Kingdom Men Rising: Teen Guys Bible Study Book is Tony Evans adapting his adult Kingdom Man material for high schoolers. It is eight sessions, published by Lifeway, and it is built to be run in a group rather than read alone.
Check which edition you are buying
This is the thing to get right before you order anything. The ISBN on this listing, 9781087757797, is the study book only. The teaching videos are a separate purchase. Lifeway also sells a newer bundled edition, Kingdom Men Rising: Teen Guys Bible Study Book with Video Access (ISBN 9798384538011), which includes the streaming.
That matters because the videos are not optional garnish. Each session is built around a five to ten minute video with Tony Evans and his son Jonathan, and a group leader who ordered the wrong edition will find that out on week one. If you are buying for a group, buy the video-access edition or buy the streaming separately.
How it is put together
Eight sessions, each with group discussion questions and personal study to do between meetings. There is a Leader Guide in the back, which is genuinely useful if the man running the group has never led one before. Session titles include “Chosen for the Challenge,” “Get Up,” “Get Going,” and a closing session on identifying key influencers.
Jonathan Evans carries a lot of the video teaching, and he is good with this age group in a way his father, for all his gifts, is not always. The Moses and Gideon session is the strongest of the eight: two men who argued with God about whether they were the right person, which is exactly where a sixteen-year-old lives.
An earlier version of this review said the study builds on David and Paul. That was wrong, and we have corrected it.
Where we would want a leader thinking
This is a book about biblical manhood, and Evans is more specific about what that means than we are. Called to Better holds that men and women are equal in worth before God and that Scripture describes distinct roles for them. We do not go further than that, because we do not think Scripture does. Evans does go further, laying out a fuller picture of male leadership in the home and church.
That is a real position held by serious Christians who take the Bible seriously, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But a leader should know it is in there rather than discovering it mid-discussion, and should be ready for a teenager to push back. Where Evans is describing character, courage, responsibility, keeping your word, he is on ground almost everyone shares. Where he moves to authority and structure, hold it more loosely and say so.
Who it is for
A youth leader or a dad running a small group of teen guys, roughly ages 14 to 18, over eight weeks. It is not a solo read; strip out the group discussion and there is not much book left.
It will work best where the guys already know each other a little. The sessions ask for honesty early, and a room of strangers will give you eight weeks of one-word answers.
Kingdom Men Rising: Teen Guys Bible Study Book on Amazon (study book only)