Why Men Hate Going to Church, page 12
In fifth grade, Connor is assigned the role of a wise man in the Sunday school Christmas pageant. He has to wear a fake beard and sing a solo. Connor is chosen because he’s one of the few boys who still attend Sunday school regularly. Connor feels like a fool wearing a towel over his head and dyed cotton balls on his face. Somehow he manages to get through his part, delivering his lines with the enthusiasm of a convict headed for the gallows.
So by sixth grade, Connor is tired of Sunday school. He’s tired of being outshone by the girls. He’s tired of being embarrassed. Sunday school makes him feel dumb. Connor would rather do the things he’s good at, like running around on a soccer field, kicking a ball.
That’s where more and more Connors can be found on Sunday morning. Sports leagues are taking over the time slot traditionally occupied by church. This is fine with boys. They know how to win on the athletic field. But in Sunday school, it’s very hard for boys to win. The rules favor children who can sit quietly, read aloud, memorize verses, and look up passages in books. A star pupil is also compliant, empathetic, and sensitive. A long attention span and the ability to receive verbal input from a female teacher also help.
How many ten-year-old boys do you know who fit this description?
Oddly enough, there is a boy like this in Connor’s Sunday school class. Brian is a quiet, obedient kid. He’s a bit of a nerd. Brian is very studious and loves to read. He grew up in a devout home, so he knows his Bible. Brian is not particularly athletic; he’s more the artistic type. He’s kindhearted and empathetic. Brian is very close to his mom.
Fast-forward thirteen years. Brian graduates from seminary and becomes a pastor.
Boys, like men, are visual creatures. They believe what they see. Unfortunately, the Jesus they see in church and Sunday school is warping their impression of God.
Traditional holy pictures portrayed Jesus as thin, pale, and soft, with long, flowing tresses caressing an androgynous face. This Jesus bears little resemblance to the rugged Judean carpenter who possessed the strength to drive out the money changers with a whip. Catholic boys meet Jesus at his weakest moment: half-dead, stripped, head down, and nailed to a cross. (Meanwhile the female icon, the Blessed Virgin, always looks healthy, calm, and serene. Hm.)
But the old holy pictures did get one thing right: they showed Jesus as a man of action—working in the company of men. Sure, they wore robes and had long, flowing hair, but at least they had beards.
In the 1980s, a Sunday school curriculum publisher decided to do some market research. He discovered that most of his product was purchased by married, middle-aged women. So he asked these ladies what they disliked about traditional curriculum. They spoke with one voice: “The pictures!” They thought Christ seemed frightening and unkind. Instead, they preferred to see pictures of a friendly Jesus doing fun things—preferably smiling, with children on his lap.
The publisher immediately called in his artists and ordered them to give Jesus a makeover. Out went the somber Nazarene in the company of men—replaced by a happy Jesus loving children.
The new Jesus was an instant hit. Women rushed to purchase this updated curriculum. Soon every Sunday school publisher had remade Jesus into a smiling Jewish camp counselor.
But there was a problem with the new Jesus. He took wimpishness to a new level—particularly when you compared him to the tough guys boys idolize. The male action heroes of popular entertainment are hypermasculine, scowling, and filthy, with sweat shining off their bulging muscles. Meanwhile, the new Jesus looked as if he’d just come from a spa treatment.
Once again, modern marketing created a Jesus who does not exist. The true Christ of Scripture is more akin to a gritty superhero. As a homeless man, he was no stranger to sweat and grime. As a tradesman, he must have been well muscled. Like a video game hero, Jesus was a fighter who left a trail of mayhem in his wake. He vanquished demons, destroyed stuff, and made people so mad they tried to kill him.2 Camp counselors don’t get nailed to crosses.
Not only was the new Jesus sissy, but most of the new illustrations placed him in the presence of children. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing—as long as you also show Jesus among men. But over the past twenty years, Jesus-and-the-children imagery has come to dominate Sunday school curriculum. In the lower grades, it’s practically the only picture of Christ children see.
All these pictures of the Messiah chillin’ with children have created an unbreakable subconscious link between Christ and childhood in the minds of boys. As young men mature and think of Jesus, their mind’s eye recalls those images of him with little ones. The time bomb is planted.
When a boy reaches puberty, desperate to become a man, the bomb explodes. A voice in his head says, Christ is for children. I’m no longer a child. Therefore, I must rid myself of Christ. We have an epidemic of young men leaving the faith not because they disbelieve, but because they perceive Christ to be a pansy and church to be a symbol of childhood.
Clever marketing has done its damage—by catering to the women who buy curriculum, publishers have unwittingly sabotaged the faith of young men.
Girls are largely unaffected because they never reject their childhoods the way boys do. It’s not uncommon for a seventeen-year-old girl to display stuffed animals, dolls, and baby pictures in her room. Seventeen-year-old boys never do this. Every young man comes to the day when he puts away childish things.3 And thanks to the way we portray Jesus in Sunday school, Christ has become a childish thing.
The real tragedy is not just that we’re losing boys—we are losing the most competitive, aggressive boys. High-testosterone boys destined to be leaders and innovators are checking out of church at a young age. Worldly temptations play a role, to be sure. But many disengage simply because of the way we raise them in the faith. They cannot compete in Sunday school, so they drop out. We teach them Christ is for children, so they drop out.
Thank heaven for high school youth group. That’s been the salvation of generations of young men. I became a Christian at the age of fifteen, thanks to a youth group.
When I was an adolescent, youth group was fun. It was based on the three Gs: games, goofiness, and God. We sang simple songs. We played nutty games. The teaching time was brief but meaningful to teens. I loved it. And it attracted a lot of guys. Church services were sometimes boring, but youth group was always a kick.
In the 1970s and ’80s, youth group music was simple and lighthearted. All you needed was a guitar and three or four songs. The first two songs were usually goofy (“Give me wax on my board, keep me surfin’ for the Lord”). The second two were more serious (“I wish we’d all been ready”). The singing was usually done in about ten minutes. Then it was time for “the talk.” Youth leaders of the 1970s understood guys. My youth leader used to tell us, “Christianity, properly practiced, will result in your death.”
Praise and worship arrived in youth group during the early 1990s. The goofy songs disappeared. Singing time expanded to thirty minutes or more. Songs flowed from one to another. Sometimes the guitarist would pause, waiting for someone to start singing a cappella, “as they felt led.” The whole feeling changed from a fun group activity to an intimate personal time with God. Youth leader “talks” came to focus on sexual purity and relationships.
In the 2000s, the praise band came to youth groups. Today, even small churches are putting together youth rock bands. Big churches are remodeling their youth spaces to offer professional quality stages, lighting, and sound equipment.
The youth meeting is quickly evolving into a music-centric experience. Youth stand in a darkened room and sing love songs to Jesus, led by a praise band of their peers. Singing can occupy up to half of the meeting. This has been great for the musicians—they get lots of stage time. But for the nonmusical, lengthy singing can be a drag.
Girls thrive in this emotional hothouse, but most boys melt and evaporate. Before you know it, you’ve got nineteen girls and five guys at youth group. And there’s not a jock among the guys.
By their senior year, girls are 14 percent more likely to have participated in a youth group. And they are 21 percent more likely to have stayed involved in youth group all four years of high school.4 Congratulations. The stage is set for the female-dominated church of the future.
Youth group was once a thing apart. But it’s quickly evolving into another church service—built upon a familiar format: singing and a sermon. I call it church lite. Youth ministry has become a development league for future pastors and music ministers. Never mind that church lite is a disaster for most boys—and up to 80 percent of kids who are raised in youth group abandon the church by age twenty-nine.5 We do church lite because preachers-and-worship-leaders-in-training need stage time before they’re called up to the big leagues.
Why is a church lite youth group so injurious to boys? It’s a very sedentary experience. It’s a lot of singing, sitting, and listening. It’s designed to stimulate the mind and emotions, leaving the body out of the equation.
What’s wrong with this? Boys are kinetic creatures. Young men need to move. During their teens, boys’ bodies are awash in testosterone. It makes them aggressive, risk taking, and fidgety. Healthy kinetic activity is one of the keys to unlocking a young man’s heart.
Paul Hill, David Anderson, and Roland Martinson are authors of an extensive study of the spiritual lives of young men. They found that young men’s “quest for identity and spirituality is kinesthetic—experienced through their bodies as much as their minds. With only a few exceptions, this was true regardless of race, class or context for the young men in our study.”6
One need only to watch Muslims at prayer to understand the power that body movement exerts in the spiritual lives of men. Yet 90 percent of Christian worship involves standing still or sitting still, either singing songs or listening to a teacher. So unless a young man is studious, sensitive, or musical, he’ll probably find a church lite youth group boring—regardless of what’s being taught—because his body is not moving enough.
The whole youth group package is boy-repellent. Young men feel oddly out of place but don’t know why. Standing in a darkened room for twenty-five minutes, singing love songs to a man, feels pointless at best. Endless “talks” about relationships and purity do nothing to fire their imaginations. Some secretly wonder, I’m supposed to like this, but I’m just not into it. Is there something wrong with me?
Nonetheless, there are signs of hope. Some youth ministry programs are working. Children’s Sunday school is changing—for the better. We will discuss these successful efforts in chapter 21.
Discussion questions for this chapter are available free at www.churchformen.com/guides.
PART 3
CALLING THE
CHURCH BACK
TO MEN
A ROCK CLIMBER CAN SCALE A SHEER CLIFF FACE IF HE HAS ENOUGH handholds and footholds. The holds don’t have to be large—just frequent enough to allow him to get a little closer to the summit.
So it is in church: a couple of masculine footholds can help a man feel at home in a house of worship. But as we’ve seen, churches have been removing the masculine footholds for generations.
So what’s a foothold? Sometimes it’s as simple as this: A joyful woman recently told me that her husband had returned to the church after more than a decade as a lost sheep. Naturally, I asked her why he came back to the fold. “Well, the Sunday he decided to visit, our pastor used a golf club as an illustration,” she said. “My husband is an avid golfer, and he said he could really relate to that sermon. He’s been coming ever since.”
We don’t have to make the church something it’s not. There’s no need for knife-throwing during Communion or hand-to-hand combat during the offertory. Men just need to know they’re valued. Christian laymen have felt ignored or invisible in church for a long time. They want footholds. They want to climb.
How do I know? Churches that reestablish the masculine footholds are seeing men return. These guys are bringing growth, innovation, and dynamism with them.
June 6, 1944, was D-day—the greatest military assault in modern history. The allies were determined to retake a continent that had fallen to Nazi tyranny.
Exactly one hundred years prior to D-day—June 6, 1844—the battle to restore men to the church began in London. The next eleven chapters are the story of that battle—a battle that continues to this day.
Chapter 15
THE BATTLE TO
REENGAGE MEN
AT THE DAWN OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, LARGE NUMBERS of men began disappearing from local congregations. Churches became bastions of female presence and power. Feminized, bookish men came to dominate the clergy. One observer described Victorian preachers as “pallid, puny, sedentary, and lifeless.”
Something had to be done.
The battle to reengage men began June 6, 1844. A twenty-two-year-old farmer-turned-department-store-worker named George Williams gathered eleven friends and organized the first Young Men’s Christian Association, a refuge of Bible study and prayer for young men seeking escape from the dangers of tenement housing and life on the streets of London.1
Williams was not trying to spark a masculine counterrevolution in the church. He simply saw men who needed Christ. But his YMCA grew rapidly, spread to the United States, and became the first of dozens of initiatives designed to relink manliness and godliness. Together these efforts came to be known as the Muscular Christianity movement.
Muscular Christianity was a direct assault on Puritan notions of piety. During the Colonial era (1600s and 1700s), Christians had developed a mistrust of anything physical. Many clergymen felt that recreation, sporting, and competition distracted from spiritual pursuits such as Bible reading and prayer. Physical conditioning was frowned upon because of the corruptibility and impermanence of the flesh. Fun and pleasure were out; serious theological discourse was in.
So imagine the furor when the Young Men’s Christian Association built its first gymnasium in the name of Christ, in 1869. Sixteen years later, the YMCA opened America’s first rural summer camp at Orange Lake, New York. In 1881, a Boston YMCA staffer coined the term bodybuilding. YMCA staff and volunteers invented the games of basketball, volleyball, and racquetball.
The YMCA also reached out to soldiers by serving as chaplains and medical corpsmen during the Civil War. In the late 1800s the Y began offering vocational courses to men, and at one time operated twenty colleges in cities around the country. In an era of strict racial segregation, YMCAs reached out to men of all colors and cultural backgrounds. YMCAs became known for offering wholesome overnight lodging at affordable prices—and during the 1920s and ’30s offered more overnight accommodations than any other hotel chain in America.
Founder George Williams once said, “If a young man says he has lost God, first buy him dinner.” The YMCA’s strategy was to lure young men back to the faith by linking spiritual health to physical well-being. Gymnasiums, camps, and comfortable beds were merely the bait.
Local churches saw the success of the YMCA and began copying it. Today, we think nothing of a church having a gym, but it was considered radical when the first church gymnasiums started appearing in the late 1800s. Denominations began acquiring the rural parcels that are still church recreational camps today. Christian ministers coined a new word to describe the ideal man: masculine.
In the United States, the Businessman’s Awakenings of 1857–58 were believed to be the first evangelistic outreach aimed specifically at males. The great evangelist D. L. Moody cut his teeth at the Chicago Awakening and spent the rest of his career targeting men with his preaching. Athletes-turned-evangelists such as Billy Sunday crisscrossed the country, winning tens of thousands of male converts. Sunday drew criticism from genteel ministers for “doffing his coat, breaking furniture and employing sports metaphors” as he preached. “But others welcomed Sunday’s claim that one could be both a Christian and a ‘real man.’”2
In 1865, William Booth launched an entire church denomination built upon a masculine metaphor. Booth called his church The Salvation Army. Although the Army did not set out to reach men specifically, its structure and discipline has enthralled generations of them. And today, with only six hundred thousand members, the Salvation Army sponsors missions in one hundred nations and helps more needy people than every other denomination combined.
At the turn of the twentieth century, churchmen were alarmed to discover up to 80 percent of the boys raised in Sunday school abandoned it during their teens.3 So a host of ministries sprang up to reach these lads, including Boys’ Brigade, the Knights of King Arthur, and of course, the Boy Scouts. These groups were formed to keep God uppermost in the minds of young men who saw themselves as too cool for Sunday school.
Despite decades of outreach to men, by 1910, US church attendance was still running two-thirds female. Midweek participation figures were even more lopsided.4 Concern over Christianity’s man-gap went all the way to the White House, where President Theodore Roosevelt became a supporter of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a short-lived series of Christian men’s rallies held in cities around the United States in the years before World War I.
THE MANLY MAINLINE?
Believe it or not, the liberal mainline churches were the greatest exponents of Muscular Christianity. These churches (Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ) were the first to build gyms and sponsor sports leagues and wilderness camps. They also focused attention on something they called the Social Gospel: performing good works outside the walls of the church.
