Empty Pews: Where Did All The Men Go?
Gender Gap Threatens Churches' Future
By Kristen Campbell and Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
Saturday, June 10, 2006

Men don't need pirates in the pews. Then again, the presence of such swashbucklers might not be the worst thing to happen to a Sunday morning.

So goes the thinking of David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church."

We don't have to have hand-to-hand combat during the worship service to get men there," Murrow said. "We just have to start speaking [their language], use the metaphors they understand and create an environment that feels masculine to them."

Today's churches, Murrow argued, just aren't cutting it.

"My background is in marketing and advertising, and one day I was sitting in church, and all of a sudden it dawned on me that the target audience of almost everything about church culture was a 50- to 55-year-old woman," said Murrow, a Presbyterian elder who's now a member of a nondenominational congregation in Anchorage. the rest