Lifeway Research released data last month showing that formal men's ministry attendance in Protestant churches grew 29 percent between 2019 and the end of 2025, which is the single largest increase of any named church program during that window. Women's ministry grew 6 percent over the same period. Youth ministry grew 4 percent. Small groups overall grew 12 percent. Every other traditional program either declined or stayed flat. Men's ministry was the outlier and nobody who pastors men is surprised.
The growth is not happening in the big conference model. The large stadium events like Promise Keepers, which peaked in the mid 1990s and collapsed in the late 2000s, have not come back at scale. What has grown is the small, consistent, Tuesday morning at 6am kind of gathering. Barna Group reported last fall that the median men's ministry in a growing church now meets 38 times a year and has about 14 men in consistent attendance. Five years ago the median was 18 meetings and 9 men. Meetings are more frequent. Attendance per meeting is higher. Retention year over year is better.
The reason this is happening is specific and worth taking seriously. Men in America are lonelier than they have been at any point in the post war measurement period. The 2024 American Perspectives Survey found that 28 percent of men under 40 report having no close friends, up from 11 percent in 1990. The Surgeon General's 2023 loneliness advisory singled out men as the highest risk demographic for the physical health consequences of social isolation. Church is one of the few remaining social structures that asks men to show up regularly, make commitments to other men, and talk about things that matter beyond sports and work.
The content of men's ministry has also shifted in a meaningful way. Ten years ago the typical men's group was built around a guest speaker, a breakfast, and a motivational sermon about being a better husband or father. The current generation of men's groups is built around sustained biblical study, confession and accountability, and practical theology. The books being read in men's groups are different. Instead of general Christian living titles, the current rotation includes Tim Keller on work and identity, Dane Ortlund on gentleness, Ray Ortlund on marriage, and more classical theology texts like Packer's Knowing God and Bonhoeffer's Life Together.
The Black church has a specific version of this story. The National Baptist Convention and the Church of God in Christ both reported double digit growth in their national men's departments between 2020 and 2025. Local churches like Liberty Baptist in Chicago, Friendship West in Dallas, and Mount Zion in Nashville have added second and third men's cohorts to handle demand. Pastor Frank Reid at Bethel AME in Baltimore said in a recent interview that his 6am Saturday men's group went from 22 men in 2019 to 94 in consistent attendance at the start of 2026. The waiting list is another 40 names.
Catholic men's ministry has grown at an even faster clip in percentage terms, though from a smaller base. The Knights of Columbus reported 18 percent growth in active membership since 2019, the largest five year gain since the 1950s. Exodus 90, the 90 day spiritual exercise program that grew out of Indianapolis, now has an estimated 60,000 participants annually compared to fewer than 5,000 when it launched in 2014. That Man Is You, another Catholic men's program, grew from 7,000 to 22,000 participants over the same window.
What Pastors and men's ministry leaders consistently point to as the engine behind all of this is confession and specificity. Men's groups that grew asked men to say out loud the specific sins they were fighting. Most men in the country have never done that in any setting, not with a therapist, not with their wives, not with their best friends. The first time a man sits in a room of other men and says the specific thing he has been hiding, something shifts. He comes back the next week because the burden is not carried alone anymore. That is not a new insight. It is in James 5. But a generation of men had never experienced it and now they are.
The growth has created a practical problem for many churches. Most pastors were not trained to run a high intensity men's ministry. Seminary curricula have not caught up. Southeastern, Gordon Conwell, Trinity, and Fuller have all added elective courses on men's ministry formation in the last three years, but the pipeline of trained leaders still lags the demand. Churches are increasingly relying on lay leaders who have come up through the program and been discipled into teaching roles. That is healthy in the long run. It is bumpy in the short run.
The one cautionary note worth sounding is that men's ministry can easily tilt toward a cultural performance of masculinity rather than a spiritual formation of men. The good versions of men's ministry are quiet. They are built around reading Scripture together, confessing sin together, praying for each other's specific situations, and showing up for each other in hospital rooms and courtrooms. The versions that over emphasize beards, axes, meat, and culture war are not growing at the same rate. The ones that do the quiet work are.
The trend line projects forward. Lifeway's forward estimate is that Protestant men's ministry attendance will grow another 15 to 20 percent through 2030. That would make it the most consistently growing category in American church life. For pastors wondering where to invest energy in 2026, the numbers are telling a clear story.