HOW GENDER SPECIFIC IS MINISTRY?
A Leadership Forum
January 1, 1991
In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins muses, "Why can't a woman be like a man?" and, as he continues to confound her, Eliza Doolittle fumes back, "Just you wait, 'enry 'iggins. … You'll be sorry, but your tears will be too late!"
Men. Women. How do they ever communicate?
And how does a church communicate to both genders? And touch both men and women with the gospel? And meet their separate needs? And joint needs? And conflicting needs?
Whew! That's what took LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley to Dallas, where they gathered and talked with three parish pastors well acquainted with the issues:
-Mary C. Miller, associate pastor of First Wayne Street United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
-Alice Petersen, who is associate pastor of College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati.
-Jim Smith, who serves Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas as a pastoral counselor.
We intended to meet on an even field, with two men and two women. But when one of the male participants couldn't attend, Jim Smith had to hold his own with only a shade of masculine help from the LEADERSHIP editors.
Leadership: According to a recent LEADERSHIP survey, the female-male ratio for Sunday worship attendance is about 60:40. Our survey also shows that married women attend church without their husbands at a rate four times greater than married men attending without their wives. Why the disparity between the religious practices of men and women?
Alice Petersen: One possibility has to do with the three fundamental human motivations writer David McClelland cites: the need for power, the need to achieve, and the need to affiliate with others. Church appeals to the need to belong. And women, in general, seek out affiliation, whereas men seem ...
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