Comments on: The Men Churches Attract

by: CT

Mon, 01 May 2006 03:35:55 +0000

Spiritual discipline is a good thing, especially when emotion fails, which it is wont to do. Personally, I’m more likely to feel close to God in my own study or in the great outdoors rather than in the church. Not that that is so unusual. I think that most pastors would admit that if one’s sole spiritual input is from the church, one is probably not growing fast enough.

I’m afraid this post might have come out a bit more negative than I hoped. It was meant as a think piece to try to figure out — to mention some possibilities anyway — how to attract more men to church. Perhaps the better question would have been how to attract them to Christ. But I don’t know how one would do that without examining the nature, the desires, the ways of thinking, of the people that don’t come.

The church I go to now is the best one I’ve ever joined. It’s a church I’m proud to invite my friends to. It’s a creative church and tries to answer exactly this sort of question. If someone wants to start a ministry to the community and can get others to join in, we try to make “yes” our default answer superceded by “no” only if the Bible forbids it. People are coming to Christ, we’re growing in spritual maturity and in numbers, and it’s an exciting place to be, but we still often have wives joining without their husbands. So even churches that are doing a lot of the right things can still have this obstinate and continuing problem.

What bothers me the most, and yet gives me the most hope (depending on how I look at it), is that institutions or thought systems that cannot solve their problems either get severely modified or they get replaced.

by: SingingOwl

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 04:09:06 +0000

A spiritual discipline…

Well, I am glad you are practicing that discipline, but how sad that it should be so! I’m sorry.

by: CT

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:28:11 +0000

Yeah, I loved your post back then when I left a comment, and I still love it. But loving Jesus sure is a different thing than loving the church. Attending church for my wife, and to some extent for myself, is a spiritual discipline.

by: SingingOwl

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 02:14:43 +0000

Last summer I went on a serious search to find how to make our church more acceptable to men. I may think about this more than average, because I’m a woman and the pastor. What I found did not answer my question, but it did lead to a frenzied rant…err….thoughtful post on what I found. If anyone is interested in reading the post (and interesting comments, IMO) it can be found here:

http://pastoretteponderings.blogspot.com/2005/08/feminization-of-church.html

by: CT

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 05:23:00 +0000

Wow. Nicely said. You mean women don’t just automatically love anything men arrange in church if they are in charge? That’s what they keep telling us.

by: Kathy

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 01:57:07 +0000

In complementarian churches, men and women are both castrated. In my church we force men into hierarchical leadership and reduce women to submission. The worship leader actually avoids songs that are tender or feminine and the whole service is consciously designed to meet the needs of 25 -35 year old men. Obviously, I’m struggling with this. We won’t attract men to church or CBE until we start treating people as whole instead of lumping them into gender internment camps.