When it comes to who fills the pews, every Sunday is Mother\u2019s Day in most mainstream American churches.<\/p>\n\n
And what about Father\u2019s Day? That can be a touchy subject for pastors in an era in which men who religiously avoid church outnumber active churchmen roughly three to one. Worship just doesn\u2019t work for millions of ordinary guys.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cWhat churches are doing isn\u2019t getting the job done. Mom is having to take the kids to church because Dad doesn\u2019t want to go,\u201d said Marc Carrier, co-author, with his Cynthia, of \u201cThe Values-Driven Family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThat leaves Mom in charge of the spiritual upbringing of the children, which means faith is a Mom thing and not a Dad thing. \u2026 So why is little Johnny \u2014 who is 25 and has his first child on the way, whether he\u2019s married or not \u2014 never in church? The odds are that his father was never in church.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Church attendance among men had already fallen to 43 percent in 1992, according to the Barna Group, which specializes in researching trends among Evangelicals. Then that number crashed to 28 percent in 1996, the year before the Promise Keepers movement held its \u201cStand in the Gap\u201d rally that drew a million or more men to the National Mall \u2014 one of the largest gatherings of any kind in American history.<\/p>\n\n
No one involved in national men\u2019s ministries believes that those stats have improved. That\u2019s one reason why a nondenominational coalition wants to hold a \u201cStand in the Gap 2007\u201d rally on Oct. 6, hoping to gather 250,000 men at the Washington Monument and on the Ellipse, just south of the White House.<\/p>\n\n
The American numbers are sobering, noted Carrier, but they are nowhere near as stunning as another set of statistics in an essay entitled \u201cThe Demographic Characteristics of the Linguistic and Religious Groups in Switzerland,\u201d published in 2000 in a volume covering trends in several European nations. The numbers that trouble traditionalists came from a 1994 survey in which the Swiss government tried to determine how religious practices are carried down from generation to generation.<\/p>\n\n
Apparently, if a father and mother were both faithful churchgoers, 33 percent of their children followed their example, with another 41 percent attending on an irregular basis and only a quarter shunning church altogether.<\/p>\n\n
But what happened if the father had little or no faith? If the father was semi-active and the mother was a faithful worshipper, only 3 percent of their children became active church members and 59 percent were irregular in their worship attendance \u2014 with the rest lost to the church altogether.<\/p>\n\n
If the father never went to church, while the mother was faithful, only 2 percent of the children became regular churchgoers and 37 percent were semi-active. Thus, more than 60 percent were lost.<\/p>\n\n
This trend continued in other survey results, noted Carrier. The bottom line was clear. If a father didn\u2019t go to church, only one child in 50 became a faithful churchgoer \u2014 no matter how strong the mother\u2019s faith.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThese numbers are old and they are from Switzerland, but they\u2019re the only numbers that anyone has,\u201d said Carrier. \u201cSomeone needs to find a way to do similar research in America to see if the same thing is happening here. This is shocking stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
At the height of the Promise Keepers movement, researchers did study one related trend in churches that began emphasizing ministry to men, said the Rev. Rick Kingham, president of the National Coalition of Men\u2019s Ministries, a network of 110 regional and national groups.<\/p>\n\n
Surveys found that if a father made a decision to become a Christian, the rest of the family followed his example 93 percent of the time. If a mother made a similar decision, the rest of the family embraced the faith 17 percent of the time, he said.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cIt seems that when a man takes that kind of spiritual stand it usually affects everyone else in the whole constellation around him, including his family and even other men that he knows,\u201d said Kingham, who is helping organize Stand in the Gap 2007.<\/p>\n\n
No one wants to minimize the importance of faithful mothers, he said, but it\u2019s clear that \u201cfathers play a unique and special role in helping their children develop a living faith \u2014 especially their sons. \u2026 There\u2019s no way to deny that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When it comes to who fills the pews, every Sunday is Mother\u2019s Day in most mainstream American churches. And what about Father\u2019s Day? That can be a touchy subject for pastors in an era in which men who religiously avoid church outnumber active churchmen roughly three to one. Worship just doesn\u2019t work for millions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[214,295,342,546,692],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-church-growth","tag-demographics","tag-evangelism","tag-men","tag-promise-keepers"],"yoast_head":"\n