A Challenge for American Christian Males.

In staff meeting today a statistic was mentioned that blew me away. The statistic along with a few others led me to write this entry.
First, the statistics.
Last year’s intern class had 11 people in it, 10 girls and 1 guy. My intern class this year has 10 people in it, 7 girls and 3 guys.
Thrive has a summer internship that lasts for two months that currently has eight accepted applicants.
All eight are women. (Note that only 12 total will be accepted.)

Notice a pattern anyone?

We have to face up to the fact that American males are being shamed by their female counterparts in terms of willingness to go to the mission field. I had this same discussion earlier this fall with a missionary from a different organization. His outlook was even more negative. He said something to the tune of “American males are going to be called to account for their unwillingness to go.”
This is not just one ministry’s problem; this is a missions problem.

My goal with this entry is not to speculate why females are embarrassing males in missions participation. My goal is to put a challenge out there to my American Christian male counterparts.

Here it is:
If you are an American, Christian Male and you aren’t involved with missions in some way you are doing something wrong. You are either ignoring God’s call on your life or you are simply making yourself too busy to hear something from God.

Let me elaborate. I am not saying that you must pack up tomorrow and join me in Africa. I am not saying you are a terrible person if you have never thought of missions before. And I am most certainly not saying that you’re a bad Christian if you have not done anything with missions before.

I learned about the different roles in missions a few weeks ago. There are many ways to get involved. You can pray for missionaries. You can support missionaries financially (a heartfelt thanks to the many males who have done both these things for me.) You can mobilize others to go to the mission field. You can do missions/ministry in America. And most obviously you can go yourself.

Now don’t get the wrong idea. You don’t just pray or write a check and then act like you’re off the hook. God calls everyone to constant missions involvement (if you doubt me check out the Great Commission, Matthew 28:16-20). God is likely calling you to something more radical than you could even imagine.

Do not feel like I am trying to guilt-trip anyone towards going overseas. That is not my intention. My purpose is to highlight the fact that guys are woefully under-represented on the mission-field. You should not go to the mission field out of guilt but it is good idea to think about stepping out of the box and trying to equalize the ratio a bit more.

If you add the three statistics from the beginning of my entry, men are outnumbered 29 to 4. Men make up less than 15% of the missionaries in these three groups. Imagine for a second if they were equal 50/50. That would mean 25 more missionaries out on the field, doing God’s work.


Jesus says the harvest is great but the workers are few. Do you want to change that guys?