Why Men Hate Going to Church
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15
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What is it about modern Christianity that is driving men away? Just 35% of American men say they attend church weekly, and women make up more than 60% of the typical congregation on a given Sunday. It's Sunday morning. Where are all the men? Golfing? Playing softball? Watching the tube? Mowing the lawn? Sleeping? One place you won't find them is in church. Less than 40 percent of adults in most churches are men, and 20 to 25 percent of married churchgoing women attend without their husbands. And why are the men who do go to church so bored? Why won't they let God change their hearts? David Murrow's groundbreaking new book reveals why men are the world's largest unreached people group. With eye-opening research and a persuasive grasp on the facts, Murrow explains the problem and offers hope and encouragement to women, pastors, and men. Why Men Hate Going to Church does not call men back to the church-it calls the church back to men.
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A Gold Mine. I finally finished reading David Murrow's “Why Men Hate Going to Church (updated)”, after having put it down for a couple of months while I read other books and worked on other things.
The best I can say about this book is that it is a gold mine, in the truest sense of the term. You see, my wife watches Gold Rush on Discovery Channel, so I wind up watching quite a bit of it with her. On that show, various crews move around literally TONS of earth, searching for a few specks of gold. That is EXACTLY what you will be doing reading this book - searching through tons of detritus (to put it gently) for the occasional HINT of something worth noting.
To say I was disappointed in this book would be a statement in contention for understatement of the year, at least. Upon seeing the title and even a couple of the other BookSneeze reviews, I actually requested BookSneeze make this available in eBook format, which is how I read all my books now. I was hoping for something as mind blowing and concrete as Shaunti Feldhan's seminal work, For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. Instead, the “research” in this book at one point literally consisted of the author standing outside an Alaska sporting goods store and asking 97 men what they thought was masculine or feminine about church.
And that is the most glaring flaw of this book - little to no actual research to base the author's claims on. Instead, he draws on what he personally sees and how he personally feels. Which is fine, if the title would have been “Why Me and My Friends Hate Going to Church”. But in purporting to talk about a genuinely real crisis, the author falls flat on his face due to so little research on the topic. Add to this the guy's blatant homophobia and misogyny - he dislikes any song that mentions a love of Jesus, because it sounds too gay - and you pretty much have a recipe for disaster. Indeed, one of the reasons I put the book down for a couple of months was because of the sheer number of times I was almost ready to destroy my Kindle just to get this book away from me. But I agreed to participate in the BookSneeze program (a truly great program, btw), and I didn't want to review the book without completing it, so here I sit, having now done so.
Overall, I'd give this book 0.5 stars out of 5. It has enough good in it that if you're DESPERATE for something to read and can get your hands on a free copy, I'd say it is better than nothing - but not by much. Had I paid for the book, I'd be demanding my money back.
