Church Buildings Emasculate Men

"You’d have to admit a Christian man is…bored.” –John Eldredge Wild At Heart

(Warning, I am going to be stereotypical of men in this sections)

Men have often been known to pursue power and ownership. Although it is not true across the board, I don’t think I'm way off the mark on this one. Furthermore, I do not think that it is bad. In fact, I think that it is part of how men are made in the image of God.

The bad thing is that churches with buildings are not exactly the safest place for a man, given his nature, to thrive.

Saddle a church with a building and gather a bunch of people together and men will naturally gravitate toward power and ownership. Again, this is not a bad thing, but what is bad is how that sense of power and ownership is used. Hierarchies quickly materialize, creating space for an impotent bureaucracy and lots of middle managers jockeying for position. Positions of authority are created and filled by men. Positions of service are needed and are assigned, by men to women.

Remember the Monster.com commercial showing children sharing their dreams, but lame dreams? One boy said with confidence, “I want to work my way into middle management.” Ultimately, what a building does is help promote men to middle management in church. Then, rather than protecting and expanding the kingdom of God, men get too interested in protecting and expanding their kingdom - measured in the building size and number of people. While being absorbed in middle management, they lose their pioneering spirit and sense of adventure – in church anyway. Or their pioneering spirit is wasted on something like a building project. In short, the church building helps domesticate men who were never meant to be domesticated.

There is a building; there are people, so manage they will. They’ll have meetings, discuss things, find ways to “be good stewards,” make decisions and so on. They will use the word ministry when they really mean manage. It’s sad, but without significant intervention, it is the best they men can do in church.

Oh they’ll find a way to satisfy that adventure spirit through hunting, over a hand of Texas Hold’em, or living vicariously through the Dallas Cowboys, but in church, they are merely middle managers. And if they cannot find a comfy middle management position in church, they’ll just exist as a pew warmer having been dragged to church by his wife.

So, men take their God-given attraction for power and ownership and find the lowest common denominator available to them and milk it for all it’s worth. It’s not that men are inherently this way, but rather it is the easiest way for them to behave given the options. Real male spirituality hardly even exists in churches in part because the men are managing buildings and people and no one is showing them anything different.

I addressed this somewhat in a blog post called jumping the low hurdles.

Lynn Anderson’s book, They Smell Like Sheep, addresses church leadership much better than I do and offers some great alternatives. It’s worth a look.

What men need to be doing in church is using their power to lift up the fallen, to heal the broken, to exalt the humiliated. The only beneficial use of power is to give it away for the benefit of the others.

What men need to be doing in church is using their sense of ownership to supply the needy, fund the underfunded, share the assets.

What men need to be doing is pioneering new church plants, launching new ministries of social justice, and constructing ways to serve children that is more than becoming a "male mother."

If men do not intentionally break new ground in church, their church buildings will turn heroic, courageous, and pioneering men into middle managers. What a tragic waste!




New post on parenting teens at Christian Parenting.