Some Concerning Statistics about Men and the Church

This Sunday our church is continuing our series “The Gospel and the Family” by talking about what it means to be a godly man.  While studying for this sermon, I ran across some research about men and the church in Darrin Patrick’s book Church Planter.

The typical U.S. church congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. This gender gap shows up in all age categories.On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. This statistic comes from Barna’s figures on male/female worship attendance, overlaid upon the Census 2000 numbers for adult men and women in the U.S. population.

This Sunday almost 25% of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. I came up with this figure by taking the U.S. Census 2000 numbers for total married adults and overlaying Barna Research’s year 2000 percentages of male vs. female attendance at weekly worship services.

The figures suggest at least 24.5 million married women attend church on a given weekend, but only 19 million married men attend. That’s 5.5 million more women, or 22.5%. The actual number may be even higher, because married people attend church in much greater numbers than singles. Over 70% of the boys who are being raised in church will abandon it during their teens and twenties. Many of these boys will never return.

More than 90% of American men believe in God, and five out of six call themselves Christians. But only two out of six attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

There is not space here to discuss a holistic answer to the question of what we should do in light of these statistics.  One thing is clear though, the answer is not to heap excessive guilt on men in order to call them to white-knuckled obedience.  We will only see this trend reverse as we point men to Jesus, who can change their lives and empower them by His Spirit to walk faithfully in what they are called to as men.