A while ago Dash brought up a perennial point of debate in churches these days: the “man problem.” I remember there was another big discussion of it a couple years back when Methodist pastor Donald Sensing complained of the same thing. And although Lee seems to doubt whether the problem actually exists, I can affirm from my own experience with churches that, indeed, evangelical churches tend to be gender-balanced while mainline churches tend to tilt towards women. And to be honest, not only do I think it’s a problem for the church, I personally don’t like it. I spent my undergrad years at an all-female college, and I don’t especially want to spend my church life in a manless environment.

I know I said in the last post that overmuch strategizing about church growth is a sign of not trusting the Spirit. But it seems that whenever there’s a problem it’s worth asking oneself whether this happened because you followed the Gospel, or because you didn’t. And since I’ve had a lot more experience in church since the last discussion, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned.

Let me start with what I don’t think are reasons. Despite what C. said in the comments, I don’t think men generally prefer ritual to happy-clappy stuff. If anything it seems to be the opposite, since low churches seem to have more men than high churches. Also, Allen Brill back in the previous discussion suggested that men like conservative churches because they’re male chauvinist, an idea Dwight echoes on Dash’s post when he says he thinks men aren’t dealing with women in leadership roles. But that also doesn’t seem to explain it all, for two reasons. One, for all the traditional sexual teachings of the Catholic Church and its male-only priesthood, Catholic priests still find themselves surrounded by vast numbers of females. Secondly, my own church is a strong counter-example. It’s the most blatantly feminist church I’ve been to this side of All Saints Pasadena, but it seems to have no trouble attracting men, either as congregants or as volunteers. Though I don’t know the exact stats, the gender mix in the congregation basically seems to be dead even.

To some extent PMC benefits from being near a huge seminary, which gives the area a higher-than-normal concentration of committed young Christian men. But there are a great many churches in Pasadena, and the Fullerites keep picking us. In fact we seem to have a sort of positive grapevine going there, where students arrive on the advice of older students and professors.

Another way my perspective has shifted since the last debate is that I think of the matter less as individual taste, and more as a social thing. That is, I think that what makes some churches “feminine” is that the female social networks define the community. People who’ve been to churches like this will know what I mean: women form the core of operations, while the men are more like add-ons brought in by their wives, mothers, girlfriends and so on. Even a male pastor can seem like a lone boat sailing atop a female ocean.

The reason this is a problem is that male and female groups have different ways of relating. I didn’t study this in depth when I was in college, but a good amount of psychological and sociological research backs this up. The exact ways that they differ are largely unconscious, which is why people trying to explain what makes a church “feminine” often have trouble putting exact words to it. But even if unarticulated, the differences are there. When the prevailing mode of relationship in a church is female, a lot of men will feel like there’s just something ineffably girly about this church. (As will I, for that matter, since I think my own mode of relating is pretty male.)

When I look at PMC, I see a lot of men having and initiating relationships. They don’t passively let the women take care of the social life. My man John Paul, for instance, organizes a lunch after church almost every week, and makes a point of inviting newcomers. On the listserv recently, another guy wrote that he didn’t feel he knows the other people in church well enough, and started organizing a monthly potluck. There’s some sort of mentoring program that matches teenagers with an adult of their own gender. And some of the guys organize and participate in political demonstrations, which I would think (and I don’t mean this to be trivializing) have much of the same bonding experience as team sports.

None of these are specifically “all male” ventures (though there are a few of those). What’s important, I think, isn’t that they’re targeting men but that men are doing them. In these lunches with John the young seminarians often seem pleased to be taken in by an older man who seems to know everything there is to know about the church, the seminary, the city and all the local hiking trails. It means that, even if they don’t make friends with John in particular, male friendships are possible at this church.

This seems to be creating a chicken-and-egg problem though: the best way to have more male involvement in church is to already have male involvement in church. And in fact, male involvement is a kind of gage of general congregational health. When a community is disintegrating, the female networks generally outlast the male ones, which is why elderly women always seem to be the last to hang on in a dying church. (This also seems to be true in other communities under stress, like inner cities.) So while some people have fingered feminization as a cause of church shrinkage, it seems likely to me to be as much a result of it, although it does create a vicious cycle that encourages further shrinkage.

If that cycle has started, reversing it may take a more deliberate effort than PMC’s largely unconscious habits. In a comment on Dash’s post, Bag Lady gave an example from a different church:

Well, in my previous parish, on most Sunday mornings we had at least 20 teen males in church (out of 200 or so congregants) — sitting in the choir stalls. Were it not for choir, they wouldn’t have been there.

Not just any choir, either — the Choir of Men and Boys. No women.

That took a lot of processing on my part, in the early years of my involvement there, but I came to understand that, because of boys’ development, they aren’t terribly likely to join a children’s choir (with girls, obviously). But they developed a very close camaraderie with their fellows in this choir — it was a very safe place for them to consider their spirituality (and musicality), where their contributions were valued.

As the boys became teens, they stayed, moving on to alto, tenor and bass — and then welcomed opportunities to participate in joint ventures with the Girls’ Choir.

And, as adults filled out the ranks, all participated and were recognized equally. A multi-generational dream.

As our former Organist/Choirmaster frequently observed, how many places in this culture can boys work alongside men without throwing or catching something?

Dwight worried that such an approach would bring the young men to the church “as males” rather than as people. Would this mean they come motivated by something other than the Gospel? Well, personally for me one of the difficulties of conversion is to go beyond a simple attraction to the Gospel and figure out how to actually live in it. It can seem pretty disconnected from me, this story of a man who lived and died 2,000 years ago in a totally different culture. Which is why knowing other people who’ve been down that road is so crucial. A lot of them are men, but I would be in trouble if they were only men. So it doesn’t surprise me that boys, especially modern boys who spend so much of their lives under female authorities, would need to learn how to live the Gospel from older men.

Another point, especially for churches that have a large feminist and/or gay contingent, is that such male bonding does not need to be feared. I think that many gender misfits were traumatized by all-male groups on the schoolyard, and may half-consciously discourage any hetero male group that forms for any purpose other than overthrowing their own prejudices. (Heck, all-female groups can be pretty tough too, an issue I had to deal with within myself before I went to the women’s retreat.) Sometimes members of the male minority in a female-dominated church don’t really want things to change, because they actually prefer being surrounded by women. (Hugo has written about his own efforts to overcome those sorts of hangups.)

Finally, I think another important difference between PMC and a lot of liberal churches is that it’s pervaded with such a strong sense of duty. I mean, they actually rarely use the word, but it’s in the air nonetheless. Everyone seems to grasp that being Christian involves a set of duties to God, family, neighbor, church and society. I think one reason men tend to wander away from mainline churches is not that they don’t believe, but that they don’t carry a sense that participation in church is an integral part of belief. I don’t know that women do either, but they seem more able to involve themselves because they enjoy the social life and because (often) they don’t have full-time jobs and simply have more time.

So even though I would not totally reject the idea that men stay away from churches because they reject the Gospel’s challenge to their power, I don’t think that’s all there is to it. In fact, judging from what I’ve seen in many mainline churches, the problem may be the extent to which it doesn’t challenge them, and convict them with the need and with the means to change their lives.