I’m going to start this with a quote from David Murrow’s new posting at Boundless.

If you’re looking for a church with young, single men, they’re generally harder to find in small, traditional congregations, and easier to find in megachurches. This is no accident: These jumbo congregations work hard to make guys feel at home. Megachurches have nixed many of the feminine cultural elements ingrained in traditional churches: group hugs, handholding, emotive displays, personal testimonies and prayer-and-share. They’ve removed the banners, quilts, curtains, doilies and flowers from their worship spaces. Some have zapped every “Jesus is my boyfriend” song from their worship sets.

Megachurches are into excellence – and so are men. Guys love a challenging sermon that doesn’t stray into condemnation or moralism. They like mind-stretching discussions and healthy debate. Men appreciate a nice facility that’s well kept.

Now, this is half correct. Getting rid of theologically dubious songs (particularly the latently homoerotic “Jesus is my boyfriend” ones) is obvious. Cutting down praise and worship works. Professional music and non frilliness work for Western males, as any bar owner knows.

But if you don’t deal with some of the issues that beset men things will go horribly wrong. We (even in the church) do not want things discussed and emoted on. We want to solve things — and help. Not be hugged or cried over.

We want to see our children, not be shamed from attending church by the sisterhood who have decided that the breakdown of our marriages was all our fault. And we don’t want to date the women who have destroyed three other men, but still see themselves as righteous.

In short, we want equal preaching. We are prepared to correct our lives. But we want to know that we will not be the only people held accountable by the leadership. It is quite easy to market a church to men. It is a lot harder to make it safe for men:. the current dating and sexual environment, which allows rapid and easy separation and divorce (of the person, but continuing access to the ex’es chequebook via alimony and child support)  has to be confronted.

Because divorce is destroying the middle aged men and women in the church. And here I speak as someone who has been divorced. The church needs to stand for the vows people have made… in the congregation. There need to be prayers for the married people, and teaching that destroys the memes of entitlement, selfishness, false self sacrifice and non biblical submission that seem to take strong men and remove their spine: gentle, godly women and make them consumed with bitterness and hate.

In short, we need to change. As a church. My boys do attend church: but our church is making some of these moves. For the current path of accommodating the fashions of this world will lead to the loss of effective witness against the idols of the age. And we will be held accountable, for we have not done our duty. We will have been neither salt, nor light.