I have recently come across a number of on-line discussions of the question: Why don't men go to church? Given the stats - women significantly outnumber men in every Western denomination - such discussions are not new. Participants tend to suggest a number of reasons for this phenomenon, from the 'femininity' of worship styles ('men hate silence and soppy songs'), to feminism ('men are pushed around by women at church'), to the sexism of the church ('men object to the way women are treated in churches'). Suggestions such as these are hotly debated, largely by reference to personal experience. eg, 'I'm a woman and I hate soppy songs' or 'I'm a man and I love soppy songs'.
What such discussions almost never do, however, is consider the most basic of historical questions. Has it always been like this? If not, when and why did it change? Questions like these immediately force us away from micro-issues to a broader perspective. In this case, for example, a very little research will demonstrate that the gender imbalance in churches in the Western world started to become apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* Interestingly, American settler churches were predominantly female almost from the beginning, whereas in Britain the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appear to have brought about this shift. With this information, it immediately becomes obvious that soppy songs and feminism are unlikely to be highly significant factors in this change. Without proposing a definitive answer, this historical perspective suggests we might need to look to issues like industrialisation, changes in class structure, the development of new denominations and theologies, and the changing relationship between church and state. How have these changes affected the way Christians 'do' church? And, how have these changes affected what it means to be a woman or a man?
The value of considering this historical perspective lies not only in its power to explain the present. It also encourages us to look at broader, deeper meanings than those suggested by our own experience. For example, if we change our music or run 'men's-only' groups in order to attract men to church, we may indeed be successful. But we will not be asking the really difficult, and perhaps really important questions about whether our culture or the gospel determines how we as churches talk and think about what it means to be male or female, what it means to be part of a church, and how the two fit together.
This, then, is my next suggestion about the value of history for the church. In my last post I argued that looking at the past helps us ask different questions about the present. Here I am suggesting that looking at the past helps us answer questions about the present differently. History can alert us to the big picture, to the shifts in society and culture that influence us in profound but often imperceptible ways. It keeps us from allowing our own experience to dominate our interpretation of present events. At its best, it confronts us with the gospel, which is always preached and lived in a particular time and culture, to which it is always a word of both judgement and grace.
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7 comments:
Good points. I wonder how the gender balance is shaped across different geographical regions as well as in historical terms. Did the churches in Australia and New Zealand parallel the European churches in gender balance in the same time periods?
I see an asterisk, but I don't see what it refers to. Is there a reference missing?
Interesting post, Jo. i think your point about history helping us to a bigger perspective on the present is well made, and i agree that a sense of the past helpfully alerts us to the fact there are often big things (eg industrialisation) that help understand and explain what we normally attribute to small things (eg soppy songs).
But to what extent do you think we need to balance local or micro history with the macro history you are talking about? I mean, there are big forces involved in shaping the chulture of the church, its place in sopciety, the profile of its membership etc. But there arevery specific, local issues as well. Stephen hinted at the possibility that Aust and NZ might be different to Europe and North America - but we can break it down even further than that (eg according to rural / urban divide, an inner city / subrban divide etc etc). What kind of history, specifically, do you think the church needs to answer the questions of the present?
To put the question differently (in practical terms) - I am a member of a church currently thinking thinking through the relationship of our particular congregation to our local community, an issue which doesn't involve issues of gender imbalance but other instances of cultural concentration - eg having a disproportionate number of white people, middle class people, university educated people ... and disproportionally few goths, uni students, people with mental health struggles).
To what extent do you think the big picture history you are writing about should be part of our thinking about our context? Do we need a history of christianity in western countries over the last 300 years, or just a history of inner city sydney? I guess i am asking whether you expect that the big picture history will usually be helpful, or only occasionally. What would it look like to take the big picture into account? And even if we dod cnclude that the bigger shiofts in the place of church in western societies explains a lot about where we, as christians, find ourselves now - what can a local church do about it? What might an acknowledgement of that bigger historical context mean for the life and planning of aocongregation? or are issues such as gender imbalance in the churches things that shoul be addressed by the big church orgaisations (eg diocese, synods, etc?)
Stephen, Meredith - thanks for these thoughtful comments. Partial responses below!
Stephen - yes, the asterisk! It was supposed to refer to a brief note about the broader parameters of this question, ie. the situation in the non-Western church, which developed differently over time but has resulted in a similar gender imbalance. I'm not sure of the exact statistics for Australia and NZ. The situation was complicated by the over-representation of men in early settler/convict societies, but my understanding is that while some churches briefly had more men than women, they fairly quickly developed the same balance as their British counterparts. I know Hilary Carey has written about this in her book 'Believing in Australia', so I will chase it up for you.
Meredith - you make a number of excellent points! My immediate response would be that any kind of history provides a bigger picture than that allowed by a focus on the present. So 'micro-history' - say, in your case, of inner-city Sydney - still provides valuable broad context for a contemporary question or situation - in your case, the particular demography of your church. Ideally, the historian would be sensitive to both the local and the global historical context for a situation.
Let me give an example that matches yours to some degree. I go to a small Anglican church with a congregation that has seen waves of growth and decline over the past sixty years - but overall, the numbers have declined. I wrote a VERY brief history of the parish in which I looked at both the broad trends of national and state church membership and also the particular issues that had confronted the congregation. From the big picture, I showed that much of what the parish had experienced was entirely 'normal' in national terms - most Anglican churches boomed after WWII because of immigration, then slowly declined. This was particularly true in Victoria, and also affected by our local context - many non-Anglican migrants had moved into our area, while the Anglican population declined. But I also looked at key moments of sharp growth or decline in the parish history, which were related to more immediate factors - the ministry of a particular priest, an internal dispute etc. These matters were much more part of the conscious memory of the church and their role in forming the congregation needed to be recognised. I tried to move between the broad and the local in a way that showed that decline was not simply 'failure' on the part of the parish, but a fairly natural development in the circumstances. But I also tried to show that developments within the congregation could halt (or speed!) that decline - ie. decline was not inevitable, we were not simply at the mercy of grand historical forces! Of course I wrote about things other than numbers in the parish, but I felt that the decline in numbers was causing great discouragement and I wanted to use historical context to both explain and encourage/motivate people to change.
You have raised a number of other important issues - I'll try to address them in later posts, especially the issue of the practical use of history for congregations.
Thanks Jo - thats really helpful. i think your point about using the historical big picture to 'normalise' the experience of particular congregations is an interesting one - and i like your suggestion that this 'normalising' process does not involve capitualting to 'grand historical forces.' i think there is a lot of value for in that for churches thinking about their context and identity. maybe one reason why history is good for the church is that it can help members see their own congregation as a community with a past. sounds obvious, but i suspect that a fair number of churches in australia would not only have a weak theology of church, but a weak sense of the history of church.
David Hempton has some very enlightening discussion on women in chapter 6 of "Methodism: Empire of the Spirit." (Yale, 2005) He points out the asymmetrical pattern of predominantly female membership and an exclusively male leadership 19th century Methodism. "The ways in whcih that fundamental asymmetry has been negotiated and reformulated over time and place are as deeply revealing of Methodism's character as a religious movement as any other analytic category." (p. 150)
Jo, you're probably aware of it already but Callum Brown's 'The Death of Christian Britain' has some fascinating stuff about the 'feminisation' of Christian culture in the 19th century - it really helped my thinking about some of the issues in 'Women of the Gobi'.
Thanks very much, Glen and Kate, for these reading suggestions. I think David Hempton is by far the most insightful historian of Methodism working today, and I'm delighted that he's now at Harvard! Kate, I am indeed familiar with Callum Brown - a fascinating argument about women and secularisation, though I'm not sure it holds up completely. But I think he is on to something in arguing that there is a connection between gender shifts and secularisation.
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