The Measure of Jesus
With the growing number of young men taking interest in faith, we sat down with Erik House, who leads Travail, to ask a pressing question: How do we help young men see greatness in Jesus, not just “greatness”?
A recent report put it this way: “Young men are leading a religious resurgence — Christianity is starting to make a comeback in the U.S., and that revival is being led by young people.” This surge should be celebrated. In an age when faith is often dismissed or privatized, the sight of young men confessing Jesus publicly is both surprising and hopeful.
But confession alone doesn’t tell the whole story. The rise sparks another question: what kind of Christianity is being embraced? Is it shaped by the Sermon on the Mount, or by the allure of power? Is it animated by sacrificial love, or by the desire to win? The momentum is real — but so is the risk that “Christian” becomes another badge of cultural identity rather than a costly way of life with Jesus.
That’s the very tension Erik House has been wrestling with — and the reason we sat down to talk.
Erik’s Response:
I agree that young men are starved for something real. That much is clear. Evidently, they are under the impression that greatness can be bought, streamed, or performed. Greatness is being sold to them as image, influence, and control. Whether they know it’s hollow or not hardly matters. When you’re starving you’ll eat whatever is set before you. But I believe the danger is not the hunger itself.
My whole life, I have watched churches try to feed this hunger with numbers. Bigger events. Bigger budgets. Bigger claims of success. Baptisms, decisions, offerings, mission trips, all measured by volume. All of this is typically reported as evidence that revival is here. That’s how I grew up anyways, and I’m not sure much has changed these days. Maybe that’s just the skeptic in me. But here’s what is true: Numbers can measure crowds, but they cannot measure resurrected hearts. They can count decisions, but they cannot count faithfulness.
Jesus modeled for us this way of faithfulness. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams was right when he said, “The Church is not called to be successful, but to be faithful.”
Revival has never been about filling rooms. Revival is resurrection. It is dry bones standing up and breathing again. It is enemies reconciled and the forgotten restored. Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” Real revival is always difficult, because it demands death before life.
Jesus named greatness in a way that still tends to offend us. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. None of this builds platforms or moves algorithms. It does not sell. It does not generate passive income. But it does form people who look like Jesus. This is what we call “saints.”
As I alluded to before, the risk is plain. Young men who are restless for meaning will reach for the boldest version of faith they can find. Sometimes that is Jesus. Sometimes it is the same old will to power in Christian clothes. Bonhoeffer stripped away this illusion: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That is the measure. Not a surge of energy. Not influence. But a cross-shaped life.
My hope is to help men shift their sight, to move from chasing greatness as the world defines it to seeing greatness in Jesus. Not tribal badges. Not affiliations. Not proving you are on the “right” side of some argument. Faithfulness. Christlikeness.
What does that look like? It looks like formation that is hidden, shaping who you are when no one is watching. It looks like communion that refuses isolation, brothers who bleed together on the narrow path. Most men are a bit uncomfortable, but willing to hear this out up to this point, not knowing fully what they’re signing up for. It sounds heroic. But this is where almost all check out: To follow Jesus looks like turning your strength toward the least—the poor, the unseen, the broken—because if you cannot find Christ in them, you will not find Him at the altar. And it looks like the cross of forgiveness, always the cross. The late catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar put it this way: “It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
This matters now more than ever, because young men are the most at risk of mistaking noise for resurrection. They will be handed politics and told it is faith. They will be handed tribalism and told it is church. They will be handed clout and told it is greatness. And unless we name it for what it is—dust and ash—they will settle for it.
Let us be careful here not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These guys are hungry. The hunger itself is good. It is the opening for something real. If it is trained on Jesus, it could form a generation that looks more like Him than the noise around them.
“What young men need isn’t another side to belong to but another life to enter. They will see the greatness of Jesus when we refuse to trade Him for cultural clout, when we live as if His kingdom is real, even when it costs us.”
So back to the question—how do we help young men see the greatness of Jesus? First, we break the cycle in our own lives. The cycle where political loyalty is baptized as faith, where tribal identity passes for discipleship. That game has gone on for far too long. What young men need isn’t another side to belong to but another life to enter. They will see the greatness of Jesus when we refuse to trade Him for cultural clout, when we live as if His kingdom is real, even when it costs us.
Jesus stood on a hillside and told the crowd who was blessed. Not the strong. Not the popular. Not the victorious. But the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart. And he forgave his enemies. This is not self-improvement. This is not identity signaling. Greatness is not clean. It is not safe. It is not popular.
Greatness is a cross, carried all the way to death. Death and resurrection. That is the Jesus metric.
Erik House is a husband, father of three young daughters, and the founder of Travail, a discipleship project based in Phoenix. Drawing on his background in theology and psychology, and his experience in ministry, Erik helps men pursue a cruciform life. His passion is for a third way—a way of following Jesus that resists culture wars and recovers reconciliation and the ancient rhythms of prayer, community, and love for the forgotten.
