Spirituality’s gender shift
More women lead while fewer men fill the pews
Rev. Nancy Talbot feels like one of the more blessed female clergy.
When the North Vancouver minister looks out on the pews on any given Sunday, she feels fortunate her small congregation is slowly growing and that at least men make up roughly three in 10 of those at worship.
The gender imbalance could be far worse. The minister at Mount Seymour United Church is painfully aware men have been quietly, but in huge numbers, streaming away from many of North America’s Christian churches.
“I don’t think many of us have answers to why it’s happening,” says Talbot, who has led Mount Seymour United for eight years while raising two boys in a same-sex relationship with her partner, Brenda.
While Talbot wonders if many men have lost interest in the church because it no longer confers social status, another part of her worries men have been turned off by a church that might be reflecting the subtle devaluing of men that’s prevalent in secular culture.
Whatever the causes, the loss of church men and boys has caused a dramatic rise in the proportion of female members — and female clergy — in Canada’s liberal-to-moderate denominations.
Many applaud the advance of women within certain wings of Christianity, such as the United, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran denominations.
U.S. studies have found 37 per cent of liberal congregations, representing more than 17 million Christians, are now led by women. And a recent survey by Faith Matters found wide approval; with more than three in four of all Americans convinced females should be permitted to be clergy.
At the same time, however, many worry about the so-called “feminisation” of the Christian church.
Both genders are concerned that somehow, the rise of women in the church is not working for a huge number of men.
The historic shift to female-predominant Christianity is perhaps no more exaggerated in North America than in the 500,000-member United Church of Canada.
The liberal denomination is hanging on to the title of the largest Protestant denomination in the country, but its active membership was more than double just five decades ago.
Men, especially, have fallen away. The typical United Church congregation is now 80 per cent female, says Rev. David Ewart, of Vancouver, one of the national church’s demographers. He’s not jokingly known as “Dr. Doom” for nothing.
Even though Ewart does not make a direct connection between the gender of clergy and church attendance rates, he notes half the United Church’s 2,400 active clergy are female, a shift similar to that occurring in secular education, health care and government services.
What’s more, he’s baffled that only one of the 22 largest congregations in the United Church of Canada has a female as its lead minister.
After another decade of United Church priests retiring, Ewart projects, four of five of the remaining clergy will be female.
And, given the United Church began ordaining homosexuals in 1992, some of the denomination’s gay clergy expect that roughly half of the small cohort of remaining male ministers will be homosexual.
The Anglican Church of Canada doesn’t keep as precise statistics on gender as the United Church.
But Don Grayston, a Vancouver Anglican priest and former Simon Fraser University religious studies instructor, says gender trends within North American Anglicanism are “the same” as those in the United Church of Canada.
“It’s a tendency that needs to be watched for the sake of balance,” says Grayston, who has observed, anecdotally, that roughly four-fifths of those sitting in the pews in most Canadian Anglican congregations are female.
When Canada’s Anglican Journal conducted an online poll of members, it found the “vast majority” of more than 4,000 responses came from females. Concomitantly, all seven staff of the Anglican Journal are women.
Canadian Anglicans began ordaining women in 1975 (almost four decades after the United Church did so). As a result, the denomination now has 1,156 female priests and 2,600 male priests. But those figures include retired Anglican priests, almost all of whom are male.
But the gender lens should not be focused solely on liberal-to-moderate Protestant denominations. Many in the relatively conservative Roman Catholic church are also wondering where the boys and men have gone.
Roman Catholic parishes, even though they are exclusively headed by male priests who have vowed celibacy, are also populated mainly by women.
In 2010, Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey suggested roughly two out of three of those filling Catholic pews are female.
Most growing evangelical congregations, such as Pentecostal, Baptist and Mennonite, have also retained patriarchal leadership, predominantly of married men.
They are doing somewhat better at attracting males. Evangelical membership is not as strongly skewed to females as liberal or Catholic churches.
According to studies, the only major Christian tradition that has truly bucked the mostly female trend is Eastern Orthodoxy, which remains strong among Greeks, Russians and people in the Middle East.
And several non-Christian religions may also be holding onto men in Canada.
Although limited data are available, polling by University of Lethbridge sociologist Reg Bibby suggests Sikh, Jewish and Muslim religions are followed by at least as many men as women.
But Buddhist and Hindu congregations join most Christian congregations in Canada in being mostly female.
Some believe a kind of perfect storm of social movements is causing North American men to be less interested in religion, especially Christianity.
Rev. Talbot is not alone in thinking the most important thing is reaching out — to again make men feel welcome in Christian settings.
Many church people, however, are still focused on celebrating women’s rising strength in Christianity.
Even though feminist Protestant theologians have been influential since the 1970s, there is still a long way to go in the wider Christian church to attain parity in leadership roles.
Only half of all congregations in the U.S. allow females as clergy — with Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most evangelical congregations still barring women. The situation is similar in Canada.
Rev. Susan Johnson, national bishop of the 139,000-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, says: “For women it’s been positive to see themselves reflected in the leadership.”
Even though she is not overly worried about the trends, Johnson doesn’t want women to dominate her church in the future. Centrist denominations like hers, she says, need “the gifts” of both genders.