I'm leaving in a short while for a weekend organised by "Christian Vision for Men" - an organisation which my parish is affiliated to because of our own 'e-men' group.
It does feel strange, in our diverse, gender-equal, culture to be focusing just on men for a while. But the hard reality is that the church has never recovered, numerically, from the loss of male worshippers caused by the world wars...leading, some have suggested, to a 'feminisation' of church worship and structures which fails to communicate to men.
Christian Vision for Men (click here) aims to reverse the decline in numbers of male Christians and "To encourage and equip Christian men in the UK to share their faith in Jesus Christ with their friends and colleagues".
Our own e-men group has experimented during this last year with a range of different approaches to encouraging men to think about faith - including discussions in the back-rooms of pubs, as well as purely social events. We've had a reasonable degree of success in attracting guys whose wives and children are more regular attendees than they are. But there is a lot more to do...especially if men who have no current connection with the church are to find, in the search for faith, something that will excite them.
Hopefully the conference will give me some stuff to think about! More when I return...
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