Marked Men For Christ Marks 25 Years Helping Men Confront the Wounds They Hide

This Christian men’s healing and discipleship ministry has served 19,800 men worldwide through its 44-hour Phase 1 Experience.

DENVER, CO, UNITED STATES, August 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Men everywhere carry wounds they never talk about. The failure they cannot admit. The rage they do not understand. The shame they have hidden since boyhood. Those wounds do not stay buried. They leak into marriage, children and work. Most men have become good at hiding them. What many have never found is a safe place to put them down.

“Strong men can carry heavy things for a long time. That does not mean they were meant to carry them forever,” says Don Carey, director of development for Marked Men For Christ.

By 2001, Steve “Spice” Spicer, the Mountain West regional manager at Procter & Gamble, and John Lager, a Capuchin friar, had spent a decade watching men listen, nod and go home relatively unchanged. Driving back from a Christian event in Kansas, they prayed. “The Holy Spirit moved, and the answer we heard from heaven was to go co create it with God,” Spice says. That December, they started Marked Men For Christ.

“We needed to get below the chin, below the neck,” Lager says. “Men were in their heads, not much in their hearts.”

The Phase 1 Experience is organized around five wounds: Deceit, Fear, Anger, Sadness and Shame. During the intense 44 hours, men move through those wounds at a series of stations, doing work many have spent years avoiding. Anger often surfaces first. Underneath it, sadness and shame can remain buried. Men describe the experience less like a conference and more like surgery on something they had forgotten was broken.

The change can show up first on a man’s face. Spice tells of an elementary school teacher whose 8 and 9 year old students said he looked taller. He had not grown. He had set down decades of shame. He stood tall.

It shows up at home, too. Men who arrived barely able to say their father’s name because of the pain inflicted have left ready to forgive their dad. Marriages that had gone quiet have started over. Families are often the first to notice.

Questions about cost and faith come quickly. Marked Men For Christ does not turn a man away for financial reasons. In the United States, about 40 percent pay nothing; worldwide, the figure is closer to 90 percent. The ministry has never been in debt. “Jesus didn’t pass the basket,” Lager says. Men who went through Phase 1 largely fund the work by giving back to fund the NEXTMAN.

The ministry has also been ecumenical from the beginning. Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals, Reformed Christians and men from churches with no label sit in the same room. A man does not have to have his theology sorted or his life cleaned up first. The ministry stands on the Apostles’ Creed. If a man can say, “I believe in Jesus,” the door is open.

In the USA and Europe, Phase 1 staff serve without pay. Nearly 1,800 volunteers give up time with their families and invest their own resources to serve men they have never met. Every staff member is a Phase 1 graduate who returned to serve.

Ask what it costs to wait another year, and Spice does not soften it. “Time is the only commodity you can’t buy more of,” he says. “If you wait, nothing will change; you’ll be the same guy. If you don’t wait, God can restore you, and you can live the next year pouring out patience, kindness, and Jesus’ love to your wife, your children, and your coworkers.”

If you are the man in this story, carrying something you have never been able to set down, there is an experience built for exactly that, almost certainly one near you this year. You do not need the money. You do not need the right words. You only need to show up. Lock in, and the Lord will do the rest. Find the Phase 1 Experience nearest you and give your family the man they have been waiting for.

## About Marked Men For Christ ##

Marked Men For Christ is an ecumenical men’s healing and discipleship ministry founded in Colorado in 2001. Its mission: as a Holy Spirit led global ministry, we build **STRONGER men for JESUS CHRIST** through ongoing transformative experiences and authentic relationships. Its flagship is the 44 hour Phase 1 Experience, followed by ongoing brotherhood. In 25 years, 19,800 men have taken part. The ministry stands on the Apostles’ Creed.

Don Carey
Marked Men For Christ
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