Women Are Not the Problem

A response to the claim that the church has been “feminized” and that women are the reason men are walking away.

There's a claim making the rounds in Christian circles these days, and it goes something like this:

The Church has been feminized, and that's why men are walking away. Everything from the way the church dresses to the way services are conducted is slanted toward a feminine perspective. The Church made it easy for women and hard for men, and the numbers are showing it.

It's a tidy explanation. It names a culprit, points to a trend, and offers a clean solution. But tidy isn't the same as true. And before we accept a diagnosis, we ought to ask whether it actually fits the patient.

I want to say at the outset that this is not an argument against men, or for one sex over the other. The Church is not a battleground where women win, and men lose, or the reverse. The body of Christ is exactly that, a body, with many members, none of whom can say to another, “I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). If men are drifting from the Church, that is a real and serious concern worth our honest attention. But misdiagnosing the cause helps no one. And blaming women, even indirectly, even by blaming a “feminized” atmosphere, gets both the history and the theology wrong.

What Does “Feminized” Even Mean?

The argument rests on a quiet assumption: that warmth, beauty, emotional expression, nurture, and relational care are “feminine,” and that their presence in worship has somehow pushed men out. But look at where those qualities actually come from in Scripture, and the assumption collapses.

The God of the Bible weeps. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He looked over Jerusalem and longed to gather her children “as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Matthew 23:37), a tender, maternal image chosen by the Son of God to describe His own heart. The same Jesus who overturned tables also took children into His arms and blessed them (Mark 10:16). Strength and tenderness were never at war in Him.

If emotional depth, beauty, and nurture are “feminine,” then we have a problem far bigger than church décor. We have a feminized Savior. But of course that's absurd. These aren't feminine traits. They're human traits, and more than that, they are godly ones. The fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). Notice that this list was written by Paul, a man, to all believers. No one gets to opt out of gentleness because they find it insufficiently masculine.

The Women Who Built the Church

Here is where history simply refuses to cooperate with the complaint. Far from being a recent arrival who softened a once-rugged institution, women have been holding the Church up from the very beginning, often when the men had scattered.

Consider the crucifixion. When Jesus was arrested, the disciples fled (Matthew 26:56). Peter denied Him three times. But the women stayed. They were there at the cross (Matthew 27:55–56), and they were the first at the tomb on Easter morning. It was Mary Magdalene to whom the risen Christ first appeared, and who was sent to tell the others (John 20:11–18). The first preacher of the resurrection, the central fact of our entire faith, was a woman, commissioned by Jesus Himself.

The early church grew in homes, and again and again, those homes belonged to women. Lydia, a seller of purple cloth, was the first convert in Europe; after her baptism, she opened her house, and it became a gathering place for the believers in Philippi (Acts 16:14–15, 40). The church in Jerusalem met in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark (Acts 12:12). Priscilla, working alongside her husband Aquila, hosted a church in her home and helped instruct the eloquent Apollos more accurately in the faith (Romans 16:3–5; Acts 18:24–26).

These women were not passive beneficiaries of an institution that “made it easy” for them. They were its hosts, its patrons, and its financiers. Luke tells us plainly that a group of women, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, “and many others,” traveled with Jesus and His disciples and “provided for them out of their resources” (Luke 8:1–3). In a word: women bankrolled the earthly ministry of Jesus. Phoebe is named as a deacon and a “patron of many” (Romans 16:1–2), entrusted by Paul to carry his letter to the Romans. The list goes on.

And this pattern did not end with the New Testament. It runs straight through the modern era, nowhere more visibly than among Black women in America, who have repeatedly built and sustained the church when the doors of formal leadership were closed to them. When some denominations refused to ordain them, they planted churches anyway. Rosa Horn founded the Pentecostal Faith Church for All Nations in Harlem, and Lucy Smith founded the All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago, both in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nannie Helen Burroughs, addressing the National Baptist Convention in 1900, named plainly how often women's gifts were obstructed, then spent her life building educational and missionary work that expanded the church's reach far beyond the pulpit. In time, the barriers themselves began to fall: in 2000, Vashti Murphy McKenzie was elected the first woman bishop in the AME Church, and more recently the Rev. Gina Stewart became the first woman president of a major Black Baptist organization, the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society. The historian W.E.B. Du Bois, surveying the Black church a century ago, concluded that it was women who sustained its spiritual and material life. He was right, and the observation holds far more broadly than that.

So when someone says the Church has been “feminized” in a way that explains its troubles, the long view of history offers a quiet, stubborn rebuttal: the Church has always leaned heavily on the faithfulness of women. That faithfulness is not the disease. If anything, it has been one of the great means of the Church's survival.

A Better Diagnosis

None of this means the concern about men is imaginary. Where men are disengaging, that matters, and it deserves a thoughtful response. But the honest answer is more complicated, and more interesting, than “blame the atmosphere.”

Men and women alike disengage from churches for reasons that have little to do with anyone's sense of style: shallow teaching, broken trust, hypocrisy, isolation, a failure to be challenged or known. The answer to a disengaged man is not to make the Church harsher or to strip out warmth and beauty as though they were contaminants. It is to call him into the fullness of discipleship, to “act like men, be strong,” yes (1 Corinthians 16:13), but in the very next breath, to “let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). Paul saw no contradiction there. Neither should we.

The deeper error in the original claim is that it makes one half of the body the standard and the other half the problem. But the gospel does not work that way. “There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The goal was never a masculine church or a feminine church. The goal is a Christlike one, and Christ is big enough to hold strength and tenderness, conviction and compassion, the courage of the cross and the gentleness of a hen gathering her chicks.

The Real Invitation

If we want men back in the pews, let's invite them in, genuinely, urgently, with open arms. But let's not do it by sending women a quiet message that their faithfulness is what went wrong. That message is not just unkind; it is unscriptural, and it is ungrateful to the very people who have so often kept the lamp burning.

Women are not the problem. They never were. They were at the cross, first at the tomb, and the doors of their homes were the first doors the Church ever walked through. The challenge before us isn't to choose between men and women. It's to build churches deep enough, honest enough, and Christ-centered enough that the whole body, every member, every gift, finds a home there.

That's not a feminine vision or a masculine one. It's simply the Church as Jesus meant it to be. ~ Tatum Monique