Pastors Research

The Case for Men’s Ministry: Research Pastors Need to See

It’s Already Working — Here’s Proof

One church in Colorado Springs started a weekly OTI breakfast with 25 men. Three years later, roughly 400 men meet weekly across nearly 40 different churches in that same area.

This isn’t a pilot theory. It’s a repeatable model, already proven in a real church, in a real city, with real pastors watching it happen next door.

OTI has saved my life and my faith. Since I joined, I’ve faced incredible trials — I lost my job, then two weeks later, on Father’s Day, I lost my best friend to cancer. Shortly after, my wife told me she wanted to separate, and my oldest son moved away. Through OTI I’ve come to understand that God is real, and that He walks through the pain of every circumstance with me.

J.J
MONUMENT, CO

The Scale of the Gap

63% of pastors say disciple-making is the skill they most need to keep developing — more than any other pastoral skill. Only 8% of pastors strongly agree they’re satisfied with the discipleship happening in their own church.

Meanwhile, roughly 3 in 5 women already attend a church with an organized women’s ministry. Men’s ministry lags behind at every level of investment — not because men matter less, but because no one has built the structure yet.

This isn’t a niche gap. It’s the discipleship priority pastors themselves name most — and the one most often left without a plan.

The Blind Spot in Your Own Pew

67% of pastors believe pornography is only a minor problem, or no problem at all, in their congregation. In the same congregations, roughly 75% of men report having viewed it. 84% of those men say no one in their life is helping them with it.

The men in your church aren’t hiding a problem you’ve already solved. They’re carrying one no one has asked them about.

Only 1% of church leaders say today’s churches are discipling new believers “very well.” 60% say “not too well.” You already see the gap in your own church. The question is what’s been built to close it.

The One Lever Only You Can Pull

Barna’s research on churches that excel at discipleship found two factors, above all others, that leaders of those churches point to as critical: the vision or endorsement of senior leadership, and a clearly articulated plan. Two-thirds of these exemplar churches cite both.

You don’t have to run this personally. You have to endorse it and hand it to someone who can. That’s the whole ask.

The Highest-Leverage Investment in the Next Generation

When both parents attend church regularly, about 41% of their children attend weekly as adults, compared to roughly 12–29% when only one parent attends or neither does. A 40-year study of over 3,000 adults across 350 families found that a warm, close relationship specifically with a father was the single strongest predictor of whether that child practiced faith as an adult — a stronger predictor than the relationship with the mother.

Draw a man into real discipleship, and you rarely get him alone — you get his marriage, his children, and often his children’s children. Reaching fathers is one of the highest-leverage investments a church can make in the next generation’s faith.

Why It Matters Beyond Your Walls

Roughly 1 in 4 children in the U.S. — 18.2 million — live without a father in the home. Youth from father-absent homes are far more likely to face poverty, delinquency, and involvement in the justice system, and men raised without a father present are themselves more likely to become absent fathers — the pattern repeats generationally unless something interrupts it.

Discipling the men in your church isn’t a men’s-ministry line item. It’s the intervention point for the next generation’s faith and the cycle of fatherlessness at once.

The Moment Is Now

As of 2025, men are attending church weekly at higher rates than women (43% vs. 36%) for the first time in 25 years of Barna tracking — the largest gender gap ever recorded, led by Gen Z men (46%) and Millennial men (55%).

42% of young men ages 18–29 now say religion is “very important” to them — a 14-point jump in just two years, the highest level Gallup has recorded for young men in more than a quarter century.

Large majorities of young men still want a good job, marriage, and fatherhood — 84% describe themselves as having ambitious plans for the future. This directly contradicts the narrative that young men “just don’t want to grow up.”

Men are walking back through the door on their own, at a rate not seen in a generation. The question is whether there’s a table waiting for them when they do.