From here:
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.
Rev. Talbot remarks in the last paragraph that she has no idea why men are not coming to church. Nancy and Brenda have made it clear that men are redundant in their personal lives. Why would it be otherwise in the church?
At least homosexual men should feel at home in the United Church:
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.
I just can’t figure it out. Perhaps there’s something in the water.
Men can’t deal with sharing, not being the boss, and people being in love while having the same sets of genitals. Men, by and large, are dicks.
Doesn’t sound very tolerant of you, Vincent, but it does sound like the standard party-line kind of statement from the left-wing.
As so many have said before me, try substituting the name of any other group in that statement, in place of “men,” and you would have a hundred discrimination suits launched against you. Why is it alright to insult and make blanket judgements about half the human race? Is that what feminists mean by equality?
Thing is, men _are_ welcome in the mainline churches. Men who can share, can play well with others and don’t divide the universe into normals and “alphabets” are in fact in these churches right now.
So in other words Vincent, the men who are in “these churches” are those who think and talk like you do…those who have reduced the Christian life-style to having a compost-bin and taking some gay acquaintance out for spinach quiche… those who receive the sacraments and spiritual direction from a divorced middle-age priestess with an eating disorder whose cincher doubles as a girdle to the point where she looks like a walking, talking, sausage link in her ecclesial regalia all while searching for her inner dyke…
Yes. Yes, that’s precisely it. You’re welcome too, of course. 🙂
Churches are freak shows-doesn’t matter the politics.
White, straight men don’t need them for social life or networking or education. Only marginal groups and segments of the population use or need them for validation or culture or networking. They haven’t been important to us for over 50 years, except as a means of getting major life ceremonies and making our moms and wives happy.
Sorry to burst your bubble. I’ve got other things to do with my time and money and trouble that are a lot more interesting and useful for me than sitting around for an hour/hour and a half singing and talking to someone invisible.
No, it’s not what feminists worth their salt mean by equality. Likewise, I don’t think it’s alright to insult and make blanket judgements about half the human race.
You won’t let me have sex with you. That makes me redundant. I’m going home and taking my balls with me.
So what seems to be point is that heterosexual men are not attracted to the modern style of churchmanship which seeks to please all but pleases very few hence the numbers? I am gobsmacked that this is the result of all the inclusiveness we have been subjected to.
Most men are intuitive and insightful about churches, valuing integrity, intelligence, and the lordship of Jesus Christ. If they are leaving there is a good reason.
Well said, Michael!
The dog whistle of the mainline churches is that heterosexual white men are to blame for all the injustices of the past. Those that remain are a long suffering remnant.
I had the same sort of experience at the UCC
I would think this does not apply to our brothers across the Tiber. No women in the pulpit, no openly gay priests and bishops and quite often extra services for immigrant families.
Remember the vote against CofE women bishops was scuttled by women.
And save me the prattle about abuse by priests, it is a problem but it is a diminishing issue, rather than TEC and ACoC inviting the alphabets to service and intentionally putting their lifestyle up for display.
Imagine spreading the Gospel to 20,000 at once, Rick Warren does. How many parishes on the Church of the Titanic does it take to match that?
Remember the vote for CofE women bishops was scuttled by women. Spel Czek OK, garmmer check is offline, sigh!
7.
Good point Steve.
Until one seriously studies the issue all we are left with are guesses as to why men have left mainline denominations and have not returned.
Nevertheless, here are some of the things I have noticed. A few years ago, a former Saskatchewan Synod bishop started a “strengthening ministry” team to help congregations move through a conflict. It was clear that to be named to this team, if one was male, he had to have at least 10 years of solid ministry in a parish. If one was female, she only had to be a seminary student or at the very least, have expressed an interest in maybe someday going to seminary. The same applied for specialized ministries such as being a chaplain or a missionary. For men you needed to have a solid career in ministry before moving on to these specialized ministries. For women, the vast majority of those in specialized ministry are recent seminary graduates with very few if any having any parish experience prior.
There is also a strange thing happening that so many of our female seminary graduates are divorced with many enrolling in seminary as the first major decision they have made once the decree absolute is in their hands.
If this is so, odd in that they divorce, and then go into a vocation that should uphold the decree to keep marriage sacred. Wouldn’t most of us see a discrepancy there? Or am I being silly in thinking that such things are still to be upheld by Christian clergy?
Lutheran Farmer, what you describe as a situation in which women can be awarded roles on lesser qualitications than men is a problem that very many of us have noticed since the whole identity politics sham has come on strong in the western world. Happens frequently with both women and with various favoured minority groups, in every avenue of life. There has been a great deal of social commentary written on exactly this, by those who notice and object to it. I take it as a given that this happens all the time in the liberal-leaning churches.
2.1.1
Vincent
… and they are an endangered species!
Praise God.
Can’t wait to see the “new men” become yesterday’s fad.
You make some very good points, Jim. In his piece yesterday ‘America the Horror Show,’ James Howard Kuntsler writes,
“Is it not so that the failure to protect little children from harm is the most shameful weakness an adult human can present?”
“For what it’s worth, the Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America, and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. The tragic monster that Mr. Lanza grew up into lived with Mom and ended up parking four bullets in her brain. Imagine the tensions in that monster. It’s not an accident that the commercial fantasies represented in movies and television aimed at boys are populated by legions of super-heroes. This sort of grandiosity — the wish to project supernatural powers — is exactly what you get in boys who have not developed competence in any reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor — and I wouldn’t necessarily include school, such as it is in our time, as a reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor, since it is mostly a brutally boring accreditation process.”
“Let me remind you that there is a range of thought and feeling evinced in human culture that no longer exists in America. These things were called virtues. They are qualities in thought and action related to goodness and excellence, and they are in very short supply these days in the USA, though we are well-supplied with fakes and approximations of virtue — such as the moments of sham heroism witnessed yesterday afternoon and evening by men watching televised football. What matters now is that an epochal undertow of events is dragging this enormous nation into an economic convulsion that will inevitably turn political. I don’t think that our society can be redeemed in its current form. It has to pass through a tribulation that demands the reemergence of adult male humans who know how to be men in more than one dimension. And you who make it through to the other side will barely comprehend the monsters left behind, or how they made themselves that way.”
It is so very sad that we live in a time when men are no longer allowed to be men. The feminazis insist on being allowed into virtually everything. The very mention of something being “man’s work” is considered offensive in the extreme. But now that we have taken everything away from men what is left for us to have as an identity? And does anyone understand just how important it is for a boy to have a “Dad”, not just someone who brings some money into the house but someone to show him how to grow up and become a “good man”?
I realize that my own casual observations are not a scientific study. But from what I have seen those boys who had a good Dad grew up and became good men. Those boys who did not have a good Dad did not grow up.
We need great men and great women, Amp. I also think whoever it was said “the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” had it about right.
I grew up in the country, riding horses and doing most anything my brother did. I have photos of my grandmother driving the tractor on the farm. I nonetheless love the fine arts and well-made household goods; and could probably spend a fortune on textiles. We all have feminine and masculine aspects to our personalities, whose full integration is realised only in our maturation.
Women have always worked. I don’t see how or why men should be threatened by that: the world of work, in my view, is really about the realisation of human talent and aptitude regardless of gender, which enriches us all. My mother worked outside the home, and it didn’t stop my father and my brother from bonding by doing masculine things together; their moving a barn together with an older man [who had the tools and expertise] my father hired for the job is an example that comes to mind.
My primary objection in all the changes wrought in the church and society is to the odious, cavalier, short-sighted approach to the fundamental unit of society constituted by same-sex marriage, that denies nature and negates the procreative potential that is unique to heterosexuality. It is not fair to children, whose birthright is their parents’ marriage.
How many of my five children will same-sex marriage kill, Lisa?
Five? Why so many? Don’t you care for the Earth? We’re already at 7 billion-what’s the need to breed so many?
None, I hope. But, nobody, including you, Vincent, knows what the future holds. And, it is presumptuous in the extreme to think otherwise.
It is wrong to reduce men from being fathers with a presence in their children’s lives to mere sperm donations. Or conversely, to turn women into uteri for sale or rent.
Well-stated, Lisa. It is only the glib, surface-dwelling sorts who throw out the one-liners that mock traditional marriage and its importance to both children and to society. Because they don’t see immediate, obvious repercussions from its breakdown, that supposedly means this effect does not exist. Of course, such people usually do not see at all. Or read broadly and in-depth. Instead, they want to be seen…..as superior progressives. They have no depth. And it takes a certain depth of thought and insight and observation to note what is going on and where it is leading. The clever zingers and one-liners may leave these people self-satisfied, and others of their ilk chuckling for a minute or two, but in reality, such views are empty and void of real thought.
Not that I ever find any such clever one-liners on this forum……. 11.2.1.1.1
Hello Lisa,
Sorry if my mentioning “men’s work” caused some offence. The point that I was trying to make is that while our society fully accepts, even embraces, the idea that some things are entirely for a woman (ie. breastfeeding) it has completely scorned the idea that there can be even just one thing that is solely for a man. For example, we did have the “Boy Scouts” which was sexist in that it was for only boys. But we also had a parallel organization called the “Girl Guides” which was for only girls. This was perfectly fine for generations of Canadians. But alas no more. We now have “Scouts Canada” for both boys and girls because our courts have ruled that a boys only club, even a private one, is no longer acceptable. Strange though that the Girl Guides, which continues to be a girls only club, is still perfectly ok.
I have to wonder why so many people, escpecially the feminazis, believe that a woman can teach a boy how to grow up to be a good man. Would anyone concede that I as a man can do just as good a job as my wife in teaching our daughters how to grow up to be good women?
Hi AMP,
No offence taken. I was actually trying to articulate my point of view without being argumentative. You raise an excellent point in your second paragraph. I would reiterate what James Howard Kuntsler wrote. The framing of the questions are too often thinly- disguised rationalisations privileging the wishes of adults over the long-term needs and interests of children.
Also, here’s something I read on the internet in regard to last week’s tragedy in CT [Source in comments here: http://www.cchrint.org/school-shooters/%5D
“As a public school teacher I see a nasty trend over the last 10 years with children at home and at school. First, and as previously mentioned, parents’ goals have changed from parenting to friendship. This is unacceptable, and leads to a sense of entitlement at home and school. Second, there is a massive decrease of faith and love at home, and the kids bring it to school everyday (to quite Toby Keith- “Plasma gettin’ bigger, Jesus gettin’ smaller). Third, psychology has done a wonderful job discovering a d finding treatments for many disorders that would have gone astray in the past. However, in typical American fashion, we are over diagnosing and over treating, which leads to overdosing out children. Fourth, when you combine entitlement with drugs and a lack of love at home, you’re stuck with a child who leaves high school not ready to face the realities of college and the work world, children who have been cheated by society’s system put in place to help them. The end result is madness. In my opinion, the answer to this madness is Faith, Love, and Family. However, I’m not a miracle worker, I’m just a problem solving math teacher who is scared for my life everyday I go to work praying we’re not next. Please apply goodness in your life to all people in hopes something like this never happens again.”
I’ll refer again to my own list of must-read authors which I posted a while ago, who all expand on this very theme. A small group of noteable people have been saying just this, for years. Vincent seems upset that I should bring in material with any whiff of academia, but if we want to expand on the personal opinions, and find out whether there is actually evidence of any sort to back these, we really must look to some credible thinkers and writers who have some insight on these topics. If it makes Vincent feel better, several of the authors whose work I mentioned are actually fellows at think tanks. Sometimes beats the ad-hoc opinion in the daily low-life newspapers.
Put the other comments here together with sermons from Nancy Talbot such as “The Heaven I’m Not Dying to Get Into,” “The God I Don’t Believe In,” and “The Jesus Who Didn’t Die for My Sins” and maybe that covers it for Mount Seymour United.
Deleted by poster.
For too many of the women clergy of today, I suspect the educational and background standards have been lowered in comparison to what they had been for a long time, and probably in comparison to male applicants too, not to mention their reasons for and attitudes towards this vocation. Many bishops appear anxious to show how forward-thinking and “with it” they are, by appointing such types.
Just think, would you want to undergo surgery performed by a surgeon who is a member of some political identity group, and could be suspected of having gone through medical school under far lower standards than the much-maligned WASP male, or would you prefer a surgeon who was highly and strictly trained?
In my mind, too many of today’s female clergy have been able to come in under lower standards and less accountability to Christianity, so rightly or wrongly, it makes this group as a whole suspicious.
But all of this is old hat, isn’t it? I don’t think that any of these concepts discussed on the site recently are new or original. Doesn’t everybody already know of these issues? They have been debated, ad nauseam, under general social commentary for a long time. Perhaps it’s time for me to move on.
I remember that (some years ago) my seminary called for a special consultation because of the divorce rate of female students. Seems that it was death for her marriage if a woman attended that particular college. The reality was, in my mind, that there was a lack of rigorousness in the vetting process for the female postulants and that this was exasperated by course content which sowed the seeds for a worldview which blamed all that was wrong in the world on men. Now don’t get me started on those who discovered their inner lesbian! Was so good to get out of there and into a parish environment with healthy woman and a clear Gospel focus.
For the past few decades, too many supposedly Christian semanaries have actualy been the very pointed breeding grounds of the Left. Ditto for graduate schools of Social Work and Education. These institutions re-mold students into the foot soldiers of the socialist cause, so these sorts can then go as missionaries and spread the word of the “Progressives.” It’s definitely not the Christian Gospel that they are spreading.
Hello all,
I know we are not great admirers here, in general, of the present ACofC, but do have a look and listen to some of the better aspects of the Anglican tradition, in the spirit of Christmas. This is the Saint Paul’s Cathedral Boys’ Choir, from the 1990s, singing Britten’s “Balulalow”:
17
Anon
Thanks for the post.
It helps to remind me of why I cling to the Anglican tradition. For me the liturgy and the music are unsurpassed.
I hear you, Jim. Merry Christmas.
Anonymous, I don’t pretend to be cleverer than anyone.There is, I hope, in my “insulting half the human race”, a half of which I’m a bemused member, some mild measure of humour. I haven’t gone to a tenth of the kind of provocative language the writer of this very blog has, bless him. Your thing seems to be asserting academic credentials, and snarling at specific individuals. I enjoy your gravitas. Keep it up. As we say in French, j’ai le dos large. If telling me I’m an ass makes you feel better, knock yourself out, man. 🙂
Lisa, I dimly see where you’re going with this. I wanted to say that same-sex marriage doesn’t invalidate my own, nor presumably yours, but your point is that kids being raised in homosexual households is a problem en soi, yes? A fair enough opinion. But being a parent is the toughest job in the world, and no kid gets the best deal. Ever. Every single kid just about survives his parents, straight or gay. We all have our cross to bear. And on the sliding scale of what makes a parent a good one , I’ll tell you, the idea that sexual orientation is anywhere near the top of the list, as opposed to being kind and loving and a good listener and a reasonable disciplinarian and a good teacher and a myriad other things, makes me shake my head in sadness.
Being a parent is the toughest job in the world, is somewhat cliché. For some people being a parent is a full-time job. For many others, it is a hobby. And for a few, it is a “cause.”
But there are things I have done that were much more difficult than being a father… the first thing that jumps to my mind was that time when I drank too much Rum in Jamaica and tried to make love to my favourite gal while standing up in a hammock. That had “disaster in the making” written all over it.
There’s nothing somewhat about it: it is a cliché. But sometimes — not always — clichés have some truth to them.
Hope you survived the hammock tryst more or less unscathed.
Every child has a mother and a father, Vincent. That is a matter into which ‘sexual orientation’ enters not at all. I would suggest you’re the one, sadly, trying to reorient the discussion into one that privileges adults in a same-sex relationship over the best interests of children. Notice I used the word ‘best.’ I’d make divorce a damn sight harder to get too. I want children raised in the best of circumstances, not just not too bad or pretty okay. I want parents doing a great job by being something more than vague, self-indulgent 14 year-olds themselves to start.
Adults _were_ children once. Even gay ones.
Maybe, but personally I would probably have been better off if my parents had split up.
You have my condolences.
Thanks, Vincent. As I said in an earlier post on this topic, getting your information and evidence from credible sources has something to be said for it. I wish everyone would give it a try. You appear, yourself, to have some disdain for education. Do you send your own children to school?
Gay parents are a whole lot better than no parents at all.
But that usually isn’t the issue with these children, Eph. It isn’t a one-or-the-other situation we are talking about.
There are beginning to be actual studies and social commentary available out there — and some very good ones at that — providing preliminary evidence and data on this issue of children who have grown up with two gay parents, so there is more to go by now than opinions.
There are always one or more generations of children who are risked for these new social arrangements (I think of the 1970s countercultural lifestyles) before they grow up themselves and the rest of us can see what the effect was. Not that some of us cannot guess beforehand.
Will someone please explain to me how men leaving mainline denominations has anything to do with homosexual parenting?
I didn’t bring it up, I don’t think. But thread drift is inevitable. 🙂
Godwin’s Law, substitute gays for Hitler.
From the original post, AMP, which goes to your question elsewhere of how can a woman be a ‘father’ to a son. I think it would be far, far less of a task for a Chinese to teach a German how to be Navajo. But you would warrant the scorn that would be immediately heaped upon you for thinking such a thought.
Nan & Bren’s sons, in point of fact, have (an) actual father(s) somewhere in the mix. However, it will help you to remember such a mutable psychological matter as ‘orientation’ is considered concrete and inalterable. Biology and physiology themselves, however, are deemed transitory and thus of negligible concern:
“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.”
Men will not attend a church where they are not respected. There is no mystery there.
Define “respected”. More interestingly, define “not respected” in this context.
If you like, of course, this is not an order. 🙂
Men are utilitarian; there is no need for us to go to church-we have other ways to get money, sex, power and social life.