My wife sometimes tunes into a certain Christian radio station when driving. She reports that the other day, she was listening in when the presenter introduced a topic of conversation “There are far fewer men than women in the church, why do we fail to attract men and can we come up with creative ways of attracting men.”
Let’s stop there for a moment because there are perhaps two obvious issues that jump out at us. First, if your response to a lack of men is to start talking in terms of “creative ideas” you might just have stumbled onto one reason as to why men struggle with church. We will come back to that later. Secondly, we might want to think about the risk in terms of being desperate to attract. I think there should be a right concern to be attractive, winsome etc but that can spill over into desperation, the anything goes approach to trying to drag people in and keep them in without thinking about whether it makes any difference to them. For example, two suggestions offered were “stuff to do with football” and including “live wrestling in the worship service.”
Well, I have been in church contexts where scraps have broken out. I take that as a healthy sign that we are engaging the very people we need to reach. However, the idea of bringing fighting as sport into worship, simply to attract others seems very out of line with what we are meant to be doing. In terms of football, well I tend to drop in football, or more specifically Bradford City illustrations into my own sermons but that reflects something natural about who I am. There’s nothing worse than the forced reference to football from the vicar who clearly is more into rugby and cricket.
Some of us might respond by saying that we don’t particularly have a “men” problem in our churches. Generally speaking, there has been a reasonable ratio of men to women in the churches I’ve been involved in. However, it is perhaps fair to say that even still I’m not sure that many churches do well at reaching working class men.
I would also suggest that there are some issues in terms of how we set things up and do things. For example, I’m not alone in observing that this starts in the kids work where children are expected to spend at least half the time on doing craft activities. I was pleased to drop in as a helper with one of our kids teams the other week and discover that the planned session involved giving some factual background to the Bible passage, talking about it, applying it and then building a temple out of Lego (we were looking at Haggai 1), My wife as a secondary school teacher has also observed over the years that a lot of youth age discussions try to draw out answers about feelings when quite a few of the boys do better responding to straight factual questions along the lines of “what does the text say.”
There may therefore be things we want to look at that are less about “how can we create ways to attract men” and more about “are there some things we don’t need to do that we could stop doing or do less of?”
In the end, I’m simplistic about men’s ministry and reaching men. My advice is that we simply get to know other men, non-Christian men, hang out with them, be their friends and introduce them to our friend Jesus..
Faithroots 