality and  the Cohorts of Satan’s Kingdom. Virtually all of the pain and suffering, injustice and bondage, sickness and social ills that plague humanity and this planet finds their root cause in one or more of these of these sources.

Yet many of us have never heard the message preached clearly from our pulpits. Or, if we did, it was selective to one battleground alone. Think with me of how effective a war might be if even one of these battlefields was ignored by leading officers in charge? This book, then, is a necessary boot camp training manual to prepare you for victory…and equip you, and those you enlist into your cohort, to engage and win in this three dimensional arena as God’s Kingdom Warrior.

Why men strategic to this war? A Focus on the Family study stated that if a child is the first person in a household to become a Christian, there is a 3.5 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow. If the mother is the first to become a Christian, there is a 17 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow.

But if the father is first, there is a 93 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow.

Many have seen the breadth of devastation that impacts a church and community when a pastor or elder fails to guard their spiritual and emotional thought life, becomes isolated, and then falls prey to sexual temptation or some other moral sin. It is strategy Satan has employed with many leaders in these modern times because he knows that if he can “strike the shepherd, the sheep will be scattered” .

Likewise the enemy of our souls has extreme prejudice against the man, husband and father. In the world system that he lords over, he has orchestrated an environment that defeats the unaware and unarmored man. He also has known, through the ages, that there is only a small fraction of a chance that his family will ever find their way to life in Christ.

Men have been marginalized by gender blending, paralyzed by the assault of sexual perversion, and waylaid by the promise of fulfillment in achieving success in their work. In addition, many churches have overplayed the quality of “niceness” as a sanitized substitute for godliness and exchanged church-centric “ministry” conscription for the calling to the adventure of a dynamic faith walk in God’s Kingdom.

This is why men are my focus and the focal point of a book soon to be released called “Out of the Stands and into the Arena. It is also why men are the fulcrum upon which Satan leverages much of his strategies of Hell. Unless the individual man recognizes that he is called by God to prepare, act, think, and respond as a Warrior in this life, he will fall far short of his created potential…and, like Gideon, will find himself hiding, alone, and disqualified.

One key basic premise for a previous book called Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge, was essentially our God is a God of Warfare . With so many pulpits focusing on only the safer New Testament writings, the American church has been for too long fed a pabulum rich diet of toddler food based to often on taste alone, while most Old Testament passages are relegated to Old Testament teaching that include the ten commandments, the Genesis story, Psalms of comfort and Joseph and his technicolored dreamcoat! The fact remains that a full one-third of the Bible was written in the context of bondage and the victorious deliverance achieved as men went to war.

The New Testament continues the theme of the breakthrough of the Kingdom of God into the human sphere by revolutionary and sometimes violent emissaries who come to liberate those who are bound and execute authoritative liberation in Jesus’ Name. The very passion of Christ and His incredible sacrifice is one marked by violence. When we examine Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, we often miss the nature of the violence done to Him in order for God to win human “Prisoners of War” back to Him. Understand that the coordinated attack by Satan through his array of demonic forces, religious hypocrisy and human jealousy all were in the context of that Great War that has been raging since the Devil sought to lead a rebellion against God himself in the Heavens eons ago. And it rages still today.

This past 18 months we have been blessed with a sovereign move of the Holy Spirit upon our men at our church. This “movement” is also beginning to happen in hot pockets across our land. Ours began in a season where we had no Senior Pastor, after a men’s houseboat retreat two years ago where I discovered that Christian men on my boat were all in the same boat”…we had some serious and debilitating sins and personal bondage in their lives….we were losing the war.
From there, a single message evolved into a series of messages and discussion groups which were planted in this writer’s heart, and then owned and developed by a group of leaders.

As a father of five sons, the most sobering news is the lack of connection that exists is between the older men and the younger. Published statistics show us that the trend of boys who become men in the American church generally walk away from the roots of their faith. In fact, based on various surveys, anywhere between 85-92% of high school students fail to return to church after they graduate and the percentages, (upwards of 95%) are higher for young men than for women.  We are losing tomorrow’s generation to this cosmic war as well.

Here is what we are seeing happen to men who choose to truly engage:

• They are learning the necessity of intimately bonding to God as your Father, and then bond into a horizontal authentic community of other Warriors.
• Men are intentionally choosing to become “chasm crossers” between the Boomers and the X, Y and millennial generations.
• Men are being released as a minister to wives and children and other family members, through high priestly worship and servant leadership.
• Men are stepping outside their comfort zones to help others in need…to engage in the battles against suffering, slavery and hunger, and caring practically for “orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27)

My challenge as a believing man is am I willing to be “drafted” into a Corps of men that are being trained and conditioned to stand, and fight and advance the kingdom of god, defined in scripture as “righteousness, peace and joy”, together? Then prepare for a violent, life changing encounter…and a battle (that has been going on, worldwide, for some time) that you must now face and deal with. This journey is not for the faint of heart, but for those who hear the clarion call of the Horn of Gideon, to prepare for and wax victorious in the adventure of your life “So Others May Live”!

Art Hobba, Team Leader
Art.hobba@calvarycoremen.org

Core Men of Calvary is a 501c3 training organization and a soon to be released book titled “Out of the Stands, into the Arena” will be for sale later this year. Connect with us at www.core300.org.