Last Thursday, our church had its usual booth set up at the giant campus-wide gathering of student organizations on the U of M Diag known as FestiFall. At our table, we hand out posters, magnets and other paraphernalia, but our primary goal is to meet interested students and let them know who we are, what we do, and that we’d love to know them. Students indicate their in small groups or other church community by putting their name and e-mail address on a sheet of paper. It’s generally a great time, but I have the feeling something very sad was happening beneath the surface.
That night, I was sent a spreadsheet of all the names and contact info for these students. I’m that guy who loves just sitting back and dreaming, strategizing, and visualizing the future demographics and structures of our church, so I gave the sheet some good thought time. Two numbers particularly stuck out to me: 114 and 22. We had 114 students indicate interest in small groups. If all these students got involved, we would almost certainly meet our goal of reaching 500 students through small groups this year.
That made me excited.
Here’s a number that made me less excited: 22 of them were men. (Give or take five guys, based on some more gender-ambiguous names). But the point remains the same:
80% of the college students coming on campus who openly desire church involvement are women.
Just think about the implications of that statistic for a moment. It deeply disturbs me for the following reasons:
1. It’s a logistical nightmare for our church. At New Life, staff longevity for women is considerably shorter than for men due to maternity turnover. This means that, at times, segments of our church have had to deal with a 2:1 male-to-female staff ratio and a 1:2 male-to-female student ratio. As a result, the female students in our church can have devastatingly fewer available mentors and examples to lead them, when they’re the ones who tend to most express a desire for mentorship (men tend to want to do things on their own, for better or worse).
We have a very discipleship-oriented church model, which demands a high staff-to-student ratio. We are looking to raise up revolutionary leaders and send them out into the world, not just plug people into ministries so they can be comfortable somewhere. We only have 4 years, so time is of the essence.
We choose an intensive, hands-on approach.
Because that seemed to be Jesus’ method for raising up revolutionary leaders.
As a result, it’s a challenge for our female staff to support the number of female student leaders in the way that we wish we could. And we don’t exactly have the luxury of hiring to meet our needs; we’re all missionaries. This means some female students may shy away from leadership, because they can see a leadership position as sacrificing their standing as someone to be led and cared for. Their perception is inaccurate but understandable. This kind of resistance, of course, only perpetuates the lack of female leadership.
2. It has difficult implications for the spiritual and emotional health of female leaders. This isn’t just a New Life Church issue. We’re handed this dynamic the first week of school because it pervades the culture. I’ve had more conversations than I care to count where female leaders in various ministries I’ve been involved in have described to me through tears their feelings of loneliness and not being cared for, because they give so much to the women they lead but don’t feel like they have anyone to invest deeply into them. This makes raising up female leaders a dangerous venture; the threat of burnout is so huge because full-time female ministers tend to be so rare and demand for female leadership is so great. At New Life, we desperately want all of our women to experience the fullness of God’s love and grace, so the last thing we’d want is for them to think that they need to work like crazy in order to be valuable to us. But if every woman on the FestiFall list comes to a small group, the groups will either be huge, or we’ll have to create more groups, potentially adding even more to the burden on our women leaders. I wonder if we ought to just turn some away.
3. It threatens future male leadership. As a male student leader on campus, this gender dynamic usually meant I was turning down requests for input and leadership from women in order to pursue relationships with men who seemed largely uninterested in being led. I’ve seen this dynamic in every close church community I’ve observed that fosters close male-female relationships. Every bone in my body wanted to take the easy route and have comfortable conversations with girls who were eager to be led, but I forced myself to instead pursue these seemingly indifferent younger men because I knew that it was the only way to restore balance. I cringe to think what would happen if our male leaders didn’t fight for this.
I wonder if God is doing this on purpose, to be honest. The over-abundance of women seeking to be led forces male church leaders to aggressively pursue younger men if they want male involvement and leadership in their church. It may be God giving grace to the men he’s chosen to raise up as future leaders, by forcing current men in leadership to pursue them and heal them from a past and a culture that has told them they aren’t worth pursuing much.
4. I fear for the future relationships of these women. The vast majority of them long to eventually have a husband who will lead them spiritually, spurring them toward greater devotion to Christ. And where are these men going to come from? Clearly not from FestiFall. If these men are raised up in our church, it’s not going to be because they came knocking on our door asking to get plugged into small groups. Apparently that’s a girl thing to thing to do.
I have a couple ideas on how to remedy all this mess, but they’re not easy at all. I’ll save that for next time.
Amazing Mikey. And unfortunately…dead on.
Mikey, you argue a good point. But in my opinion, I think the staff-student ratio is more important than the male-female ratio in either the staff/leadership or the student body. I’m glad to hear you’re pursuing young men to try to fight the male-female unbalance. Even so, there are still a number of young men, even with a relative abundance the male leaders, that are getting left behind. These young men want to be led well and grown up to be able to mentor other young men eventually, and they even go as so far to pursue leaders (not the leaders pursuing them like your strategy entails), but there just doesn’t seem to be enough time or leadership resources for them. You mention that women who mentor other young women often feel lonely due to the lack of female leaders available to pour into them. I don’t think that is unique to women. I think there are also some men who feel lonely as well in leadership. I was told once that leadership is lonely, and I think that is true regardless of gender and is just part of the sacrifice of being a leader. I suspect all of this is related more to the staff-student ratio than the gender ratios.
Also, you have to remember, this was just one instance where there was a lack of guy interest. I have experienced the opposite, where there was a greater guy interest (quantitatively) in an event related to campus ministry. So the numbers can go both ways. I’m not sure what the big picture is, but it would be helpful to study more events to draw a clearer conclusion. But I would agree that women tend to be more open about their desire to be involved in church.
Very good post Mikey! I’ve noticed a lot of these issues in my own life and the lives of the women around me, I’m very interested to read about your possible solutions.
Mike,
You’re facing at New Life what is the case across American evangelicalism. From the stats that I’ve seen the American church is 60% female and 40% male. The church is seen as effeminate and weak, singing love songs to a Jesus with flowing hair and a glowing complexion. Leaders from Mark Driscoll to Matt Chandler to Mark Galli have written and preached about the need to portray the biblical Jesus in all his “maleness” to counteract “Jesus is my homeboy” who just wants to hang out and is cool with whatever you want to do. I look at a church like Mars Hill Seattle, where I’m at grad school right now, and there are tons of young men who want the hard words that they hear Driscoll preach about how God’s wrath is against them because of their continued rebellion and the only thing that can reconcile them to their Creator God is through the sacrifice of His Son on a bloody cross. God calls us as men to the enormous task of leading our eventual wife and family, but we have our Heavenly Father as the perfect model.
As for a practical solution, I don’t think you can overestimate the impact that adult men who are fathers can have when discipling younger men. How do you, though, get those young men even engaged a little to get them into those mentoring relationships? You’ve got to challenge the idols of parties, video games, and pornography, which are, unfortunately, problems that aren’t just restricted to the campus. You have to challenge the men that are at New Life to reach out to their peers with Gospel while simultaneously see their involvement at church not as peripheral to their life but central. If the local church is the bride of Christ, we should love her, and love requires sacrifice and service.
One of the thoughts that has been brewing as I look to plant a church in Ann Arbor is seeking to be a training center/incubator for Christian guys that, out of high school, feel called to full-time ministry/planting churches. Instead of them taking the typical route and heading to Bible college, they could come to the church and be intentionally mentored, trained, and discipled to disciple others and plant churches. These men would be sent by the local church as missionaries on campus, seeking to gospel their classmates, roommates, and friends. Missional communities can rise up through those relationships, but they are never separate from close involvement in the body of the local church. This not only provides them opportunities to see the diversity in the body, but also helps them learn what a gospel-centered church looks like, so that when they graduate, they know what to look for. Additionally, these men who have been apprenticed to plant churches can then be sent out to plant churches upon graduation. This obviously a costly and time-intensive process, but one that very closely follows the Paul/Timothy model that we see in Scripture.
Remember that Benson Hines said that college ministry is missions, right? In many places in the world, missionaries first reach the women in a culture – they have more time to build relationships, then can be used to influence the men in their society.
Personally, I’d love to have your problem. If we had 80 women expressing interest in small groups, I doubt we’d have any problem upping the number of guys around within a few weeks. Nothing attracts guys like girls (and vice versa.) Get the few guys you have to go out and bring some friends to their (obviously) girl-dominated small groups.
Now, I don’t encourage or endorse “dating-evangelism” by any means, but if you can turn your lemons into lemonade (or lemon smoothies) thats bonus there.
In the midst of this discussion, I’m also concerned that the ratios we discuss almost always involve staff. Yes, we tend to be the people who are older and available, and there’s no getting around that. But I don’t think there will ever be enough staff for each interested person to be mentored by a staffperson, and there DEFINITELY will never be enough female staff. Is there a solution that is more realistic than balancing the ratios?
I think one thing that is necessary, when it comes to men, and I don’t know if you will include this in your solutions, is for male leadership to strongly pursue other men. You do not see men being very open about their lives and desiring closer relationships, but I’ve found that when I pursue men it is something that they want. It’s a vulnerable position to put oneself in to pursue that kind of mentorship and openness in a relationship. I have seen men take the easy way out and disciple, evangelize and pursue deeper female relationships because it’s more comfortable and easier to pursue. There’s less rejection and there’s a need there that they can meet. But, the same need exists in men and it takes more effort to get underneath the surface with them, but it’s something we need to do. As male leaders we need to believe that this need exists and actually see it, even if on the surface something else is communicated. I think the hearts of men yearn for something more…deep relationship, realness, devotion, and love.
I think there is a sense of value we get from giving input and meeting the needs in others and maybe that encourages some of us men to take care of women more and not prioritize male relationships. My fear here is the unhealth that can be created in these relationships – whether it’s dependency issues or impurity, or something else.
I’m interested in the solutions, too. I’d love to see women and men taken care of more and more and growing deeper in their love for Jesus. I think it can be easy for us to point out, and I’m hoping we take the steps of faith to actually do something.
I, obviously, love for this topic to be brought up. Your concerns seem dead on, Mikey. I also agree strongly with Meghan: there is no way we can rely on staff members as the entirity of our “solution.” So many girls I know only feel “cared for” if a female staffer is “discipling” them. We women definitely need to break the stereotypes about what discipling is, and encourage peer discipleship among ladies. Although you’re wise enough to recognize the need for you as a male leader to prioritize young men, I’m sure it’s difficult for all guys to be so discerning. We women need to be aware of our actions as well, turning to women to meet some of our relational needs instead of always looking to guys to affirm and guide us. I’m all for brother/sister relationships, but I also think guys would have more time to spend with young men if we women weren’t hounding them all the time because of our own insecurities.
But don’t worry, none of this will stop me and Steph from video chatting you.
I’m very excited to move onto part II.