Gender Differences and Worship

Women More Likely Than Men to Pray, Believe in God

 

Women are more likely to profess belief in a God, pray and attend religious services than men, according to a new analysis of survey data. Ahead of Women’s History Month in March, the Pew Research Center offered new insight on sex and religiosity

Tue, Mar. 03, 2009 Posted: 01:52 PM EST

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Women are more likely to profess belief in a God, pray and attend religious services than men, according to a new analysis of survey data.

Ahead of Women’s History Month in March, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life offered new insight on sex and religiosity based on a previous survey.

After gleaning over its 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Pew Forum found that women are more religious than men on a variety of measures.

When it comes to women, 86 percent are affiliated with a religion, 77 percent have absolutely certain belief in a God or a universal spirit, 63 percent say religion is very important in their lives and 44 percent attend worship services at least weekly, according to survey results.

The proportion of men who claimed such religious behavior and beliefs was lower. Compared to women, only 79 percent of men are affiliated with a religion, 65 percent have absolutely certain belief in a God or a universal spirit, 49 percent say religion is very important in their lives and 34 percent attend worship services at least weekly.

Women were also more likely than men to have absolutely certain belief in a personal God, 58 to 45 percent.

The biggest difference in religious behaviors between men and women was their prayer habits. Sixty-six percent of women say they pray at least daily, leading men by 17 percentage points.

What accounts for this difference?

In a 2002 commentary for Gallup Poll, George H. Gallup Jr. suggested that women traditionally have tended to spend more time then men in raising children and thereby also spent more time overseeing their church activities. In the past, women usually tend to have more flexible schedules than men, permitting them the time for more involvement with the church, Gallup wrote.

Other factors, according to Gallup, that might explain why women are more religious than men included their tendency to be more open in sharing personal problems, be more relational and have more of an empirical rather than a rational basis for faith.

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Survey, released in February 2008, also revealed that men were more likely than women to switch religious affiliation, 45 to 42 percent. Moreover, men are twice as likely to say they are atheist or agnostic compared to women, 5.5 to 2.6 percent.

Women are more likely than men to be affiliated with nearly every major Christian group, from Protestantism to Catholicism. But the situation was reversed when it came to non-Christian religions, including Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, which more men than women are affiliated with.

Elena Garcia
Christian Post Reporter

 

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What does this mean for Remember the Sabbath Day?

Not Programs, Parents

Moral Therapeutic Deists. In 2005, University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith coined that phrase to describe the core religious values held by the vast majority of the next generation of the church in America. Summing up four years of research for the National Study of Youth and Religion, his study gave definition to some of the greatest fears already sensed by thousands of discerning ministers and churches across the evangelical world.

In spite of teenagers’ surprisingly positive interest in matters of religion and active participation in vibrant churches, millions of students “graduating” from our ministries were unable to articulate even the most basic beliefs of the Christian faith. The carefully designed study revealed that young people were emerging from our popular children’s ministries and youth programs with the belief that religion is about doing good and being happy, watched over by a distant and benign Creator whose purpose is largely to help us feel better about ourselves.[1]

For all of the advances and investments in the fields of preschool, children and student ministries in the past thirty years, this wasn’t the desired outcome. Barna research revealed in 2006 the inevitable result of such a shallow foundation: millions of young adults who had been active in evangelical churches as children and teens were now dropping out of church in record numbers as 20-somethings.

Lead researcher Dave Kinnaman noted, “Much of the ministry to teenagers in America needs an overhaul – not because churches fail to attract significant numbers of young people, but because so much of those efforts are not creating a sustainable faith beyond high school.”[2]

While many churches are still content to ignore these warning signs, there is a growing movement in the evangelical world that is rallying around the conviction that the best path to impacting future generations is actually found in recovering our past – the ancient model of spiritual formation as revealed by the role of the family, as first discovered in the Old Testament and then combined with the power of Christ-fueled community in the New Testament…

Research shows that we have on average about 40 hours a year of biblical instruction at church. Parents, by comparison, have over 3,000 hours a year outside of school and work in which they are constantly “teaching” their children something![5] The powerful and timeless message of Deuteronomy 6:4-7 articulated our convictions: if we are going to see a generation “emerge” to love God with all their heart, soul and strength, then we are going to have to re-direct much of our time and energy to equip parents (most of whom were not invested in spiritually by their own parents) about what it meant to “impress” these truths upon the lives of their children…

Full Article: http://www.preaching.com/printerfriendly/11574759/

Remember the Sabbath Day from your laptop? Third Commandment

Click In Remembrance Of Me

‘How can we provide authentic worship through the Web for people who are not part of the church?’

Lisa Miller
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Nov 3, 2008
With a scrap of bagel and a sip of Crystal Light, Beth McDonald gave communion to her husband. Then, after a blessing, he gave communion to her. Music played as the celebrant intoned the ancient words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The experience was among the most spiritually powerful of her life. “I had my eyes closed,” McDonald told me. “We were praying … I got really choked up.”

McDonald was not in church; she was in her living room in Minnesota. The celebrant was not at church; he was at home, in Santa Fe, N.M. Other participants logged on from Sri Lanka, Australia and the Netherlands. Through streaming video and the Internet, all were joined in holy communion.

As technology reshapes our world, as our “friends” become the people we know on Facebook as well as the ones we invite home for dinner, the definition of community is taking on radically new meanings. Nowhere is the concept of community more crucial than in religion. In the West, people traditionally worship together, in a group, in one room; that togetherness has theological import. In Christianity, the sacrament of communion underscores the unity of the faithful; consuming the consecrated bread and wine binds Christians with each other, with the saints in heaven and with the Lord. Now, at the farthest corners of the Christian world, a few people are applying new-tech concepts of community to this ancient rite. The example above is among the most avant-garde. The celebrant, Zeph Daniel, is a musician who preaches online to a group of Christians disconnected from the traditional church. One of his slogans is “Leave religion and find God.”

The experiment is underway in more mainstream corners of the Christian world as well. Two Methodist ministers have (in unrelated efforts) put communion services online. The Rev. Thomas Madron, pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Nashville, says he was moved to build an interactive communion site (holycommunionontheweb.com) to help people get what he calls “spiritual buttressing” when they need it, regardless of whether they regularly go to church. A former technology-company CEO, Madron is convinced that religious institutions need to rethink the way they deliver their services. “There’s a whole long list of people who just simply can’t make it regularly to a church—for example, people in the military, or people whose jobs require them to travel a lot, or students.” His tenure in the tech world led him to ponder “how we can provide authentic worship experiences through the Web for people who are not part of the institutional church.” Unlike Daniel’s communion service, which occurred at a specific time—and so gathered people together, in virtual space—Madron’s version is do-it-yourself. Simply click on the link and proceed as directed— an approach that allows the communicant to take communion any time, anywhere. Madron says his online service is meant to augment, not replace, a church service. “There’s a communal aspect to the eucharist that’s difficult to satisfy on the Web,” he says.

Can a Christian community be authentically replicated online? For Roman Catholics, especially, who believe the communion wafer is the body of Christ, a disembodied ritual makes no sense. Anne Foerst is a professor of computer science at St. Bonaventure University. She is also a practicing Lutheran who has a doctorate in theology. The whole point of religion, she insists, is embodiment—the being together, physically, with others and with God. The sacrament “cannot be simulated. The experience is not about you and the eucharist … If you can’t make the time to experience the community, then why do you need the sacrament?” To those who say they feel alienated from the traditional church, Foerst invokes the message of Jesus. Nobody’s perfect, she says. Get over it.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/165676