Chapter 1
One Man Can Make A Difference
Turning Tragedy to Triumph
A tawny-red dawn had just begun to break across an angry Tennessee sky when I reached Starbucks that morning, but now, as I sat back in my comfortable chair pondering, the clouds had cleared and shafts of golden sunlight streaked the room. A few other early risers had been dribbling in to tank up on their morning caffeine, but I had been so absorbed in a type-written manuscript that I had not noticed them.
What was absorbing me was one man’s account of how, over an elongated stretch of his life, God had set him on an unexpected course so that at that particular time he was in a position to make an extraordinary difference in the lives of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men. As I considered the possibilities, I sipped my cappuccino, bit into my pastry, and disappeared back into my thoughts.
I had first met Jay Crouse when he turned up in a seminary winter session class I had taught several Januarys earlier. A short, dark-haired man with an infectious smile, Jay was full of perceptive observations about the subject we had been studying, and during that time together he had talked about his concern for the hearts of men. His passion that men have a healthy relationship with God the Father through Jesus, the Son, fascinated me, but until now I had not known the twists and turns that had brought him to the point where he was willing to turn his back on a potentially lucrative career, and setting off into unknown territory.
Now that I had read his story the facts were at my fingertips – and I found myself thanking God that Jay and his family had been willing to make major sacrifices to follow where the Lord seemed to be leading. One of the things that had most fascinated me about Jay’s story was that it had been a tragedy in an Atlanta church twenty years earlier that had unwittingly pointed him in so unexpected and fruitful a direction.
I have always been captivated by the way God is able to take the raw material of human life, be it tragedy or be it crisis, and then to transform it from something unsightly into a thing of beauty. It was a reckless act of homicide that had forced Moses to flee into the desert to escape the wrath of Egypt’s king. Yet forty years later Moses was to lead the People of Israel on one of the most epic escapes ever been recorded. Without that hideous murder, which Moses must have regretted a million times over during what seemed to be the wasted years of exile, there might have been no exodus journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.
I had begun to take an interest in the significance of such turning points when, years earlier, an unexpected crisis almost ripped my own life apart. As a result of this experience, I had accumulated a mental storehouse filled with similar accounts of God’s grace bringing blessing out of human failure or misery. The particular tragedy that changed the trajectory of Jay Crouse’s life was the breakdown of the marriage of the pastor of the Presbyterian church he and his wife attended during their first years together.
Jay and Laura were newlyweds, and found the sad circumstances that had led to this heartbreak so difficult to handle that for the good of their own relationship it became necessary to find another spiritual home. So it was that they eventually linked up with a big red-brick United Methodist Church set in one of the pleasant tree-filled suburbs just to the north of the city, the church which also happened to be the congregation in which Laura Crouse had grown up.
Jay was not a Southerner, but grew up in the Buckeye state of Ohio. When he launched his career in business following graduation from college in the late 1970s, he had come south to the boom town of Atlanta. He had been raised in a Christian home, but despite a youthful profession of faith, like so many others, when he got to college he had found that there were just too many other distractions. The spiritual side of his life was put into the deep freeze for a number of years, only to re-emerge at the time of his marriage, and then to intensify with the arrival of the Crouses’ eldest son, John. These changes in his family circumstances had been the incentive that had led them to hook up with that lively Presbyterian church. Then, having settled into this community of faith, their own marital security was threatened by the family disaster that befell the congregation’s leader.
New Year’s Resolution
Not many people keep their New Year’s resolutions, but Jay Crouse is one of life’s exceptions! As their family was put down roots at Northside United Methodist Church, he became aware of a Men’s Prayer Breakfast that met very early on a weekday morning, come rain or shine, before guys headed off to work. He was intrigued. He had never come across anything like this before, so a few months after linking up with the parish, and with some trepidation, he resolved that he would give the gathering a try.
Keeping that resolution was the major turning point in his story. “Those men took me under their wings and led me into an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ,” he wrote. “That wonderful experience gave me a foundation in terms of my own spiritual life and a sense about the power of what happens when men come together in spiritual formation.” Within a few weeks Jay Crouse was hooked, and became one of the regulars who got up early to meet with God over coffee and donuts.
During the next three years, nurtured by a healthy congregation, the Crouses found their faith growing and deepening, with this revolution being most apparent for Jay within the context of the early morning group. As the thread of his life became interwoven with that of the men at Northside, he discovered the richness of male fellowship, the potential and the adventure of being God’s man in today’s world, and the exhilaration that accompanies the challenge to Christian obedience.
The Crouses thought they were settled in Atlanta for the long haul, but this was not to be the case. A reality of today’s world is that often a career advance requires relocation, which is precisely what happened, dragging the family away from all that was familiar in Atlanta, and planting them where they were complete strangers.
Church of the Redeemer
By this point the Crouse family was no longer just Laura, Jay, and John, but two more sons had been added to their quiver. Jay’s new work took them to Sarasota, on Florida’s west coast, and as they came to rest they started looking for another church home. With Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches in their combined backgrounds, these were the natural places to begin, but after a frustrating year they realized they were no closer to finding a congregation where they felt they could really belong. Then a friend said, “Why don’t you try the Church of the Redeemer?”
Jay laughs today about his family arriving at this bastion of high church Anglicanism. “We did not realize that Redeemer was an Episcopal church, but we found that out immediately the service started. It was completely foreign to anything we had ever experienced in our lives before! Although we struggled through the first service, there was something about the church that kept drawing us back. With each visit we became more comfortable, and gradually we became familiar with the liturgy and tradition.”
If it was so unfamiliar to them, why did they stick around? Their answer is a simple one: “We were overwhelmed by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church. We felt God leading us to this new church home.” After initial misgivings, Jay and Laura became enthusiastic pilgrims on the Canterbury Trail, and it was not too long before they were confirmed, finding themselves increasingly at ease in the congregation into which God had parachuted them.
But as much as they appreciated their new church home, Jay was realizing that something was missing. He found himself craving the fellowship of those twenty or thirty other men with whom he had met every week in Atlanta. After giving it a lot of thought and prayer he approached the rector with the idea that they might launch a men’s gathering of some kind at Church of the Redeemer. The two of them mulled the idea over together, and, after several discussions, decided to try out the notion of a Men’s Prayer Breakfast. They publicized what they were intending to do, prayed fervently, and wondered what the outcome would be.
Five or six men showed up on that first Friday morning at 7.15 a.m., some of them with the same mixture of trepidation and curiosity as Jay had had several years earlier when he has tentatively tested the waters with the Men’s Prayer Breakfast at their old church in Atlanta. Fifteen years later, a whole procession of men have come and gone, but each Friday morning around twenty guys will appear for the Prayer Breakfast at the Church of the Redeemer, and on Saturday mornings there is an additional gathering for the benefit of the men who can’t make it during the week.
These fellowships have evolved, becoming the core around which a vibrant men’s ministry at the Church of the Redeemer has developed, and Jay Crouse always seemed to be somewhere close to the heart of the action. Jay thought that all he was doing was being a faithful parishioner, little did he realize that the men’s ministry at Redeemer was part of his apprenticeship. When God had led him from Ohio to Atlanta, and then to Florida, there was a much bigger strategy in the divine mind that Jay had fathomed at that point!
A Call to Ministry?
Almost inevitably, it seems, when an Episcopalian starts getting really enthusiastic about serving Jesus Christ, the issue of ordination is raised. During the mid-Nineties this was an avenue that Jay and Laura found themselves puzzling over. After various conversations and much thought, they participated in various programs put on by the Diocese of Southwest Florida, designed to help people Christians discover God’s will for their lives, especially to see if ordained ministry is part of the divine pattern. As the Crouses worked through the process, talked, and prayed, they could not get comfortable with the idea of ordination. Yet even as the idea of the “collar” receded, there continued to be a growing excitement in their hearts about ministry, and a curiosity about what the Lord might be calling them to do.
This was a period when all sorts of things were happening in the churches throughout the USA, and for the first time in several generations men’s ministry was coming to the front burner and getting a lot of publicity. The Goliath of this reawakened interest in ministry among men was the Promise Keepers movement. In its early years Promise Keepers exploded onto the scene and was highly controversial. It appeared like a meteorite out of Colorado, the brainchild of college football coach and Christian layman, Bill McCartney. It was the right thing at the right time, touching a raw nerve among America’s men, and for a while it seemed that nothing could stop it.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, Jay and the men at the Church of the Redeemer found themselves caught up in Promise Keepers, and gained much from it. Jay, eager as always to get as much from the movement as he possibly could, undertook all the training opportunities that they offered, and that he could fit into his schedule and budget. But while Promise Keepers had whetted his appetite, enabling to focus on the challenge of making Christian men, in Jay’s case it was just another arena in which his gifts were being focused and honed for what God really had in mind.
As Promise Keepers climaxed with huge gatherings all over the country, there were fresh stirrings in the Episcopal Church in Southwest Florida. Changing leadership, as one bishop retired and another took his place, led to new priorities and a ratcheting up of male-oriented activities within the diocese. When Rogers Harris stepped down as Bishop of Southwest Florida, his place was taken by John B. Lipscomb, a parish priest from Louisiana, and the son of a Baptist minister. At that time Lipscomb was one of the youngest bishops in the Episcopal Church, and brought the perspective of a different generation to the leadership of the diocese.
Lipscomb spent a number of months in Southwest Florida as bishop coadjutor doing his on-the-job-training, as it were, before taking the reins of leadership in the latter part of 1997. During that preparatory time he had had the space and opportunity to observe and learn what was going on in Southwest Florida, so that by the time he was installed as diocesan bishop he was ready to float some ideas about the place of men’s ministry in the life of this community of congregations. In his mind men’s ministry was not going to be “yet another program,” but a well-grounded effort to take the challenge of ministry among men very seriously.
Very quickly one thing led to another. A retreat spawned a task force which then spent a number of months thinking, planning, praying, dreaming, and trying to listen to what God had to say. Gradually the vision for Episcopal Men’s Ministry started to grow, and Jay Crouse was once again in the heart of the fray. He found himself increasingly involved in conversations with the bishop, and out of a deepening friendship and mutual respect they were able to explore what role Jay might play in this venture. What became apparent was a growing realization that this initiative would not have the dynamic needed for success unless Jay was heavily involved in its leadership and direction.
The Challenge Ahead
So, in September 1999 the journey Jay had begun in Atlanta when he had made his New Year resolution about going to the men’s group at his church reached another important milestone. At the start of that month he quit his “day job” and became part of the diocesan team as the first full-time Director of Men’s Ministry. In the months that followed he and the bishop went to work sharing their passion with Episcopal churches, both large and small, up and down the Gulf coast of Florida. Simply stated, it is their belief that raising up men as wholehearted followers of Jesus Christ, and nurturing them spiritually, is foundational if the church is to be healthy and to thrive.
When I was writing this during 2002 and early 2003, men’s ministry in Southwest Florida has not achieved heights of success that are accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets, but is very much a steady work in progress. Little by little a strong beachhead has been established, but clearly it is only the beginning of something much bigger. It has been a little like a stone thrown into a pond, for the ripples are already moving steadily outward from that starting point, and are focusing a growing enthusiasm for ministry among men throughout the wider Episcopal Church – and the challenge is colossal.
For reasons we will explore later, there has been an imbalance between men and women in America’s churches for several hundred years, but during the latter part of the 20th Century the situation deteriorated as far as men and the Christian gospel are concerned. Some polls suggest that on an average Sunday morning less than a third of those worshiping in Christian churches in the United States will be male, and several percentage points were lost during the 1990s alone.
The only way to address such a challenge is to be intentional, and Jay Crouse now finds himself at the forefront of that intentionality. His years in business before becoming Director of Men’s Ministries in the Diocese of Southwest Florida are not being wasted, for the skills he learned about planning and strategizing then are now being put to good use in the diocese – and beyond.
This is what this book is about…
One Man Can Make A Difference
Turning Tragedy to Triumph
A tawny-red dawn had just begun to break across an angry Tennessee sky when I reached Starbucks that morning, but now, as I sat back in my comfortable chair pondering, the clouds had cleared and shafts of golden sunlight streaked the room. A few other early risers had been dribbling in to tank up on their morning caffeine, but I had been so absorbed in a type-written manuscript that I had not noticed them.
What was absorbing me was one man’s account of how, over an elongated stretch of his life, God had set him on an unexpected course so that at that particular time he was in a position to make an extraordinary difference in the lives of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men. As I considered the possibilities, I sipped my cappuccino, bit into my pastry, and disappeared back into my thoughts.
I had first met Jay Crouse when he turned up in a seminary winter session class I had taught several Januarys earlier. A short, dark-haired man with an infectious smile, Jay was full of perceptive observations about the subject we had been studying, and during that time together he had talked about his concern for the hearts of men. His passion that men have a healthy relationship with God the Father through Jesus, the Son, fascinated me, but until now I had not known the twists and turns that had brought him to the point where he was willing to turn his back on a potentially lucrative career, and setting off into unknown territory.
Now that I had read his story the facts were at my fingertips – and I found myself thanking God that Jay and his family had been willing to make major sacrifices to follow where the Lord seemed to be leading. One of the things that had most fascinated me about Jay’s story was that it had been a tragedy in an Atlanta church twenty years earlier that had unwittingly pointed him in so unexpected and fruitful a direction.
I have always been captivated by the way God is able to take the raw material of human life, be it tragedy or be it crisis, and then to transform it from something unsightly into a thing of beauty. It was a reckless act of homicide that had forced Moses to flee into the desert to escape the wrath of Egypt’s king. Yet forty years later Moses was to lead the People of Israel on one of the most epic escapes ever been recorded. Without that hideous murder, which Moses must have regretted a million times over during what seemed to be the wasted years of exile, there might have been no exodus journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.
I had begun to take an interest in the significance of such turning points when, years earlier, an unexpected crisis almost ripped my own life apart. As a result of this experience, I had accumulated a mental storehouse filled with similar accounts of God’s grace bringing blessing out of human failure or misery. The particular tragedy that changed the trajectory of Jay Crouse’s life was the breakdown of the marriage of the pastor of the Presbyterian church he and his wife attended during their first years together.
Jay and Laura were newlyweds, and found the sad circumstances that had led to this heartbreak so difficult to handle that for the good of their own relationship it became necessary to find another spiritual home. So it was that they eventually linked up with a big red-brick United Methodist Church set in one of the pleasant tree-filled suburbs just to the north of the city, the church which also happened to be the congregation in which Laura Crouse had grown up.
Jay was not a Southerner, but grew up in the Buckeye state of Ohio. When he launched his career in business following graduation from college in the late 1970s, he had come south to the boom town of Atlanta. He had been raised in a Christian home, but despite a youthful profession of faith, like so many others, when he got to college he had found that there were just too many other distractions. The spiritual side of his life was put into the deep freeze for a number of years, only to re-emerge at the time of his marriage, and then to intensify with the arrival of the Crouses’ eldest son, John. These changes in his family circumstances had been the incentive that had led them to hook up with that lively Presbyterian church. Then, having settled into this community of faith, their own marital security was threatened by the family disaster that befell the congregation’s leader.
New Year’s Resolution
Not many people keep their New Year’s resolutions, but Jay Crouse is one of life’s exceptions! As their family was put down roots at Northside United Methodist Church, he became aware of a Men’s Prayer Breakfast that met very early on a weekday morning, come rain or shine, before guys headed off to work. He was intrigued. He had never come across anything like this before, so a few months after linking up with the parish, and with some trepidation, he resolved that he would give the gathering a try.
Keeping that resolution was the major turning point in his story. “Those men took me under their wings and led me into an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ,” he wrote. “That wonderful experience gave me a foundation in terms of my own spiritual life and a sense about the power of what happens when men come together in spiritual formation.” Within a few weeks Jay Crouse was hooked, and became one of the regulars who got up early to meet with God over coffee and donuts.
During the next three years, nurtured by a healthy congregation, the Crouses found their faith growing and deepening, with this revolution being most apparent for Jay within the context of the early morning group. As the thread of his life became interwoven with that of the men at Northside, he discovered the richness of male fellowship, the potential and the adventure of being God’s man in today’s world, and the exhilaration that accompanies the challenge to Christian obedience.
The Crouses thought they were settled in Atlanta for the long haul, but this was not to be the case. A reality of today’s world is that often a career advance requires relocation, which is precisely what happened, dragging the family away from all that was familiar in Atlanta, and planting them where they were complete strangers.
Church of the Redeemer
By this point the Crouse family was no longer just Laura, Jay, and John, but two more sons had been added to their quiver. Jay’s new work took them to Sarasota, on Florida’s west coast, and as they came to rest they started looking for another church home. With Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches in their combined backgrounds, these were the natural places to begin, but after a frustrating year they realized they were no closer to finding a congregation where they felt they could really belong. Then a friend said, “Why don’t you try the Church of the Redeemer?”
Jay laughs today about his family arriving at this bastion of high church Anglicanism. “We did not realize that Redeemer was an Episcopal church, but we found that out immediately the service started. It was completely foreign to anything we had ever experienced in our lives before! Although we struggled through the first service, there was something about the church that kept drawing us back. With each visit we became more comfortable, and gradually we became familiar with the liturgy and tradition.”
If it was so unfamiliar to them, why did they stick around? Their answer is a simple one: “We were overwhelmed by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church. We felt God leading us to this new church home.” After initial misgivings, Jay and Laura became enthusiastic pilgrims on the Canterbury Trail, and it was not too long before they were confirmed, finding themselves increasingly at ease in the congregation into which God had parachuted them.
But as much as they appreciated their new church home, Jay was realizing that something was missing. He found himself craving the fellowship of those twenty or thirty other men with whom he had met every week in Atlanta. After giving it a lot of thought and prayer he approached the rector with the idea that they might launch a men’s gathering of some kind at Church of the Redeemer. The two of them mulled the idea over together, and, after several discussions, decided to try out the notion of a Men’s Prayer Breakfast. They publicized what they were intending to do, prayed fervently, and wondered what the outcome would be.
Five or six men showed up on that first Friday morning at 7.15 a.m., some of them with the same mixture of trepidation and curiosity as Jay had had several years earlier when he has tentatively tested the waters with the Men’s Prayer Breakfast at their old church in Atlanta. Fifteen years later, a whole procession of men have come and gone, but each Friday morning around twenty guys will appear for the Prayer Breakfast at the Church of the Redeemer, and on Saturday mornings there is an additional gathering for the benefit of the men who can’t make it during the week.
These fellowships have evolved, becoming the core around which a vibrant men’s ministry at the Church of the Redeemer has developed, and Jay Crouse always seemed to be somewhere close to the heart of the action. Jay thought that all he was doing was being a faithful parishioner, little did he realize that the men’s ministry at Redeemer was part of his apprenticeship. When God had led him from Ohio to Atlanta, and then to Florida, there was a much bigger strategy in the divine mind that Jay had fathomed at that point!
A Call to Ministry?
Almost inevitably, it seems, when an Episcopalian starts getting really enthusiastic about serving Jesus Christ, the issue of ordination is raised. During the mid-Nineties this was an avenue that Jay and Laura found themselves puzzling over. After various conversations and much thought, they participated in various programs put on by the Diocese of Southwest Florida, designed to help people Christians discover God’s will for their lives, especially to see if ordained ministry is part of the divine pattern. As the Crouses worked through the process, talked, and prayed, they could not get comfortable with the idea of ordination. Yet even as the idea of the “collar” receded, there continued to be a growing excitement in their hearts about ministry, and a curiosity about what the Lord might be calling them to do.
This was a period when all sorts of things were happening in the churches throughout the USA, and for the first time in several generations men’s ministry was coming to the front burner and getting a lot of publicity. The Goliath of this reawakened interest in ministry among men was the Promise Keepers movement. In its early years Promise Keepers exploded onto the scene and was highly controversial. It appeared like a meteorite out of Colorado, the brainchild of college football coach and Christian layman, Bill McCartney. It was the right thing at the right time, touching a raw nerve among America’s men, and for a while it seemed that nothing could stop it.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, Jay and the men at the Church of the Redeemer found themselves caught up in Promise Keepers, and gained much from it. Jay, eager as always to get as much from the movement as he possibly could, undertook all the training opportunities that they offered, and that he could fit into his schedule and budget. But while Promise Keepers had whetted his appetite, enabling to focus on the challenge of making Christian men, in Jay’s case it was just another arena in which his gifts were being focused and honed for what God really had in mind.
As Promise Keepers climaxed with huge gatherings all over the country, there were fresh stirrings in the Episcopal Church in Southwest Florida. Changing leadership, as one bishop retired and another took his place, led to new priorities and a ratcheting up of male-oriented activities within the diocese. When Rogers Harris stepped down as Bishop of Southwest Florida, his place was taken by John B. Lipscomb, a parish priest from Louisiana, and the son of a Baptist minister. At that time Lipscomb was one of the youngest bishops in the Episcopal Church, and brought the perspective of a different generation to the leadership of the diocese.
Lipscomb spent a number of months in Southwest Florida as bishop coadjutor doing his on-the-job-training, as it were, before taking the reins of leadership in the latter part of 1997. During that preparatory time he had had the space and opportunity to observe and learn what was going on in Southwest Florida, so that by the time he was installed as diocesan bishop he was ready to float some ideas about the place of men’s ministry in the life of this community of congregations. In his mind men’s ministry was not going to be “yet another program,” but a well-grounded effort to take the challenge of ministry among men very seriously.
Very quickly one thing led to another. A retreat spawned a task force which then spent a number of months thinking, planning, praying, dreaming, and trying to listen to what God had to say. Gradually the vision for Episcopal Men’s Ministry started to grow, and Jay Crouse was once again in the heart of the fray. He found himself increasingly involved in conversations with the bishop, and out of a deepening friendship and mutual respect they were able to explore what role Jay might play in this venture. What became apparent was a growing realization that this initiative would not have the dynamic needed for success unless Jay was heavily involved in its leadership and direction.
The Challenge Ahead
So, in September 1999 the journey Jay had begun in Atlanta when he had made his New Year resolution about going to the men’s group at his church reached another important milestone. At the start of that month he quit his “day job” and became part of the diocesan team as the first full-time Director of Men’s Ministry. In the months that followed he and the bishop went to work sharing their passion with Episcopal churches, both large and small, up and down the Gulf coast of Florida. Simply stated, it is their belief that raising up men as wholehearted followers of Jesus Christ, and nurturing them spiritually, is foundational if the church is to be healthy and to thrive.
When I was writing this during 2002 and early 2003, men’s ministry in Southwest Florida has not achieved heights of success that are accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets, but is very much a steady work in progress. Little by little a strong beachhead has been established, but clearly it is only the beginning of something much bigger. It has been a little like a stone thrown into a pond, for the ripples are already moving steadily outward from that starting point, and are focusing a growing enthusiasm for ministry among men throughout the wider Episcopal Church – and the challenge is colossal.
For reasons we will explore later, there has been an imbalance between men and women in America’s churches for several hundred years, but during the latter part of the 20th Century the situation deteriorated as far as men and the Christian gospel are concerned. Some polls suggest that on an average Sunday morning less than a third of those worshiping in Christian churches in the United States will be male, and several percentage points were lost during the 1990s alone.
The only way to address such a challenge is to be intentional, and Jay Crouse now finds himself at the forefront of that intentionality. His years in business before becoming Director of Men’s Ministries in the Diocese of Southwest Florida are not being wasted, for the skills he learned about planning and strategizing then are now being put to good use in the diocese – and beyond.
This is what this book is about…
1 comment:
Richard:
Thank you for starting this Blog! Men's ministry is certainly an important ministry which has been missing for some time now. In the 60's The "Brotherhood of St. Andrew" was active in the parish where I was Rector in Nashville it was made up of a small but active group o laymen who were really the core of the leadership when we built St. Bartholomew's. It could not have been done without them.
Bob Hayden+ (Retired)
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