Our men’s ministry thrived during lockdown

The best way for men’s ministry to grow and be meaningful is to meet on a regular basis throughout the year to disciple men more effectively, says MPower leader Mark Lyndon-Jones. Trinity Church in Brentwood took that advice to heart, as MPower group leader Deji Okanlawon explains.

Deji Okanlawon

The Trinity men’s group started in March 2020, just after we attended an MPower national event at Malvern.

The week after we returned, the pandemic broke out, and we found ourselves in lockdown. However, our vision to create a community of men who do life together was undiminished by these events.

Prior to this, Trinity did not have any such group, and often it’s difficult for our men to get to know each other, connect, engage and encourage one another as we all take on life in its various facets. This desire to see strong, connected, spiritual men raised within our community birthed our men’s group.

That was our why. The next phase was the how.

The pandemic posed several challenges, especially because starting a group of this nature would have been easier with in-person, face-to-face gatherings, but we did not have that luxury. So, embracing the technology at hand, we decided to start meeting online. But how often should we meet, and what do we discuss?

Considering these points prayerfully and through the leading of the Holy Spirit, we decided to meet weekly. Weekly sounds great but can also be daunting. How do we create content that will be relevant, engaging and life-giving every week? The answer was emphatic. The Holy Spirit inspired us to use the MPower ‘Fuel for the Week’ devotional.

The Fuel for the Week series is a weekly article sent every Monday to encourage men in their walk with God. Its simple, concise and easy-to-consume format makes it very easy for men to read either on the go or during their devotional time. In five minutes or so, you could get a life-giving word into your soul, find encouragement, and, more importantly, keep your fire for the Lord burning.

So how did we use this in our weekly meeting? Each weekend, we would take the previous week’s episode, convert it into a jpeg image, and send it to our men’s WhatsApp group. Before sending it, we introduced what the episode was about to create a context and hunger within the group.

Sending this ahead of our Monday meetings gave guys time to study, apply and hear what God is saying to them through it, helping them to connect to God on their own.

This has created richer, fuller and livelier conversations not only when we met online but also in a stronger sense now that we meet together in person, continuing to use these resources to good effect, still on a weekly basis, as a band of brothers. For us, the MPower principle of seeing guys coached by the Word has been encouraging, equipping and effective in disciplining the men of Trinity Church in all aspects of life.

This article first appeared in Direction, Elim’s monthly magazine.

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