Reader mdavid alerted me to the following article concerning evangelization and men in the church: Bringing Men Back to the Church. The first sentence:
Here’s a simple formula, tried and true, for getting families into church: If the fathers come, the wives and children will come, too.
The article is short and worth a read in its entirety. Here are the stats which lie at the heart of its argument:
- If a child is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 3.7 percent probability that the rest of the family will become Christians.
- If mom is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 17 percent probability that the rest of the family will follow.
- If dad is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 93 percent probability that everyone else in the family will follow his lead.
I can attest to personal anecdotes which firmly support this. A follow-up post will touch on that story more. The article itself is short on solutions, so I invite my readers to take this opportunity to offer their thoughts on how to address this problem.
In the meantime, here is another good blog post by Beefy Levinson which touches on why the priest shortage in the US is artificially created.
