Male attendance at churches has been dropping, research shows
Parties, not pulpits, interested pastor Leonard Moore when he was in college. He had grown up attending the Church of Christ Holiness in Cleveland, but by the time he was an undergraduate in Mississippi at Jackson State University, he had stopped showing up on Sundays.
"I grew up in the church, but the church didn't grow up in me," Moore said. "You can be in the church your whole life and be gifted in Church 101. But for a long time, there was never a transformative process in my soul and in my life."
Moore is now 38 and is leading a year-old Austin church called the Soul Movement. One of his goals is to attract men back to the church — men who might have left during their college years just as he did.
David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church," wrote in his 2004 book that one out of three church attendees is male. The Barna Research Group, a group based in Ventura, Calif.,...