By Matt Friedeman, PhD
April 14, 2005

(AgapePress) - More women go to church than men. A lot more. Some 83 million Americans attend church weekly, says author David Murrow, but only 35 million of them are men, creating a gender gap of 13 million not seen in other religious constructs.

Not in Buddhism. Not in Hinduism. Not in Judaism and certainly not in Islam.

Is Christianity flawed, then, for males?

Murrow's volume, titled Why Men Hate Going to Church (released in March by Nelson), has some answers to why this is true and how it can change; but reading the Gospels, I have a hunch as well.

Last January I was at West Africa Theological Seminary in Lagos, Nigeria, and found myself in quarters with a guy who is known in certain missionary circles as a professor international -- someone who has devoted his life to teaching in colleges and seminaries in need of his spiritual and academic expertise. He told me, "Wherever you go on campuses around the world, there is always the occasional professor that has an inordinate amount of influence on students."

He returned to that remark several times over the week we were together.

Those of us who know campuses and churches can recognize the same pattern -- from time to time you run into a man who does indeed have impact on other men beyond the norm. Why?

I think that frequently it could be owed to a terrific personality or a station in life that others want to emulate. But many times, all things being equal, the men who win men are those who reflect the life and ministry of Jesus: they are purposeful, biblical, no-nonsense, on a mission, and invite others through personal attention to their objectives.

Those things, unfortunately, don't reflect the average church; worse, they are dynamics of only the rare church. But men who apply their faith to challenging and even risky situations for a greater good, and ultimately for God's glory, stand out. When asked to join such a cause, calling for toughness of body and mind and an attitude of boldness, men respond. Suddenly, they hear a call -- they aren't just attending a service, feeling obligated to show up and sip coffee at a Sunday school class already underattended, or sing a song in an octave not to their liking.

They are suddenly being asked by a real man to make a real difference in the real world for a living and active God.

At any rate, that is the Jesus style.

And my hunch is that men who want other men to take them and their church seriously will figure out this kind of Christ-driven life and reflect it.

Here's a story that drives the masculine among us nuts:

"Suppose it was that geese could talk," begins the 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in a journal entry titled "The Tame Geese." He goes on to describe a land in which geese were in the habit of waddling every Sunday to church and where the presiding gander would honk his sermons. The theme of those talks was God's generous gift to these fowl -- wings. With the aid of wings, the congregation heard, the geese could "fly away to distant regions, blessed climes, where properly they were at home, for here they were only strangers."

"And so it was every Sunday," writes Kierkegaard. But weekly, after hearing such fine oratory and enjoying their homogeneous fellowship: "Each would waddle home to his own affairs." And, writes the author, to the delight of hungry human mouths these geese "throve and were well liked, became plump and delicate -- and then were eaten ... and that was the end of it."

We were created for more.