The Men Churches Attract
I’m not so sure that feminists and egalitarians aren’t shooting themselves in the foot when they actively de-emphasize differences between the sexes. In my experience a high percentage of people not only see their spouses as quite different from themselves, but they see more similarities between themselves and their (same-sex) buddies. In fact, their natural tendency is to celebrate those differences and similarities — to have fun with them — to boost their own self-esteem and the self-esteem of those who they love. Even though I’m an egalitarian and hate stereotyping and have a deep need to see the complexity in people, I can still relate to that impulse to see, to try to understand, and to celebrate those differences between the sexes.
At the Christians for Biblical Equality annual conference last year, CBE recognized its inability to attract men, and apparently, would like to correct that weakness. I commend that realization and that desire. I’m not surprised, however, that they’re having trouble. Where does CBE get its inspiration for its behavior patterns and ways of meeting? From church. Their meetings feel like church services. And do most churches have lots of success at attracting males? Not at all. Less than 40 percent of adults in most churches are men and more than 20 percent of married women attend church without their husbands. And CBE is not doing anywhere near that well.
Some observers call men that are attracted to Christian churches “soft males.” They say stallions hang out in bars and geldings hang out in church. They are “tamed men.” In Why Men Hate Going to Church David Murrow quotes Susan Faludi (Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man)concerning her observation of men at a Promise Keepers rally: “If they were plotting the overthrow of a feminist world, they showed no signs of it. Mostly they seemed intent on being mannerly and tidy. In an era when the sports spectators who were the bleachers’ usual clientele left the stadiums littered and vandalized, the Promise Keepers were careful to throw away all their trash. They obediently took notes during the speeches and displayed at all times their Promise Keepers ID bracelets, which looked exactly like the identification bands worn by hospital patients . . . . They were willfully docile, as though, if they just obeyed long enough, they would at last get their reward.”
Murrow: “We’re clean. We’re courteous. We’re conscientious. Above all, we’re nice . . . . Successful Christian living is defined not by the bold actions we take, but by the foolish actions we avoid. It’s not the goals we accomplish, but the sins we escape that make us good Christian men . . . . Real men visit our churches, look around . . . and beat a path to the door.” He goes on to describe the three sorts of men who are missing from our churches: risk takers, fun lovers, and dangerous men (by which he means men who have developed a lifestyle and persona that says “don’t mess with me”). Does your church parking lot fill up with Harleys, Murrow asks, or mud-covered pickup trucks? Does your church have fun that breaks out spontaneously, maybe even in the middle of worship, or do you have a “fellowship” committee that controls the time and place when church members can kick up their heels?
I’m one of those life-long church-going men, an evangelical insider, and such descriptions make me crazy. That said, when I look back over my life and all the churches I’ve attended, I wonder why I have such trouble enjoying church. Of the stuff we say, the way we do things, the behaviors we think are those that make people “spiritual,” much of it seems to me to be designed to make women comfortable and men uncomfortable. Does anyone else have these sorts of thoughts?
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.
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.
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
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.
A spiritual discipline…
Well, I am glad you are practicing that discipline, but how sad that it should be so! I’m sorry.
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.