(My article for the July edition of Heartbeat Africa. Here’s the video our team produced on the same subject).

“Two thirds of active missionaries are married couples. Another third are single women. The rest are single men.”

This is not exactly a statistic, per se. It’s a sentiment, and sometimes a joke, expressed by mission leaders, mission recruiters, and most recently, by a bunch of twenty-something singles in my living room. It is a sentiment that reveals a striking truth about missionary work today: There are very few single men choosing to go.

The real statistic is this: For AIM and other similar organizations, somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of all single missionaries are women. For every 10 singles sent, only 2 are men. The disparity is great enough that there’s a noticeable gap on many mission fields. The men are missing, and a cadre of single women have taken up the work, sometimes doing jobs that a male presence would be better suited to.

Why is there such a difference between men and women who choose missions in their single years? And does it matter?

Statistics and demographics are a very human way to measure something. Maybe God is simply directing more women into missions than men—kind of like the way He calls more people from Michigan than New Jersey (or does He?) But maybe there’s something behind the trend. Maybe there’s something that our churches and mission agencies can do differently. And maybe there are some men out there who need a wake up call.

The majority of singles entering mission work today are young, part of the generation known as the ‘millenials’. I am neither young or single, so in order to gather some insight on the issue, I enticed a half-dozen of these millenials over to my house with the promise of a home-cooked meal and an evening of stirring, and possibly unsettling, conversation. The group consisted of three single men and three single women, ranging in ages from 22 to 30, all active missionaries in Africa.

A lot has been said about this generation, and I’m not the first to wonder if something’s gone awry. There’s been plenty written, and even preached, lamenting the diminishing participation of men in modern society and the church. Mark Driscol, head pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle puts it bluntly (as he usually does), “The least likely person to see in church is a twenty something single male.” Coincidentally (or is it consequently?) this is also the least likely person to see on the mission field.

A Cultural Tide

Distracted. Entitled. Over confident. Under motived. Apathetic. If you were to dig for adjectives that describe the millennial generation, these are some of the common descriptors that would surface. I laid this out, somewhat timidly, to our discussion group and asked them if they agreed. I was surprised to hear such a resounding ‘yes’.

Increasingly wired, millenials have the world at their fingertips, entertainment at every turn, and expectations that things ought to be easy—easy as a click. Despite massive virtual connectivity they are growing more bored, disconnected, and apathetic. The men in particular extend their adolescent pursuits, and both men and women delay marriage. They change jobs more frequently, attend church less religiously, yet “post” more prolifically about what’s wrong with the world.

Driscol sees this in the church: “The notorious sin of Christian guys today is complaining about things rather than doing something.”

Benjamin Brophy, in an article entitled “My Generation’s Disease”, put it this way: “Millennials want to change the world, but they sit and wait for that world-changing opportunity to be handed to them. The cliche is that we want to save the world, but we want to do it from behind a computer screen.”

Our focus group offered the recent “Kony 2012″ campaign as an illustration. The video documentary exposing warlord Joseph Kony and the atrocities he’s committed in Central Africa went massively viral in 2012—largely due to the moral outrage of millenials.

“So many were worked up,” our group said, “but all they did was share the video. They had no idea this was going on for years, and now, no one talks about it anymore.”

“That’s not lasting change,” one of the young women offered, “That’s just making yourself feel better.”

I asked the group if the world could actually be changed with a click. Yes, they said, as millenials have witnessed these things first hand in their lifetime. But then I asked them if disciples could be made with a click.

“Taking time to build relationships, be in people’s lives, and understand a culture, is much harder than clicking a button,” one of the women argued. “I don’t know a lot of young people who would be willing to walk into a situation like this. This is really hard. Discipleship requires real relationships, commitment, and sacrifice.”

Could this be part of what’s affecting millenials’ participation in missions, and if so, is it a greater factor for men? Are the men just more apathetic than the women? To even try to answer that, we had to first define what manhood is, or rather, what it’s perceived to be.

The narrative on gender roles has changed for this generation, and our group had a lot to say about the effects on their age-mates from what the culture and the media teaches about manhood.

In the past 50 years, women in the West have made great gains. Today, more women than men graduate from college, with better GPAs, and greater confidence and drive than the men in their classes. They are more likely than men to go to graduate school and many even out-earn their counterparts in the marketplace. Women are being told that they can achieve anything, and many are pursuing that promise. Men, on the other hand, are being told something of the opposite.

As women have gained more equality, men have been devalued. Referred to as the “feminization of the culture”, we are in the midst of a cultural shift where men are perceived as less and less important in the scheme of things. The media takes this perception and codifies it. And then a generation taught through mass media grows up believing it.

As Owen Strachan writes in The Gospel Coalition blog, “Men today are in trouble. Guys have been taught by countless sources and media outlets that they are inherently dumb, ignoble, and inferior to women. Guys hook up with girls, shirk responsibility, take only unserious things seriously, and generally neglect the great opportunities before them.”

Is it possible these millennial men are simply living up the low expectations culture has laid out for them?

Our discussion group was quick to lay some blame at the door of fatherless homes. Once an anomaly, absent fathers—resulting from divorce or neglect or even overwork—are now an epidemic. As a result, scores of children grow up without balanced role models or instruction on gender roles. Boys learn about manhood from the media or their peers, but not from their fathers.

Driscol says this leads to a kind of “extended adolescence”, where boys remain boys well into their twenties. “In a consumer culture, manhood ends up being defined by what you consume, not by what you produce. Men become self-absorbed consumers, of gadgets and games and women. What kills young men is the thinking that this extended adolescence is acceptable and unavoidable.”