Key Points:
- United Methodist Men and its scouting ministry held its first in-person meetings since 2017 from July 31 to Aug. 3 at Epworth-by-the-Sea, a United Methodist retreat center in Georgia.
- One main concern was reaching young men, especially at a time when online influencers appear to hold so much sway.
- Conference attendees attended workshops and worship services to build rapport and plan for the future.
- The Rev. Rick Vance was revealed as the new leader of UM Men.
The sudden crash of thunder made the lights blink off and on in Strickland Auditorium, a few minutes after a group of earnest men hoping to connect to younger generations were themselves thunderstruck.
Mother Nature gets credit for the rainstorm. Two young pastors, the Revs. Joshua Swanson and Peter Kwon, jolted the men with a couple of clips from the 2016 documentary “The Red Pill.” The documentary spotlights the men’s rights movement and problems facing young men and boys.
One clip shows “Fresh and Fit” podcast host Myron Gaines and his guest Andrew Tate, who faces rape and human trafficking charges in the U.K. and Romania, discussing their outlook on the differences between the sexes.
Tate and Gaines are hugely popular online “influencers” of young men.
Here’s one of the more sedate rants, with profanity modified:
“Life for a man is harder than life for a woman,” said Tate as shown in the documentary. “We need to have a lot of (crap) to be an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup. If you're a truly beautiful (woman) you don’t need anything else.
“I've been on boats in Dubai with 19-year-old Moldova girls. The guy who bought that boat needed $100 million. That (woman) — makeup.”
The logic is ridiculous, but its influence on young men is undeniable.
“We say we want to reach young men, and we want to reach young people, and we don’t know anything about (Tate and Gaines),” Kwon said. “A guy who has 10 million followers online who we’ve never even heard of. Another guy who has millions of views online, and you've never even seen their face.”
It was a sobering moment at the 2025 National Men’s and Scouting Ministry Gathering July 31 to Aug. 3 at Epworth-by-the-Sea, a United Methodist retreat center. Very few of the attendees were as young as Kwon and Swanson, who are 33 and 34, respectively.
The younger Swanson is the son of Bishop James Swanson, who has been serving as interim top executive of United Methodist Men since 2017. Longtime United Methodist Men staffer the Rev. Rick Vance was announced as the elder Swanson’s successor at the conference.
“Stepping into this role is not just an administrative transition, it’s a sacred trust,” Vance said. “When men are spiritually equipped, they become catalysts for healing in families, strength in churches and hope in communities.”
The men’s gathering — held for the first time since 2017 because COVID-19 forced the cancellation of the last gathering — featured various takes on how to reach men of all ages.
Speakers took it from several angles, including reaching boys, corporate executives and active laymen. The potential of the Fresh Expressions movement was acknowledged.
“You have to get some younger people to remain sustainable, right?” said Jeff Fuller, abundant health coordinator for the North Georgia Conference, who led a workshop on strengthening men’s resilience and promoting healthy fatherhood.
“For so long, there’s been a cookie-cutter model,” Fuller added. “We have got to do things creatively. We’ve got to be like Jesus, a part of the community and world, and not expect community and world to automatically come to where we are.”
Educational sessions were held about questions of faith, social justice, mentoring, local church leadership, parenting, conflict, digital discipleship and healthy living. There was ice cream on Saturday night.
There was also fiery preaching and an address by Roger Krone, the chief executive officer of Scouting America, formerly known as Boy Scouts of America.
Bishop Swanson said he thought the conference was “pretty good.” There were 98 registrants.
“I am obviously disappointed in the attendance,” he said, “but I knew the attendance would not be great numbers … because it has been eight years since our last national gathering, also because of disaffiliation of many our churches. The other part was because many of our annual conferences and episcopal areas currently do not have UM Men presidents.”
Krone is known as “chief scout executive” of Scouting America. The organization works to instill 12 principles in scouts. These principles, known as the Scout Law, are to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
That’s a world away from the views of influencers like Tate and Gaines.
“We have a mission statement, and it’s to teach youth to make ethical and moral choices over their life,” Krone said. “You might think that we just take kids out camping … but during those experiences and during our meetings, we actually have four goals in mind.
“That’s to develop character, citizenship, leadership and personal fitness, and those four categories are woven into everything that we do, how we organize, how we train, how we equip, how we divide up the tasks that have to be done that weekend.”
Scouting offers an alternative to the obsession of many young boys’ lives: time spent on electronic devices.
“If they’re not involved in an after-school activity, they are at home … in the basement on a small screen device, hopefully just playing a video game,” Krone said. “We know that’s not completely true. We have seen the trends on online pornography, which is horrible, but the biggest trend today is kids sports betting.”
Some boys have wracked up to $30,000 in credit-card debt for their parents from betting on sports, he said.
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It’s not only boys who are in crisis, Fuller said. He led a workshop on strengthening men’s resilience and promoting healthy fatherhood.
“As men, we’ve always been taught to suppress our emotions,” he said. “Now we’re at a point in time that the heart attack rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the depression rate is up and all of that.
“We’ve got to find a way to allow men to be the humans that they are, and to get in touch with a lot of things that have prevented men from transitioning from boys to men.”
There was something for businessmen, too.
Randy Ross, a former church pastor, says he was called as a pastor to corporate America to advocate for corporate social responsibility He has consulted for firms including McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Berkshire Hathaway. Ross made the argument that businesses don’t exist solely to make profits.
“Now, I do agree that if you don’t make money, you will soon be out of business, but I don’t think the purpose of business is to make money,” Ross said. “I think the purpose of business, at its very heart, is to improve the human condition, to make life good.”
Ross said the marketplace is “where the next great revival is going to take place.”
“What I want to do is talk about corporate social responsibility. … The reality is that people like to do good business with businesses that do good, which gives us a tremendous opportunity as Christians in the marketplace to be light in dark places.”
Bishop Swanson closed the conference with a prayer voicing hope that the attendees will go home fired up to build their ministries for men.
“We come here, and we get full of God’s grace,” the bishop prayed.
“My hope for the General Commission on United Methodist Men, my hope for us in scouting, my hope is that … we’ll be able to dream bigger, and we’ll be able to dream better, and we’ll be able to dream more.
“We can’t be satisfied with where we are,” he added. “We’ve got to begin to challenge ourselves and have some God-sized visions, some God-sized dreams that allow us to hear what God is calling us to hear. He’s got to turn our pain into power.”
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digests.
