Some years ago on this blog I did a series of posts that resulted of some head counting I did at my church; my aim was to get an idea of the ratio of males to females. This little exercise was carried out on and off for about three years. I was surprised at the approximate constancy of the ratio over the period. The ratio turned out to be about 40% males to 60% females, hence I termed it the "four to six mix". The project was linked to an another theme and that I referred to as the feminisation (in the stereotypical sense of the word) of the Western church in its spiritual attitudes and culture; in particular the move to a more emotional, intuitive and passion based church along with a drift toward an almost gnostic interpretation of the faith. (This is not true, however, of the kind of evangelicalism which strongly identifies with the reformation and majors in doctrine and "Truth" - such churches tend to eschew the emotional and experience based excesses of churches influenced by "Charismatic" culture. They also tend to be more "masculinised" in their ethos)
Anyway, the sequence of posts between June 2007 and January 2011 on this subject can be accessed using this link:
Now here's what I want to come to. Recently the 4:6 mix has surfaced again in two independent connections: The first connection is the "iknow" church management software my own church uses. The iknow software generates this monthly report:
The 4:6 statistic here is, I assume, taken from membership numbers rather than the rota population expressed by the bar chart. This 4:6 ratio has been static for at least a year if I recall correctly.
I now turn to the June edition of Premier Christianity magazine where we find an article entitled Your Church Needs More Men. This article includes the statistical schematic below:
Yes, that's right, up pops the 4:6 mix again, this time presumably based on extensive church surveys. The fact that my small sample reflects this survey is, as I have put it before, statistical "magic" which would have made Arthur Koestler proud (See "The Roots of Coincidence" Pages 26-27 and see also my book Disorder and Randomness)
One of the concerns (and this has long been a concern of mine too) of the Christianity article is the obvious implication of the statistical imbalance: Namely, that unless young church women are prepared to stay single many will not find a male partner within the confines of the Church and will have to find husbands outside the church. In fact given that a large percentage of the more senior church population have successfully paired off it follows that the gender imbalance among young people will be even more skewed than 4:6.
Looking through my "4:6 Mix" posts I notice that Christianity magazine has published articles on the gender imbalance and the related feminisation of the church on at least six occasions: There was a spate of articles and book reviews in 2007 & 2008: Viz: July & September 2007, February, and March 2008 and two articles in May 2008.
In my previous posts I toyed with idea that a factor strongly related to the 4:6 mix was the "feminisation" of church; that is, a cultural skew entailing a move away from stereotypically male traits and this is evidenced in the feminisation of worship. For example, quoting from my post of Feb 22nd 2008 where I quote a church leader called Carl Beech....
As for the state of worship in church with its male
alienating ‘Swoon for Jesus love ins’ Beech seems to understand this as well:
“Our terminology is that Jesus is our lover – press yourselves into his arms
and let him embrace you”. Beech goes onto to say: “I’m very grateful for the
charismatic movement, but I think we need to recast the terminology. Some of
the songs which emerged in the 90s were very cathartic.” It was a lot worse
than that Carl: the mid nineties was the heyday of the Toronto Blessing when,
if you didn't want to be accused of resisting the Spirit, you emulated those
'in the Spirit' and got down on all fours and barked!
This is not to say that a "feminine" style of worship is wrong in itself: Also there is no necessary inference to be drawn which stereotypes genetic "males" and genetic "females" into particular roles. Some males may prefer the feminised worship and some females may prefer more masculine styles. The statistical clustering of genetic males and females around what are conventionally thought of as feminine and masculine traits is going to be a cloudy affair subject to many exceptions. The problem, however, arises when there is an imbalance of culture that alienates a section of the congregation.
To be frank the premium placed on a soppy "swoon for Jesus" gnosticism in some Christian quarters alienates me as it does other males. There have been some gallant moves in an attempt to create events that cater for a more male orientated "laddish" culture (such as the 4M movement). This is good and gets full marks as a nice try but what little I've seen of these events suggest to me that the epiphanies of "Jesus gnosis" are still regarded as the acme of Christian experience. While this situation persists the statistics will remain the same.
It is probably not as simple as a trend toward a uniform feminisation; rather it may actually be a polarisation between hyper-feminisation and hyper-masculinisation with the latter evidenced by a dominating male leadership which on occasion can be a mix of patriarchary, authoritarianism, and bullying, all of which chimes well with fundamentalism and is a complementary fit with a feminised, obedient and compliant church membership. My current guess is that such is the reaction of church communities to cultural stress and marginalisation in a changing world.
STOP PRESS:
Talking about bullying leaders: The abrasive and domineering Mark Driscoll is back according to a Premier Christianity web article entitled Mark Driscoll is back but he hasn't learned his lessons. See here. But I wonder if it's not just Driscoll who has to do some learning but also a fundagelical culture which is inclined to give such characters a free ride on its back.
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