Leaders I’m Learning From: Joseph Mattera (1 of 5)

I love to learn and I’m really focused on being a life-long learner. If you’ve read this BLOG very often you will have noticed that in many posts I share nuggets I’ve picked up from books, blogs, messages, articles etc.

I do this for several reasons:

1. When I find something that helps me I naturally want to share it with as many others as possible.
2. I use my blog as a bit of a ‘learning journal’ – and if I want to recall something that stood out to me I simply have to run a search on my own blog to find it again.

This week I want to focus on one leader that I’m learning from: Apostle Joseph Mattera from New York City. I met him briefly once but really have been impacted through his blog. I find that he is both practical and theologically sound. He really challenges me to grow in ‘loving God with my mind’ and to make sure I stay grounded in the word. He is not intimidated by political correctness and speaks the truth both articulately and boldly.

In a recent post he shared 15 Reasons Men Don’t Attend Church (very good food for thought):

1. Many churches do not clearly articulate their vision. Men are generally task-oriented and are motivated by vision and purpose.
2. Sunday messages are often more hype than practical teaching with substance. Men are often very cognitive and logical, and crave practical teaching that will equip them to be better fathers, husbands, and businessmen.
3. Sunday worship often involves excessive displays of emotion that make men feel uncomfortable.
4. Sunday worship is often 45 minutes or longer, which is way too long for the average first-time male visitor.
5. Sunday services are too long, with lengthy announcements and other elongated verbiage most men deem unnecessary.
6. The lack of male leadership among the pastors, elders, deacons, and ministry team. The situation is even more exacerbated in cases when the senior pastor is a female, although this is improving in the corporate world. Most strong men have a hard time submitting to a female executive leader in a church setting. I am told there are some rare exceptions to this, although I have never witnesses one firsthand.
7. Lack of male bonding, fellowship, and men’s discipleship.
8. Men in marketplace leadership are not affirmed. Many businessmen feel their leadership gifting is not recognized in the local church; they are only viewed as cash cows to fund the local church.
9. The feminization of Christianity has caused numerous men to see Jesus and Christianity as wimpy and effeminate.
10. The Anabaptist concept of pacifism has infiltrated the Evangelical world and emasculated men’s innate desires to both defend and protect their families and country. For example, “turning the other cheek” in Matthew 5 has been misunderstood to mean that a man cannot go to war for his country and defend his family when they are threatened with bodily harm. This cannot be what Jesus meant, since going to war was expected in the Old Testament. Romans 13:4-7 teaches that magistrates act as God’s ministers when they use the sword to protect their citizens, and Jesus Himself resisted evil forcibly when He drove the money changers and thieves out of the temple. Thus, we conclude that “turning the other cheek” means that Christians should not fight merely if they are insulted, since being slapped on the cheek represents no mortal threat but is only a way of insulting the victim.
11. Many churches emphasize a feelings-centered subjective relationship with God rather than objective principle-centered faith based on the Word of God. Although feelings are important, it should also be emphasized that faith is first, then correct feelings will follow.
12. Most of the church celebrates Mother’s Day and ignores Father’s Day, due to family fragmentation and divorce. Often, boys are brought up by single mothers and do not even know how to relate to their earthly fathers and other male authority figures.
13. Many of the words in contemporary songs emphasize the church as the bride of Christ, thus emphasizing the believer’s role as the receiver in the relationship (a feminine position much like the wife in a marriage) instead of balancing out the songs with hymns and lyrics that emphasize Christ as King and His church as His army called forth to conquer the nations for Him.
14. In urban centers, especially among African-Americans and Hispanics, many boys are raised in fragmented families by single mothers, thus making it harder to disciple them when they come into the church. Generally, a woman does not have the capability to balance nurturing with strong correction to properly raise up a boy to manhood. Thus, often boys are undisciplined and not used to the confines of structure and male authority. The exception is when a boy is either in the military or team sports, in which the male coach becomes a surrogate father exerting authority in the boy’s life.
15. Many men (businessmen in particular) will attach themselves to a successful enterprise exhibiting a spirit of excellence and fiscal responsibility. This is a far cry from many shabby storefront church operations, in which the pastor runs a mom-and-pop shop with autocratic control without fiscal disclosure, accountability, and proper church government.