There are a lot of questions I have about Christianity in our modern/post-modern era (they are co-existent and conflicting). I have questions about why the marketers are more successful than the pray-ers. I have questions about why a commitment to God’s Word is often seen as incompatible with a growing church. I have questions about why I have questions.
But there is one question that really just will not let go of my mind, and it keeps coming back to me – often keeping me from sleeping. WHY aren’t there more men in the church? I don’t mean sitting in the pews; I mean actively involved. Beyond the paid staff and the elders/deacons, generally men are not too terribly involved in churches. Women decorate; women teach Sunday School classes; women coordinate activities and events; women do far more special music than men do.
I am not a sexist, but when I read the New Testament I don’t see women as the support of the church. It was men who made the decisions; men who were chosen by Christ as apostles; men who wrote the entire New Testament. And the men of the Bible are men’s men. Paul, for all his intellect, took beating after beating and kept coming. Jesus overturned tables and drove people out of the Temple with a whip. Peter and John had callouses on their hands. There are flowery Bible covers, no lace doilies, no effeminate gentlemen in the New Testament church.
So, where did they all go? This is what David Murrow thinks of the current church situation:
[In church] we’re going to sing love songs to Jesus and there’s going to be fresh flowers on the altar and quilted banners on the walls…it would look like the rapture if women didn’t come to the typical church one Sunday.
Murrow, the author of Why Men Hate Church, points out that church has become about things men just don’t care about. Think about it. Why are churches decorated in pastels and pinks? Why is Mother’s Day Sunday more popular than Veteran’s Day?
Where are all the men and their influence? Why do they allow their wives and mothers to run things? To tell them what to wear and how to act?
Where are they? As Leon Podles put it:
“Women go to church, men go to football games.” (The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity)
This question just drives me nuts, because I am a man. I want to be surrounded by men. I want to be working alongside men. While I love the women in my church, I want MEN doing things in the church.
Here is the problem – church is passive. People go to church and just sit there. They don’t DO anything. Women love this kind of activity. Men hate it. Gene Edwards puts it this way:
Here it is. Man’s role in Christianity:
At 8:30 on Sunday morning you put on that horrendous costume called a suit. Then you have a fight with your wife and kids trying to get them off to Sunday School. Then you, man, still screaming, go to the car and “go to church.”
You, man, walk into a church building. (Remember, you are a man.) You are at this very moment fulfilling Christendom’s expectations of you … the converted human male. Now in the building you sit down.
You, man, then listen to an oration which is delivered in the Greco-Roman tradition laid down by Aristotle in a practice which Aristotle called rhetoric. You, man, have now done your masculine job, you have now fulfilled the male role model of a Christian. So now you can get up out of the pew and go home.
That’s it!! That is your role in the kingdom of God.
(Taken from “When the Church Was Led Only By Laymen” by Gene Edwards. Click here for that article)
Women are passive by nature. They enjoy being served. Men like to DO things. I’m not talking about the lazy bum who just wants to vegetate in front of his TV with a bag of potato chips and enough beer to drown his pathetic life. I am talking about men. Men who take charge, who engage and act. Men who hunt things; men who punch things; men who think Rocky is the height of film-making! These kinds of guys might be at church but they’re rarely in church. They don’t see church as 
theirs.
And why should they? The buildings are effeminate; the principles we teach are effeminate. Being a man is almost an offense to Christian sensibility. Even our most famous picture of Jesus, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ is, “…a bearded woman with as much dignity as a movie-house billboard.” (Richard Muehlberger quoted in Material Christianity: Religion and Culture in America, Colleen McDannell)
Men look at church as a chickifying. They’ve been taught that Jesus was basically a girl in man’s clothing and that in order to be a man, you have to essentially act like a pansy. Who wants that?
Now, for certain, the Bible is clear that a Christian man is not a violent man, not an abuser or a drunk. But the men of the church are MEN. God created men to be caretakers and that means they are strong, that they work hard.
Here’s the thing though – unless men step up and lead, the church will continue to be run by the women. As long as we think of faith as something our wives are into but not for us, we will continue to hate church because we’re NOT WOMEN. We allow the lies of our culture to neuter us and then confirm it by our own inaction.
It is politically incorrect to be a man in today’s world and in today’s church, men are expected to follow and not lead. This is baloney of the lowest order. Being a Christian man means being a man. I want to lead a church of men, not chickified boys. I want to lead a church where men stand as men, lead as Christ would lead and build the kingdom together.
Let’s do this thing!
You can read some other great stuff here:
http://www.christinyall.com/articles/men.html
Well, you hit the nail on the head,any one who has read the bible and took it serious enough to actually study it can plainly see that Jesus was a man that the apostals (at least) thought would be the leader they could follow into battle, a far cry from the image that so many churches puts out.
I do not go to church because I do not see so many things like most people are taught and I do not have enough sense to avoid questions that might make them uncomfortable with what they believe. lets face it there are some things that are hard to understand, doe,s it mean pro or con?
As I was listening to pastor Vernon mcgee ( a world wide known pastor) he read a scripture and then he hesitated and said I beg your pardon folks, I don,t know what that means.
If some one with a reputation like his admits that there may be something they do not understand, then why is it that so many who has just started preaching will try to explain it even though they have no idea?
Could it be they think no one else knows anything?
There is probly a lot of reasons why men who believe do not like to go to church and I can understand that very well.
But the other thing is that the Bible says that in the last days men shall be lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God.
And I believe it also says that men will become as women.
At any rate I guess my worry is this, and that is saving my own soul from hell because if i would get what I deserve, thats what it would be.
God bless
Cliff.
you’re right. church has becomes a place for women and their gentleness. a male pastor that i know off has forgotten how to confront. he has this idea that he or we need to love one another. yet he does not want or afraid to confront the wrongdoer. what is becoming of christian male leaders nowadays?
Most of the articles I have read regarding the paucity of male church attendance get it wrong, including the one above. I used to go to church with enthusiasm and strong belonging. But like most men who attend and then quit or never go in the first place it comes down to the mental nature of men. We realise the whole thing is irrational and just plain silly. Men don’t go to church because it is a plain and simple huge waste of time. Women are far more susceptible to the chimeric aspects of christianity; of which there are very few aspects that are not. Church offers no sort of concrete reward that humans can grasp. And quite often church ends up condemning one’s inner humanity and defining inner humanity as innately evil. When, in practice, most people are anything but almost all of the time. Men go to church after being told it will make us better people. When we notice the obvious that this is simply not the case, we make the rational choice of not going at all. We don’t not go because the church is “feminized” or “lacks masculine core values”. We don’t go because it is irrational to do so.
With respect, I disagree and the number of men who make up our congregation would take issue with your position as well. Your description has nothing to do with being male and everything to do with being disillusioned, and it is quite unfair to women, people of faith, and even atheists.
I agree that disillusionment is a factor. But the sourcing of that disillusionment is akin to realising there is no Santa: the promises were hollow and based on mystical irrationality. The only reward church offers is a mystical one in which one must wait until death to receive. And with that sort of limitation, the ecclesiastical authorities have complete freedom to make up any sort of promisory or punitive skein of confusing theology to keep people in the seats and paying tithes. Men have realised that this is a scam and have abandoned it for more satisfactory or productive pursuits. My position is not “unfair” to any one demographic except those who substitute fear for reason and ineffable dreamy dreams for positivist satisfactions. And my position is certainly not unfair to atheists; I am one.
I disagree with almost everything you said, but that goes without saying.
Then don’t be a wuss christian and DISPROVE that every thing I said is true and deal with me on the dialectical battlefield instead of dropping trite phraseology. Or does that “go without saying?”
Name calling is not welcome on my blog. You said your piece, and I disagreed. Leave it at that and walk away civilly.