Looking for a Few Good Men : Seen any guys in church lately? Ministers are going out of their way to appeal to those who believe religion lacks relevance in their lives.

You won’t see Allen Humphries in church. Although he’s a role model in his community, he’s at home, watching the Raiders on Sunday morning. Now in his 50s, he left organized religion behind with his childhood. “It’s difficult to be some place at a given time each week,” he explains.

Pastors have heard that one so many times they’re now treating religion like a new sport.

Saturday nights, the Rev. Isaac Canales heads to high school football fields to bless the game. He has converted five coaches along the way.

“Deep inside, men like football,” says Canales, pastor of Mission Ebenezer Family Church in Carson. “That means I have to go where the guys are, ‘cause they aren’t going to come to me.”

It’s not that most men have anything against church. Some actually write a weekly check for the collection basket, then drive the family to the door. It’s just that going inside makes them feel a little uneasy.

“That’s not what real men do,” explains Andrew Kimbrell about what runs through a man’s mind when people start singing hymns and holding hands. An atheist who converted to Christianity 10 years ago, Kimbrell now worries that his 11-year-old son doesn’t have any spiritual heroes.

Religion is right up there with crying in public, he says. Actually, crying rates higher--it is allowed on the battlefield. Kimbrell defames such fossilized ideals in his new book, “The Masculine Mystique” (Ballantine).

The timing seems right. His study of men just might catch the same wave that has already swept up the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., this fall and the Promise Keepers men’s ministry that started five years ago in a Colorado basketball arena and gained national momentum.

While men may have a new interest in religion, you’re not going to see them crowding into church on Sunday morning. Not yet, anyway. Women and children still outnumber the men, but pastors and others with vested interests are putting on the pressure.

*

For Humphries, a sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, church simply isn’t a priority right now.

“My dad was not a guy who went to church until his 50s, around retirement,” he says. “I’m evolving that same way.”

As a teen-ager, he was a leader in the Methodist youth program. That changed in his 20s. “We let worldly things overcome the spiritual. We want the nice house, the car. To get those things, you have to commit yourself.”

Plenty of people would say Humphries is doing all right without church. Four years ago he founded the Black Peace Officers Assn. of Los Angeles County; now there are 400 members. They promise to be mentors in their community, volunteering their time for civic service. “I believe I am a very spiritual person,” he says.

Some ministers and other regular churchgoers want more. And as Canales proves, they are getting pushy about it.

William Crane is a sculptor and a Vietnam veteran who gave up on organized religion 30 years ago.

“In Vietnam, I told God and the church that I’m in charge now,” he recalls. Then, three years ago he started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the basement of St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood. Eventually he ventured upstairs. This fall is his first anniversary back as a registered parishioner.

St. Paul pastor Bill Edens has been there just over one year. “When I came, I could see that the men were not involved,” he recalls. Women took charge of Scripture reading, administering communion and other ministries.

He encouraged a men’s spirituality group that now has about a dozen regular members. He helped arrange a men’s retreat last month, led by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, who introduced Christianity to the secular men’s movement started five years ago by poet Robert Bly. In his book “Iron John: A Book About Men,” Bly retrieved classic male heroes--warriors, kings, outdoorsmen--and used them to create a new romantic identity for men; Rohr appeals to Christian warriors, kings and outdoorsmen.

Upcoming men’s events at St. Paul include a Promise Keepers Retreat (Catholics are now adapting the evangelical Christian program, which emphasizes leadership and responsibility in the family).

“Men have spiritual needs that go unmet,” Edens says. “There is a time for men to gather, worship and talk about spiritual concerns, as men. They need a place where they feel safe, a chance to express weakness and vulnerability.”

That isn’t what church has provided. “Traditionally in church, masculine virtues are belittled: achievement, purposefulness, the need to make our way in the world,” he says. “For most men, church seems a feminine environment. Compassion, gentleness, fidelity, receptivity to the word of God are the values expressed.”

For all of Edens’ efforts, change has been slow in coming. One recent Sunday he made an appeal from the sanctuary. “I’d like to speak to the men of the parish,” he began. “We need you to get involved.”

The response has been minuscule. And even if it had been seismic, it would affect only the men inside the building. As for those outside, it seems more women are taking up the challenge.

One St. Paul parishioner and mother of two refers to her husband as a “holiday Catholic,” since that is the only time he goes to church. “He doesn’t object to going, but he’s always got an excuse for why he can’t,” says the woman, who asked not to be quoted by name because it would cause problems at home.

Her husband quit Sunday school around age 12, but now she is nudging him back into the fold. “He does say he’d like to come to church when his life settles down. Right now he has too much to do.” Her response? “So do I, but I choose to make time for this.”

Lately, she says, the challenge has gotten tougher. “Our two [children] are asking, ‘Why do I have to go to church when Daddy stays home and reads the paper?’ I’m just starting to broach this subject with him.”

The Jewish and Muslim faiths don’t have this problem. For generations, men have been the dominant presence at religious services. Muslim men vastly outnumber women in the mosque. Jewish men and boys dominate the Sabbath service. “It is the women, the subjugated group, who are pulling together, bonding,” says Rabbi James Rudin, director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

*

The Rev. Lydia Waters of the Crossroads / Njiapanda Methodist Church in Compton makes sure that the men of the congregation stand on the sidewalk Sunday mornings to greet everyone passing by. “A lot of men who haven’t been coming to church see our men outside and get led in,” she says.

Men are now the focus of a Crossroads worship service the first Sunday of each month. They line the walls of the room to symbolize their role as protectors. They lead the boys who receive communion to emphasize their place as mentors and role models.

Some doubt the staying power. They won’t stay long this time, for the same reasons that have always kept men out of church, says Herbert Goldberg, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in men’s issues. “This new men’s movement is a content movement,” he says. “That doesn’t mean it has any roots. Church is the institution men turn to when all else is lost.

“Men are groping to anchor themselves at a time when they are more and more disconnected. They have little or nothing going on a personal level. If religion provides a structure that generates closeness and community, it could serve a useful purpose.”

But he doubts it. “Men are isolated, competitive, success driven. But they don’t need spirituality. They need bonding.”

Women who refuse to take that for an answer ought to hear what religious pollster George Barna of the Barna Research Group in Glendale has to say. His surveys show that women’s efforts to get men back to church, even for the sake of the children, usually don’t work. “We’ve concluded that women see the burden of value-driven parenting on their shoulders,” Barna says. “Husbands say, ‘Church is your issue, not mine.’ ”

Over the past five years, several polls conducted by the Princeton Religious Research Center have asked men and women the same question: “What is the importance of religion in your life?” Sixty-one percent of women rate it very high; only 47% of men rate it as high.

Pollster George Gallup Jr., who directs the center, says that could change if churches become more relevant to men’s lives. “There is a lot of searching going on; men and women are looking for meaning. Right now, men don’t have a place to talk about how God is present in their lives. But it is distinctly possible that if the church can provide a place, the new vitality in organized religion will be the surprise of the next century.”