Daniel Taylor, while accepting the increasing  list of names given to the trends in the confusing expressions of contemporary Christian spirituality, suggests another name.  He notes, “The labels have proliferated: nones, dones, nonverts, New Atheists, unaffiliated, unchurched, dechurched, and exvangelicals, and the like.  I would like to add one more: yearners.”  Taylor chooses to see yearners not as skeptics.  “They live,” observes Taylor,” in the borderlands between committed faith and full disbelief – just inside the border or just outside, only God knows which.”  They are restless, while often enduring psychological and spiritual pain.  Taylor states, “yearners are earnestly searching for a meaningful relationship with transcendence.” He quotes Blaise Pascal, “Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”

Yearners fall into two categories: First, committed yearners, who affirm faith in God but struggle with doubts and secondly, uncommitted yearners, who cannot commit to faith but still believe in God.  The key component is  each category is commitment.  There will be the usual doubts.  “For many believers,” Taylor maintains, “faith is the melody and doubt, the counterpoint – sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant. Genuine faith is compatible with doubt and hard questions, yet it is not compatible with a lasting unwillingness to commit.”

Taylor points to,  yearner-poet Anne Sexton, as an example of a  struggling yearner.  Referring to the title of one of Sexton’s books of poetry, “The awful Rowing Toward God,” Taylor focuses on the word, “toward”- “a rowing toward God, yearning for God, and for the embrace and restoration of God, but always ‘toward.”‘ A few years before her death, she said, “There is a hard-core part of me that believes, and there’s this little critic in me that believes nothing.”   

This is a description of many spiritually minded men in our churches, struggling with the cultural label of “toxic masculinity. In their rowing toward God, men who are yearners “need to be shown understanding and compassion as well as encouragement to accept the risks and rewards of commitment to the God of the Bible.”

“The Christian church can do better by its yearners.  Taylor gives the following suggests.  First,  change the vocabulary. Doubter, “suggests a disease that can be ‘cured’ through proper ‘treatment.'”   Secondly, “before you ‘solve’ their problems, respect their stories.  Thirdly, treat a yearner as a Thomas, not as a Judas.  “Thomas stayed committed despite his understandable doubts…….A yearner seeks to be a committed Thomas.  Fourthly, “live out the Bible that you say you believe.  Consider the way you live could be the evidence of faith a yearner is seeking.”  

What can we learn from Taylor’s description of a “yearner” in relating to men and their spiritual journey.  Men who are “yearners” have a desire to know God at a soulful level, beyond  believing and doing.  Does God  really live within me or am I looking at the Father from a detached distance.  Yearner have a hunger to come home to a safe place with the Father. 

We must remember “rowing toward God” will necessarily  mean having doubts as a man makes his way home to the Father.  Men in the church will often hide their doubts out of shame or fear of rejection.  We need to honor and respect the stories of other men.  This means paying  loving attention to their stories. We need male “soul mate.” to journey with them. May the “yearners” see love in us.  “No one has ever seen God.  But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us” (I John 4:12).