New Movement Reaching for 10 Million Men by 2015
A fresh new Christian men's movement is on the rise around the globe. And within the next decade, pastors are hoping to witness the next great men's awakening.
The Christian Men's Network (CMN) celebrates its 30th anniversary this week in Dallas as it pushes forward on an ambitious plan to reach 10 million men by the year 2015.
"Our goal is to make manhood and Christlikeness synonymous," said Paul L. Cole, president of CMN Worldwide.
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Whether it's men within the church, men who have left, men in the government or men in different spheres of culture, the CMN initiative is all about reaching men through a biblically-based curriculum.
"We believe that if you build strong men, you build strong families, and strong families will build strong churches, and strong churches will change the culture," said Cole, who is currently holding strategic forums in Dallas with church leaders from around the world.
This week's three-day celebratory event, which kicked off Monday, is appropriately titled "The Lions Roar" as men get together to talk about views of masculinity and success and how to take the world for Christ by building godly men. It reflects a wider Christian men's movement of recapturing the masculinity that many feel is lost in the churches and building up men to reach their full potential in Christ.
Many men have never been trained on how to be a father, a husband, much less on how to be a man, said Cole. And most men are defined by the culture in which they live rather than the culture of their faith, he added.
Cole's father and the late founder of CMN, Dr. Edwin Louis Cole, authored one of the first books on masculinity and men's issues in the modern Christian men's movement some three decades ago. Maximized Manhood is now the most widely read men's book in the world, according to Paul Cole.
Before his death in 2002, Edwin Cole envisioned taking Christian men's outreach to the next level, believing that when men begin to or "dare to" live by the message of the Bible, it will turn the world around, as Paul Cole stated.
The goal is to have 10 million in some kind of Christian mentoring or discipleship program.
CMN launched the initiative three years ago in Brazil where 100 new churches each month are signing up for the CMN curriculum based on the late Cole's writings. Currently, the movement has spread to 62 countries including Peru, Indonesia, and the United States. And over the next 15 months, CMN head Paul Cole will visit 100 major cities and six continents to meet with pastors and leaders to launch the initiative in their local regions.
"The next great men's awakening has to be pastor-led because it has to build churches," said Cole, noting that the men's movement in the United States has been at a low in recent years, while it has exploded overseas.
"We got to crank this thing back up."
And the entire curriculum and movement is driven by Scripture.
"No man's life can change outside the Word of God," Cole stressed.
CMN celebrates its 30th anniversary Tuesday during The Lions Roar (Oct. 1-3) in Dallas. The strategic forums feature a culturally diverse group of influential church leaders, including Sunday Adelaja, who pastors the largest church in Europe.
"We're meeting not based on the fact that U.S. ministries have all the answers," said Cole, "but that men from all over the world have the answers."
