This year, at Reformed assemblies and synods across the country, we heard a similar concern: There is a shortage of pastors. Churches need men. Presbyteries need men. Mission works need men. Pulpits are opening, congregations are waiting, and the question keeps coming up: Why are young men not choosing the ministry?

In Presbyterianism, a man does not simply announce himself as a minister. His gifts and graces are observed, tested, examined, and confirmed by the church. That has gotten me thinking. Before the church asks why fewer young men are becoming pastors, we may need to ask why fewer young men are being formed into men capable of embracing costly, durable, public, spiritual responsibility.

One Symptom of a Spreading Sickness

In explaining the shortage, some have suggested that the ministry has become too effeminate and that young men who are drawn to masculinity are avoiding the ministry. I think there may be something to consider here, but not quite as it is often stated. Ministry in Reformed congregations is not effeminate. We sing old hymns and psalms. We preach verse by verse through the Scriptures. We catechize our children. We visit the sick and bury the dead. We stand against feminism, egalitarianism, and sinful male dominance. The work of ministry is not soft. It is not a therapeutic hobby for men who do not want responsibility. The ministry requires masculine boldness to pronounce condemnation of sin, and forgiveness through the gospel.

But there is a deeper question hiding underneath the masculinity argument. The wider culture—and that includes the church—has offered young men several false versions of masculinity. Some are told that masculinity is inherently suspicious and dangerous, something to be apologized for, softened, or managed. Others are told that masculinity is mainly aggression, self-assertion, physical dominance, online combat, sexual conquest, or contempt for weakness. Neither of these narratives forms young men for the ministry, let alone forming them for marriage, fatherhood, churchmanship, or ordinary adult life. This is where the ministry shortage begins to look like one symptom of a much broader cultural sickness.

Young men are not doing well. They are falling behind educationally. They are struggling economically. Many are delaying marriage or avoiding it altogether. Many are lonely, even if they do not always know how to say so. Many lack close male friendships. Many are living in a digital world that rewards passivity, outrage, irony, pornography, distraction, and fantasy.

The Rival Liturgies of the Digital World

This is not simply about screentime, though most of us who use social media excessively would be better off pulling away from it for a while. The deeper concern is that digital life forms young men in rival liturgies. It trains them in habits, instincts, reflexes, and desires that run directly against the grain of pastoral ministry. It trains fragmented attention.

Pastoral ministry requires sustained reading, long prayer, careful listening, sermon preparation, hospital visits, ordinary administration, patience with slow sanctification, and long faithfulness in one place and in the same direction. The digital environment rewards speed, reaction, novelty, and emotional spikes. It is difficult to form pastors in a world that is constantly training men not to attend.

Social media trains what can be called spectator masculinity. Many young men consume masculinity without practicing it. They watch men lift, fight, debate, build, preach, hunt, argue, lead, and conquer imaginary worlds. They consume strength as content; they admire courage from a distance. They can talk endlessly about leadership while rarely being responsible for actual people. A man does not become strong by watching strength. He becomes strong by bearing weight.

Further, social media trains avoidance of embodied risk. Ministry is intensely embodied. You have to look people in the eye and sit in rooms where grief is thick. You have to preach in public and correct real people, not avatars. You have to disappoint people, forgive people, and sometimes be misunderstood by people you love. Online life allows a man to curate, withdraw, mute, block, perform, or disappear. Pastoral ministry does not.

Online life also trains cynicism toward institutions. A young man can spend years consuming stories of pastoral failure, denominational corruption, celebrity scandal, theological compromise, and online outrage. Some of that criticism is deserved. Churches have failed, and pastors have sinned. Churches have sometimes protected themselves when they should have protected sheep. But there is a kind of constant exposure to failure that does not produce wisdom. It produces contempt. A young man may become very skilled at diagnosing every problem in the church while never giving himself to the patient work of building anything.

The Influencer and the Pastor

Many young men are drawn to online teachers, influencers, and commentators who appear confident, masculine, and authoritative. Some of those men may say true things, and some may even be useful. But the contrast between the influencer and the pastor is worth considering. Who are young men listening to?

The influencer gathers attention; the pastor gives attention. The influencer performs authority; the pastor bears responsibility. The influencer is rewarded for being interesting; the pastor is called to be faithful. The influencer can move on when the audience turns; the pastor stays with the flock. The influencer speaks to a crowd he does not know; the pastor must speak to people whose sins, sorrows, marriages, children, fears, and graves he knows.

This does not mean that public teaching online is worthless, but we should not confuse influence with office or visibility with shepherding. And we should not be surprised if young men trained to admire the influencer’s platform struggle to desire the pastor’s burden.

That may be one of the most important parts of this whole discussion. The young man who admires theological combat online may not yet be ready to sit patiently with a grieving widow. The young man who loves the idea of masculine leadership may not yet be ready to serve unnoticed. The young man who wants to preach hard truths may not yet be ready to love hard people. The young man who wants to be useful in the kingdom may still need years of ordinary formation. That is not a reason to despise him. It is a reason to disciple him.

The Slow Work of Raising Men

Pastors do not drop out of the sky, and seminary does not create ministers out of nothing. A seminary can train a man in Greek, Hebrew, exegesis, systematic theology, church history, preaching, and pastoral theology. It can refine, test, and strengthen him. But it cannot give him what the church, the home, and the communion of saints can.

Formation begins in the home, with family worship. In our Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, we have never thought that Christian maturity appears by accident. Our children are formed as they see their fathers and mothers open the Scriptures, pray, sing, confess sin, speak of Christ, and order the life of the household around the worship of God. Family worship teaches a young man that the Word of God is not merely something handled by ministers in public, but something that governs ordinary life. Not every Christian home has all of this in equal measure, but ordinarily, the home is one of the first places where boys learn whether Christianity is ornamental or central.

Before a man becomes a minister, he must first become a man. He must learn to show up, tell the truth, work hard, receive correction, keep his promises, control his appetites, care for others, pray when he does not feel like praying, and do what is right when no one applauds. He must learn that responsibility is not the enemy of joy—it is one of the forms glory takes in this fallen world.

We need fathers who train sons to see work, worship, marriage, fatherhood, and church membership as honorable burdens. We need older men who do more than complain about young men. They must know them, invite them in, correct them, and give them something useful to do. We need elders who notice gifts early and test them patiently. We need pastors who take young men with them on visits, let them see the hidden parts of ministry, and show them that the work is costly but good.

Some of those sons may become ministers. Most will not, and that is fine; we need Christians in every lawful calling. But if we are not forming men for ordinary Christian responsibility, we should not be surprised when fewer are ready for extraordinary ecclesiastical responsibility. The church does not merely need to recruit pastors. She needs to raise men.

The author is pastor of Hillsdale OPC in Hillsdale, Michigan. New Horizons, October 2026.