Who's Leaving the Church the Most?
Who’s Leaving the Church the Most?
Single evangelical women, according to the sources used by Katie Gaddini, book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022). Single evangelical women are leaving the white church more than any demographic.
Today is discussion day. (By the way, this afternoon Laura Mott Tarro and I will record a podcast session with Katie Gaddini.)
Pause with that: If women make up 55-60% of the evangelical church, what does their leaving of the church say about the future of the church?
This is one of the biggest takeaways for me of this fair-minded yet bold study by Gaddini.
What can we do?
Single evangelical women join the church for a sense of belonging but then find in too many cases they belong but just not fully. They want to be valued and they are more than their bodies and gender; they want freedom to be and to do who they are and what they can do.
Not just single women but all evangelical women have similar expectations of the church.
What are your suggestions?
They become evangelical for community and transformation and healing but they find it both “liberative and restrictive, comforting and wounding.” To belong they must toe the line; to remain they experience the pain of unfulfilled promises.
There is, Gaddini observes, a “cruel attachment to equality.” Think about this potent turn of phrase. Thoughts?
Their hope knots them to the church, but it is the church’s structures, powers, and male leaders that cut the rope. They wait “for a future that may never come.”
This is, she says, “a pervasive problem within evangelical Christianity.”
Where are you seeing this not happen?
Church plants being planted by women… I’m seeing a trend in ours at least. We would have more women than men attending - and single women, at that.
I served as a Navy Chaplain for 21 years and always tried to attend a Church similar to mine wherever I was stationed. Unfortunately, as I introduced myself, and they found out I was a Chaplain and therefore ordained, even though I was as evangelical as they were, I often heard comments such as , “Nice to have you here, I’m sure you will find another church where you will feel comfortable.” Simply put, they did not want me even attending.