Church is for sissies

Where are the young, single men on Sunday morning? Answer: Anywhere but church! According to Bojidar Marinov the reason is that young, single men aren't being engage by the church. Unless they have gifts, abilities and passions that can be directly utilized in the institutional church they have no sense of calling within and alongside the church. It is irrelevant to those who have the greatest potential to impact the world for Christ. Here's how the author puts it:

But then, why would a young man stay in the church? Is there a “male” message in our churches today? Is there a message that gives a young man a worthy cause to work for and to fight for? Why would he stay, to listen all his life to the same sermon over and over again, in many different versions of it? Come back every Sunday to learn—for the n-th time, over and over again—that God loves us? Shed tears over the same emotional stuff every week? Or hear that we live in the “last times” and therefore evil will expand and he can’t do anything to turn the tide? Or that his gifts mean nothing in these “last times,” all he is supposed to do is to “witness” to save a few souls from hell?

There is no message for them. The church’s message concerns only the church and the limited scope of activities that the pastors have declared to be “spiritual.” Any young man with gifts outside the scope of these activities is left to feel a “second class” citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. And guess what: Men are born with the impulse to be first class. This impulse is in the Y-chromosome. They will look for a cause, they will look for meaning in life, they will look for ideas, worldviews, professions, that give them the opportunity to have that meaningful first-class life.

In the world outside the church there are many opportunities to find meaningful life. Jobs, careers, political and social causes, sports, adventures, business opportunities—they all give a man an opportunity to prove himself, to have a sense of accomplishment, to achieve goals. Not long after a young man leaves his family he is drawn to them—and predictably. He is a man, for crying out loud, he has the drive, the inner energy to do something! Why would he want to stay in a church, passive, listening to the same sermon every Sunday that tells him that there is nothing he can do to change the world except snatch a few souls from hell? He is eager to go out there and prove himself in all those fields but then the church is silent about them, the preachers never preach about them and never explain the spiritual value of those jobs, sports, political and social causes, business, etc. in the Kingdom of God. There is no theology for political action, no theology for business action, no theology for social activity. What would a young man do then?

The silence and the refusal of the churches to preach and teach a comprehensive worldview creates a tension; and our young men resolve the tension by leaving the church and going to the world. It is not necessarily “backsliding,” it is not necessarily “apostasy.” It is a perfectly logical response to the deficiencies in our churches’ preaching and teaching.

As long as we have a female church with a female message, our young men will prefer to stay away from it. You only get what you preach. The loss of our sons to the enemy is a curse, and it is our fault we have let our churches truncate the message to irrelevance. Today’s gender demographic in our churches is a product of today’s irrelevant message in the churches. You know a society by its men. If they are gone, then the society has ceased to be relevant to the real world.