Why Men Hate Going to Church - David Murrow

A few weeks back (April 16th) I was privileged to be able to attend a Men's Ministry Forum put on by Outdoor Connection Ministries an organization that helps churches put men's ministries together. The special guest was David Murrow of Church for Men author of the book Why Men Hate Going to Church. David's talk was great. Here are some notes that I took during his presentation.

He started out by showing a slide listing two columns of attributes. On one side were words like strong, hard worker, and focused. On the other side were words like caring, loving, and gentle. Murrow asked us to look at both columns and tell him which column we thought best described the characteristics of Jesus Christ. Most people answered the caring-loving-gentle column. Murrow confessed that he had gotten the two columns from chapter one of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. One column described men and the other column (the one that everyone selected) described women (and apparently Jesus).

Murrow said that in order for men to be involved in church, they feel that they must change 80% of who they are. Murrow shared a quote by W. Edwards Deming, "The system you have is perfectly designed to produce the results you are getting." So what results are the Church getting right now when it comes to engaging men at church?

• There are 11-13 million more women in church than men
• 1/4 of all married church-going women go to church without their husbands
• 90% of boys abandon church by the age of 20
• 4% of single men aged 18-34 go to church
• 10% of churches have an ongoing men's ministry

(I wasn't able to get the sources for any of these statistics - if you are going to use them, please look them up before you do!)

In mainline churches the gender gap is as high as 66% female and 33% male. There aren't similar gender gaps in any other major world religion. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism have nothing like the gender gap that exists in Christianity. Islam is certainly not experiencing this disparity. In the US, mosque attendance is overwhelmingly male. The early church didn't experience this kind of gender gap. It was a movement of fisherman that dropped their nets and followed Jesus. Murrow added, "we can't even get men to drop their remotes for 90 minutes to come to church."

Murrow shared some things that we must keep in mind in building our churches to make sure that they are men friendly. Women tend to have the edge on men in these areas:

1. Reading - Many Sunday School classes involve taking turns reading passages of scripture. Many men have trouble reading. Men are diagnosed with reading disorders at 4 times the rate of women.
2. Expressing ideas - Women tend to be more able to express ideas than men. Research has shown that women speak 20,000-25,000 words per day and men only speak 7,000-10,000 words per day.
   
3. Finger dexterity - Women are generally better at turning those thin Bible pages than men are.
   
4. Bible Knowledge - Women are 29% more likely to read the Bible than men and 70% of all Christian books are bought by women.
5. Socializing - Again a generalization that tends to be true is that men are not as good at socializing as women are.
   
6. Hugging - Men generally aren't comfortable in "hugging churches." Men tend to have more personal space issues than women.
7. Singing - Murrow added that contemporary worship may be more men friendly because they can sing and not be self-conscious of their voices as they are drowned out by the drums and guitars.
   
8. Showing Emotion - Women have less barriers to this than men do. Men are taught from an early age not to show emotion.
   
9. Holding Hands - Again a personal space issue.
   
10. Sitting still - Men have 10 times the testosterone level that women do and it is at its highest level in the morning (when we tend to have worship services).
    
11. Attention span - The average US male attention span is 6-8 minutes. Women have an average attention span of around 20 minutes. However, men are more deeply focused for those 6-8 minutes than women are for their 20 minutes.

If church sometimes operates as a system that is designed for women to win and men to lose, when does the losing begin? Murrow believes that it begins when men are boys in Sunday School. Sunday School is a system that values girls over boys. For all of the reasons already listed above, it is hard for boys to win. Many churches also show children images of Jesus that all but guarantee that boys will lose interest in Jesus. We show images of Jesus with children or Jesus with lambs. Jesus didn't spend a great deal of time with children or lambs, but there seems to be overly abundant artistic evidence that He did. Murrow asked the question, why would the disciples have gotten rebuked by Jesus for trying to keep the little children away from Jesus if it was Jesus custom to spend time with children. This was towards the end of His ministry. Wouldn't the disciples have known that Jesus liked to spend time with children by then? Apparently then it wasn't a common occurance for Jesus to hang out with children. According to Murrow, boys need to see pictures of Jesus hanging out with other men.

Murrow pointed out the growth of the phrase, "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," as particularly damaging to the Church. One hundred years ago if you said that, it wouldn't have made sense to anyone. Today, however, it is probably the most used phrase to describe salvation. Women's movies feature a heroine who finds a happy relationship with a wonderful man. Men's movies feature a hero who saves the world against impossible odds. We tend to speak of Jesus as if we are the heroine of a women's movie instead of speaking of him as the hero of a men's movie. Jesus is the hero who saved the world against impossible odds.

Churches need to keep this information in mind. If you want to have a growing church, you must appeal to both men and women and not set up systems that guarantee that men won't want to come to your church. The churches with the smallest gender gap are non-denominational 55% women and 45% men and they are also the fastest growing churches. A recent study released found that churches with a large number of men tend to be growing churches. (pdf)

Murrow was careful to point out that his book is not about creating male-dominated churches. It is more about restoring a balance that has been lost.

Another point, that I heard elsewhere about this issue... There is a growing number of areas that were formerly male territory that are being marketed specifically to women now. Places like Lowes or Home Depot are putting on events specifically for women - "Do it herself workshops." You can purchase pink power tools, screwdrivers, and hammers. However, to my knowledge there are no similar movements to get men involved in scrap booking. The point of this is that it appears than women can do masculine, but men don't do feminine. The application for churches is that we need to create male friendly environments and if we can do that successfully, men and women will come. Women want to go to church with their husbands and sons. If they need to "sacrifice" the flowers all over the building and the pink pew cushions to have that, they are willing to do that!