Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. About half are not church members but heard about the parties through friends, said Mr. Vendors hustle hot dogs and “Predestined to Fight” T-shirts. Roughly 100 young men, many sporting shaved heads and tattoos, attend fight parties at Canyon Creek near Seattle, watching bouts on the church’s four big-screen televisions. Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like. Its proponents point to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine showing that mixed martial arts participants suffer a lower rate of knockouts than boxers. Lane got his hands taped by Pastor John Renken of Xtreme Ministries. Robert Brady, 49, the executive vice president of a conservative evangelical group, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, agreed, saying that the mixed martial arts motif of evangelism “so easily takes away from the real focus of the church, which is the Gospel.” Many black churches have chosen not to participate.īefore the Cage Assault bout in Memphis, Mr. “I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men.” “What you attract people to Christ with is also what you need to get people to stay,” said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle. Yet even among more experimental sects, mixed martial arts has critics. Nondenominational evangelical churches have a long history of using popular culture rock music, skateboarding and even yoga to reach new followers. Thompson said, “I realized that a person can fight for good.” Renken’s who until recently had struggled with unemployment and who fights under the nickname the Fury.
“I’m fighting to provide a better quality of life for my family and provide them with things that I didn’t have growing up,” said Mike Thompson, 32, a former gang member and student of Mr. “You have a lot of troubled young men who grew up without fathers, and they’re wandering and they’re hopeless and they’re lousy dads themselves and they’re just lost,” said Paul Robie, 54, a pastor at South Mountain Community Church in Draper, Utah.įighting as a metaphor has resonated with some young men. The sport is seen as a legitimate outreach tool by the youth ministry affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches. Several put the number of churches taking up mixed martial arts at roughly 700 of an estimated 115,000 white evangelical churches in America. These pastors say the marriage of faith and fighting is intended to promote Christian values, quoting verses like “fight the good fight of faith” from Timothy 6:12. The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.” “Compassion and love we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle.
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries and into the image of Jesus in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.
Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low.