Saturday, May 12, 2012

Mother’s Day Packs Church Pews


An article in today’s USA Today newspaper highlights what many regular church goers already know, especially it seems in the smaller, evangelical-leaning churches: it is hard to get men in the pews on a regular Sunday. From the piece:

"It seems that on Mother's Day, moms say, 'Let's all go to church.' But on Father's Day, dads say, 'I'm going to go play golf,' " says Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, the Nashville-based Christian research firm that conducted the survey.

"Christmas, Easter and Mother's Day have become the three days of male holy obligation when their wives and mothers are able to guilt them into the pews," says David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going to Church.

There was a point not many years ago when my household was the only church-going family in our neighborhood.  Lest you misunderstand – no one was attending faith services anywhere except maybe the Church of the Holy Beach Sand or Our Lady of the Weed Wacker.  But that’s changed within the last three years or so. We even have our church's Associate Pastor living two houses away from us (now I need to be on my best behavior, at least outdoors!).

I don’t know, was male-avoidance a problem in the 1st century Christian church as well?

5 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Here's a depressing thought: perhaps men only go if they get to be in charge, providing an explanation for the scriptural directions and traditions of forbidding certain functions to women. Maybe it is in our nature - and the favoritism toward men actually an accommodation. Like affirmative action.

james said...

There seems to be no way of knowing about the early church, but IIRC numbers on men and women attending showed similar asymmetries a few centuries ago. I wish I could find the reference...
I wonder if the Orthodox kept some kind of records of who showed up at services.

Erin said...

"Church of the Holy Beach Sand...Our Lady of the Weed Wacker" Cute. In college, your alternative was Bedside Bible Church.

I found that women outweighed men in college campus ministries, sometimes almost 2:1. And most of the guys at our InterVarsity meetings were engineers, so they weren't exactly the best conversationalists...

Sponge-headed ScienceMan said...

Erin - it was "Church of the Holy Springs."

Sponge-headed ScienceMan said...

No, correction, "Church of the Inner Springs"