I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've had a lot of conversations with men around the idea of men's ministry, their experience with it, and mine. The data that I've been able to collect has shaped what I'm building and what we're building at The Remnant.
Men are told to find community, but the offerings for them don't often fit their life. They don't fit the rhythms of the life that they have built, the rhythms of the life that they've been given. They don't fit the season of life that they're in. Oftentimes they're husbands and fathers, with newborn babies or they are older with grandchildren coming, and to try to fit a one-size-fits-all event or something on the schedule (like a Tuesday night or a Tuesday morning thing) doesn't capture the whole audience.
When I say, "Find community," okay, great. What if I can't fit the one place where community happens? Then where do I find it? Do I go to the gym and meet people there? Well, maybe. Or do I go to my children's school events or their football games? Oftentimes our community is found in the places where we frequent most in our life that fit in the rhythms of our life.
It struck me in that moment that while having a men's events is awesome, I believe that the solution is actually creating the architecture and building the framework for environments where men can find community within the actual rhythms of their lives consistently.
For example, let's say my kid's soccer game might be every Saturday and I am friends with a couple of the dads, that's great, but I don't know if I would classify that as doing life with someone. That's why I started the Remnant. What the Remnant is creating is a place that solves the problem of consistent relationships for men because we know that we need them and we know that they're important, but we don't know how to do it or have the space in our schedule.
We have our marriages, our kids, our businesses and our work, our own personal health, and we try to be leaders at our church and serve in our church. We're supposed to have friends that we're supposed to invest in and be intentional with, but how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to fit consistent men's community into my life?
Community in the Rhythms of Life
What we're building isn't a gym with Christian branding. It's a community and a club that uses the gym as a tool available to it, alongside the coworking space, the community kitchen, private office spaces, and, as silly as it sounds, the dry sauna.
Looking at my own experience, the Lord told me to build a space that I would want to use. Some of the more in-depth life conversations I've had were sitting in the sauna, having conversations with people.
This collection of things under one roof is bringing things together that men are using every day anyway:
They're going to the gym.
They're taking coffee meetings.
They're working in their office.
They are taking lunch meetings.
All of that already fits into their schedule. Now, if I can replace that with an environment, one location on their calendar, an environment where the standard is held, I know that men that I meet there are going to hold me accountable in the relationships that I build. I don't have to vet whether you can be trusted because you've already been curated for this environment and agreed to the standard required to be met.
Then community and brotherhood become a part of my normal life and I can go home and be a husband and a father. I can be present for dinner with my friends. When my wife and I want to sit and watch a movie, I don't have to worry about the fact that I haven't invested in community. On a Tuesday night, I'm not missing dinner and bedtime. I've already invested in guys that are going to be investing in me as well.
The men that we're going to be building this with are men who fear the Lord, men who choose obedience over comfort, men willing to accept the consequences of culture for standing up for what they believe in. Not perfect dudes. Dudes that are broken, dudes that cuss, dudes that have made mistakes. The most important thing about this and the one common denominator is that they are trying their hardest to obey the Lord and to operate under the fear of the Lord.
When Comfort Fell Apart
Why does this matter? This matters to me because I realized that at my lowest point, when I looked around, I needed someone to tell me to continue, to suffer, to continue to be put through the crucible, and to be put in tension and to be remolded and broken and rebuilt.
In the complete transformation of my understanding of God, of my faith, and of myself, it took me being stripped of everything. It took me having things pried from my hands that I was holding on to for dear life.
I was asked to quit my job. That was the genesis of this. I was asked to quit my job where I was making unbelievable money, crazy, crazy money. The Lord asked me to quit it on a silent retreat.
And I did not like it at all.
I had in my journal, "Lord, I hear what you're asking, and this is scary as shit. I don't want to do it because you know the consequences of it." But I wrote it down and then I confessed it to a group of men that were on the retreat with me and happened to fear the Lord as well. They held me accountable to quitting a job.
As I drove back down the mountain, I heard every justification as to why I shouldn't quit my job, why I should continue to pursue comfort, and why my status as a wealth manager for professional athletes actually mattered.
Little did I know that these were the things that the Lord was going to have to pull off of me and burn out of me.
He brought me to the point where my bank accounts were emptied.
My whole job was to teach people and to put plans in place for people so that their finances were bulletproof, to find comfort in their financial plan. This is completely counter to what I had believed in my personal life: comfort can't be from anything but God.
I had subconsciously or consciously built this structure of comfort for myself through my finances, and the Lord, in His mercy, dismantled it over the course of 18 months. My backup plans, the backup plans to my backup plans, my safety net and emergency life rafts, everything was dismantled outside of my own will and outside of my own actions.
He brought me to my knees. In those moments, I didn't need someone to tell me to go get another job. I didn't need someone to tell me to go find comfort in something else. He had asked me to walk away from a job that I could make six figures a month if the cards fell right. He didn't need me to go serve tables. It's not what He was asking me to do. What He was asking me to do was to find my comfort and my peace in Him and to not subscribe to the beliefs and the systems of the world that serve the gods and that make idols of gods that aren't Him.
What I needed was s group of guys in my circle that said, "Man, this is really hard. This fucking sucks, actually," and were able to sit with me in that but not tell me to leave it.
I looked around. I didn't have very many of those men that I was close with, that I had invested time in, because I didn't have time to. I was too busy trying to make my life work.
I had one, maybe two men that I trusted. That was fully my fault. Nobody else's but mine.
What's crazy is I still went to the gym, I still went to coworking spaces, and I still went to coffee shops to work. It made me start to wonder: what if while in those places I was actually surrounded by other men who I would have the ability to open up to and have conversation with?
Nobody Knew
It changed the importance of friendship to me because isolation is dangerous.
A marking moment in my life was a day when my daughter's tonsils were so swollen and bleeding from tonsillitis, and I had to walk out of the house holding back tears.
I couldn't afford a copay to take her to the doctor and I just sat in my car and I cried. I said, "God, why are you doing this right now? Why are you letting me feel this?! Why is this happening?”
I think it was twofold:
I actually heard Him say, "You're going to get in the car, you're going to cry about this. Then you're going to go to your office and you're going to put a face on. Nobody's going to know the depth of what you're feeling right now. Then you're going to go to small group and nobody in your small group actually knows either."
He made me audit and look around my life and I realized, "Holy cow, I don't have anybody that I've allowed into this," because men's brains work differently.
Shared Pain and Shared Hard Work
Men don't bond over coffee shops and they don't bond over small groups. They bond over shared pain, honestly, and shared hard work. It's the reason why locker rooms have developed some of the greatest relationships, because you share the fall camp and you share the early morning workouts. It's why military relationships are so close: you've shared in hard work together.
As an adult, I struggle to think of a community or an environment where hard work is shared and trust is built through common difficult situations
That's what we're building: a community of men who all fear the Lord. I think that the fear of the Lord is impossible, or if not impossible, very close to impossible to operate under without accountability and without men holding you to that standard (because the Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak).
It says,
“How joyful are those who fear the LORD—all who follow his ways! You will enjoy the fruit of your labor. How joyful and prosperous you will be! Your wife will be like a fruitful grapevine, flourishing within your home. Your children will be like vigorous young olive trees as they sit around your table. That is the LORD’s blessing for those who fear him.”
Psalm 128:1–4 (NLT)
“It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones.”
Psalm 127:2 (NLT)
All through the Bible, it talks about, “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord.”
I don't believe, through personal experience, that you can consistently operate with saying yes to hard things when the enemy is constantly telling you not to. The Remnant is building a place where we say what we believe. We need people around us who recognize when our lives stop matching that.
Making Obedience Easier
I honestly believe that real community should make obedience easier, not comfort easier. It should make obedience the default and discomfort the default. We put in systems for men to be able to sit with each other in discomfort because brotherhood can't exist if everybody is performing. Brotherhood can't exist if there isn't true authenticity, vulnerability, and clarity in what's actually happening in that room.
When you sit in a room with five men in a Bible study, if they don't actually know what's going on, they can't speak into or pray into what you're doing to encourage you. At The Remnant, we're creating that right now, through intentional lifts and a private training center being shared with us until our physical building is here, an environment where you work, you show up, you train hard. We eat, we share food afterwards, and we talk. It's consistency compounding. Week after week, it is repetition, shared hard work, and continually being given the opportunity to open up.
Men are different trust has to be given. That trust is given through time spent together and shared experiences. What I think we're actually building is infrastructure for male friendship, a place where relationships happen naturally. They're not organic because organic would mean that it just happened. We have to actually build the space for this to happen, and that's what we're doing: we're architecting infrastructure where men are pushed to be better husbands, fathers, friends, leaders, followers of Christ, to positively impact every sphere of influence that they operate in.
A Challenge
My challenge in this would be to ask the Lord, as soon as you read this: What's the thing that you're talking to me about right now that I don't want to talk to you about? What are my justifications, and who have I actually brought in to hold me accountable to these things? Because at the end of the day, if we're not operating under the fear of the Lord, then He actually isn't King and He actually isn't Lord. Jesus isn't our friend; He's our King. It's either obedience or it's rebellion, and I don't want to be in rebellion, but my flesh does. I need my friends, the men around me, my wife, and my family around me to continue to drive me towards holiness and to put my flesh on the cross.
A Note to the Reader
This is the first of my weekly newsletters, where I will be sharing thoughts that I have around marriage, fatherhood, faith, work, training, men's ministry, business, and all things men. All the things that I'm learning while we're building The Remnant. It'll probably sound more like me talking than writing. I'll bring in lessons that I learn from other people, writings from other people, and I promise full authenticity, vulnerability, and probably a couple of bad words along the way.