Pastor Matt Chewning | Act Like Men Conference | 2026

You Have the Spirit. Do You Have the Power?

Pastor Matt Chewning | Act Like Men Conference | 2026 · Crosspoint City Church · 57:06 Originally published by Crosspoint City Church on YouTube. Watch it on their channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CrosspointCity

Matt Chewning walks into a conference hall packed with men, looks around, and tells them their worship was weak. Not their theology, not their marriages — their singing. "I ain't angry. I'm just honest," he says, and then doubles down: America is raising men so soft they can't take hard words. Six minutes in, he has either lost you or he has you.

The sermon that follows is more careful than the opening suggests. Chewning takes the men to Acts 19, where Paul meets a dozen disciples in Ephesus who have never heard of the Holy Spirit, and builds a distinction he spends half the talk defending from John 14, John 20, and Acts 1: the Spirit in you seals your salvation; the Spirit on you supplies power. That's his thesis, and it's the reason for the rebuke. He isn't claiming these men aren't saved. He's claiming they're saved and exhausted — running a spiritual war on natural strength.

Where it bites is Galatians 5. Chewning's read on the flesh is that it is never satisfied and always adapting: you fix your marriage and something else grows up behind you. He illustrates it with a hunting trip where he shot the smallest hog on the property and felt cheated, until the guide explained that the small ones are the ones you have to kill, because ten sows and one boar become a million hogs in five years. Most of us, he says, are negotiating with the hog. Talking to it. Feeding it a little.

His answer comes from Luke 11 — ask, seek, knock — and he refuses to let it stay abstract. Not one prayer. Not a pastor praying on your behalf. Not a conference. He says flatly that a men's conference will send you home empty, which is a strange and honest thing to say from the platform of one.

Two places to keep your guard up. The in/on distinction is genuinely contested — plenty of careful Christians read Acts as a transitional narrative and hear a second-blessing theology here they'd want to argue with. And Chewning's tone occasionally slips from bracing into crude, including a throwaway line about affection between fathers and sons that lands worse than he intends. Take the sermon; you don't have to take the packaging.

The question it leaves open is the one he asks last: what kind of man will you be when nobody's watching you raise your hand?

Worth Sitting With
Chewning says we have "a lot of effort" and no power. Where in your life are you working hardest and moving least?
He argues the flesh is always adapting — that fixing one area lets another grow. What grew while you were busy fixing something else?
What would it cost you, specifically, to pray the way he describes: out loud, on your knees, more than once, in front of another man?
He says a conference can't do this for you and neither can your pastor. Who have you been quietly outsourcing your asking to?
Bring It to Your Group

Read Galatians 5:16–25 together, slowly. Then have each man name one thing on Paul's list he has been managing rather than killing — and one man in the room he'll ask to pray over him about it this month.

Matt Chewning is a pastor who planted a church in Boston. This review covers his message "Pastor Matt Chewning | Act Like Men Conference | 2026," published by Crosspoint City Church on July 29, 2026. Full video and more of their work: https://www.youtube.com/@CrosspointCity