Posted on 10/23/2011 6:23:05 PM PDT by hiho hiho
Gathered around the coffeepot in a church fellowship hall on a fall Sunday, a gaggle of men are talking with animation and passion, joking and bragging in the way of males. The topic? Football, of course. "How 'bout them Devils! D'ya see that pick six in the third quarter? Amazing! Hey, Joe, sorry about your Dawgs! Maybe you'll get 'em next week, if they don't fire your coach first!" In a few minutes, many will wander into worship, the married ones joining their wives. As the first hymn begins, some of them will stand and keep silent guard, staring mutely into space as the women beside them sing.
What is it with men and church? We men are famously outnumbered, to be sure. According to a recent survey, we make up only 39 percent of the worshipers in a typical congregation. This is not just because we die earlier and leave the pews filled with the sturdier gender. The percentages hold across the board, for every age category.
Even when we do show up for worship, we're often not particularly happy about it. This is not breaking news, of course. Study after study has shown that many men who name themselves as Christian feel bored, alienated and disengaged from church. When we drag ourselves to church, researchers say, it is not for ourselves but to fulfill the obligations of our roles as son, husband, father or pastor.
Why are men and the church often at odds? Sadly, many of the answers are as insulting as they are misguided. Some researchers are persuaded that the antipathy of men to church resides at the hormonal level. They argue that men, loaded as they are with testosterone, have a proclivity to impulsive, risk-taking, occasionally violent action—exactly the behavior disallowed in the soft world of worship. Given this theory, what enticements can the wimpy church possibly offer us men when we compare it to the joys of hiding away in a man cave, stuffing our maws with pizza and beer as we watch Da Bears and heading out after sundown to rip off a few wheel covers and rumble in the Wal-Mart parking lot?
Others propose a more political and historical explanation, namely that centuries of male control of the church have yielded to an ineluctable force of feminization. Pastel worship, passive and sentimental images of the Christian life, handholding around the communion table and hymns that coo about lover-boy Jesus who "walks with me and talks with me" have replaced stronger, more masculine themes. One man reported that the first thing he does when he walks into a church is to look at the curtains. One glance tells him all he needs to know about who's making the decisions.
Really? The feminine erosion of the church? As David Foster Wallace said in a different context, this is an idea "so stupid it practically drools." Even sillier are the proposed masculine remedies. One website suggests "Ten Ways to Man Up Your Church," beginning with obtaining "a manly pastor" who projects "a healthy masculinity." This patently ignores strong women clergy, of course, but it also denigrates the capacity of men to recognize and respond to able leadership regardless of gender or stereotypes. I recently visited a church with a chest-thumping manly pastor. After worship, one man in the congregation confided, "I feel like I'm on the set of a Tarzan movie." As for "manning up" worship, I know that if my church begins handing out NASCAR jackets with the bulletins, I'm going to look for a different church—maybe one with lace curtains.
Still, the numbers don't lie. Men are staying away from church. The reasons are undoubtedly complex, but perhaps a clue can be found in a Christian group that attracts men and women in roughly equal numbers: Eastern Orthodoxy. A cynic might say that men are attracted to Orthodoxy because it is conservative, with an all-male clergy, many of them sporting beards. The finding of religion journalist Frederica Mathewes-Green, however, is closer to the truth. She surveyed male adult converts and discovered that Orthodoxy's main appeal is that it's "challenging." One convert said, "Orthodoxy is serious. It is difficult. It is demanding. It is about mercy, but it is also about overcoming myself." Another said that he was sick of "bourgeois, feel-good American Christianity."
Yes, some churchgoers are satisfied with feel-good Christianity, but I think many Christians—women and men—yearn for a more costly, demanding, life-changing discipleship. Perhaps women are more patient when they don't find it, or more discerning of the deeper cross-bearing opportunities that lie beneath the candied surface. Men take a walk or hang around the church coffeepot talking in jargon about football: another disciplined and costly arena of life in which people sacrifice their bodies and their individual desires for a larger cause that matters to them, at least for the moment. Near transcendence is preferable to no transcendence at all.
No. No sign of peace, no guitars, either. Just an organ at most masses, except when they do a mass by Mozart or another composer. Then mostly it’s strings.
You have to look but there are churches that preach the Word. I am one that exposes the cult of liberalism and simply goes from one end of the Bible to the other. Speaks the truth and is stuffed to the rafters.
Pray for America
:)
I’m not one to talk about football either but I’d prefer that to a lazy, uncreative, emotive Bush bash at every staff meeting as I experienced in the last office I worked in.
You need to be more surreptitious... well, at least I though I was:)
I’m glad there are more choices available. I live in a small city (~90K) and we have 3 Catholic churches. The most conservative one is actually on the local University campus. It has a latin mass once in a great while but I’ve been away each time. Hope to experience it one day.
Personally, I quit going to church because 2 out of 3 sermons in almost every church I’ve ever been were variations on a theme: Why God wants you to write me a check. Why you’ll be bless if you tithe. Why you’ll be blessed if you write me a check above your tithe. Why tithing isn’t enough. God needs your dollars to spread his word, give more. Since I saw almost no change from church to church, I gave before I found a preacher who just said, “Stick’m up” on Sundays.
Wit aside, I’ve never attended a church who’s predominate theme wasn’t money money money.
If I may my Pastor Steve Smothermon of Legacy Church here in Albuquerque just did and excellent Sermon on why men don’t go and how the church has failed in reaching out to men and what God really expects of men who serve. The sermon which is part 9 (10/16/11) in a series called ‘We Are’ can be watched here in the Sermon Archives:
http://www.legacychurchnm.com/index.cfm/PageID/1589/index.html
Does the priest face the congregation while saying the Mass or is his back to the people as it used to be?
The worst horrors for me were the folk masses in the 70’s. I despised them.
When did Christianity become Muslim, ‘cause I'm reading alot of “everything wrong with the Church is women's fault”
Which leads me to ask do you really feel this way about your Mother? Your Wife? Your Daughter?
Does any man here actually consider that the feminizing of the Church began because women know that the Lord isn't against them?
Women were made as helpmate to Man. Not property, not Servants...Helpmates.
Men need to grow a pair, and actually start acting like Men, and not d#cks.
You will love the Latin Mass! My granddaughter sings in the Latin Mass Church downtown in Chicago, and they sing in Latin, of course. The Church is crowded at every Mass.
I think feminization steeped in libreralism has alienated men from their own communities. In the past such engagement offered at least the reward of feeling appreciated. I think that incentive is severely weakened among all community institutions and this is by design.
We just had our “tithing” sermon at our church today. Talked more about all of the good things that are happening and can be done with our gifts than about any “guilt trip” about it. Preacher says that it had been two years since he gave his last “tithing” sermon - and that sounded about right.
Oh, and when the plate goes around, it is always announced that “If you are a guest here - just let it pass by you. You are our guest.”
At the church I grew up in, the pastor figured that to have men come it had to be on time and short services. Services were 50 minutes long. Perhaps a 5 minute sermon! 10 minutes in between the services to move the hundreds of cars in and out (five services). I now appreciate longer services - but the lack of punctuality bugs me a lot.
A lot of men get out of the habit of worship when they’re young and single because the teaching about sexual abstinence outside of marriage is too hard for them to accept. When they get married and have kids, yes, maybe then they’ll go back. But maybe not. The years have passed and they’re out of the habit. It’s hard to get back into that state of submittedness, unless there’s a real wake-up call, or unless the preacher is really, really anointed and knows how to touch hard hearts.
My church is evangelical presbyterian. Best I can tell, we are about 50-50 in the gender ratio. Straight uncompromising gospel every Sunday. Membership is booming.
Liberals are welcome there, but I haven’t met one yet.
Bookmark for tomorrow morning.
Men do not put up with other men telling them how to worship.
The priest does not face the congregation in the Latin Mass. It’s just as it was before Vatican II.
It’s not anti-female. The church used to be male dominated. It smelled of rich incense, the buildings were solid, not decorated with fru-fru. In the last 50 years the church has become feminized, out went the chanting, incense and solid-oak paneling — in came love songs, scented candles and yes, curtains.
I have noted that when something bad happens men need a formal dignified ritual. At 9/11 fireman escorted the bodies of the fallen colleagues out with great care and ceremony. The great unceasing ritual at the Tomb of the Unknown reeks of testosterone. On the deck of the Titanic the true men did not fight the women for life jackets, they changed into their dinner jackets to meet their inevitable fate with dignity. This is since of order is something that males understand and need.
If the premise of this article isn’t drivel, as some have suggested, I think you’ve hit on the problem.
Catholic or Protestant, the Mass or the Lord’s Supper, too many church meetings have drifted away from Christ.
The Lord’s Supper is the gift and work of God, given to the Church as the central organizing principle for corporate worship. It centers us upon the Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucifed, so that in all things He may have the preeminence.
Any church that ignores the Lord by neglecting the Lord’s Supper is bound to become cold. And for Protestants that usally means their worship either drifts into arid moral discourse or it turns to the excess of fleshly exuberance that is the modern praise format centered upon musical entertainment.
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