“All the fathers in church today please stand up for special prayers and blessings,” the pastor boomed into the microphone. His request surprised the men and I saw the one seated on my pew anxiously looking at the door.
"All the fathers in church today please stand up for special prayers and blessings,” the pastor boomed into the microphone. His request surprised the men and I saw the one seated on my pew anxiously looking at the door.
The day, December 27, a day I decided to attend church after a while. In stark contrast to the number of women attending church services every week in Rwanda, men appear to be outnumbered all the time.
It is not unusual to see a mother and her children dropped off at their local church. As the children tumble out of the car and the mother dashes off to church, dad reverses his car and speeds away, having done his Sunday morning duty of delivering his family for their weekly spiritual nourishment.
In other cases, he remains in the car, reading his weekend papers or sleeping. Many churches in Rwanda today boast of more women faithful while the number of men keeps dwindling.
Thierry Kamugisha has been to church only four times, once on Christmas Day and the other three times during funeral services for close relatives. Kamugisha, a graphic designer blames his demanding job for his failure to attend church.
"I used to go to church in Butare where I was working before, but when I moved to Kigali I don’t know what happened, perhaps I acquired a bad habit. Sometimes I think it is Satan who tells me not to go to church,” says Kamugisha, whose wife Annette and children regularly attend Sunday service.
A 35-year-old lawyer admits that the thought of going to church on a Sunday morning never crosses his mind, despite his wife trying to lure him.
"She prepares my breakfast early on Sunday and persuades me to get out of bed which I manage to let her and the children leave for church with a promise to join them later but I never do. When they come back, they find me lying on the sofa, sipping tea and reading the day’s newspapers,” he says.
John a university student, attends church services on Christmas Day when he travels upcountry for ‘social reasons’ but he rarely stays beyond the offertory session.
"When I want to meditate I would rather go to a quiet place like a forest on my own than to church,” he says.
According to research, thousands of men around the world experience ‘Sunday morning sickness’ and find myriad excuses for staying behind while encouraging their families to attend church faithfully.
In his book titled The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, Leon Podles shows that many men all over the world do not care much about church unless they are in charge while more women than men attend and participate in church in both Catholic and Protestant congregations.
Podles writes that the exit of men from the church goes back to the first Christian millennium, when church leaders redefined Christianity in feminine terms such as ‘the bride of Christ’.
To get the men to rejoin the flock, Podles writes, today’s church should cater more to the psychological needs of men.
It is unclear at which point Christianity abandoned its male members yet the founder of the religion, Christ, was a man and started his ministry by recruiting 12 other men.
John is also of the view that some Rwandan men abscond church due to the drink. "Many men work on Saturdays and hit the bars afterwards to ‘relax’. That is why Sunday morning is preserved for nursing hangovers and over-sleeping, and church has to be forfeited,” he says.
Some men, he says, only seek solace from church when things are not going well in their lives or when there is no money to buy beer.
Men generally get something or someone to blame for not going to church including the pastor for asking for tithes and the boring sermons.
On his part Karangwa, John’s schoolmate, says church leaders are materialist, "they drive huge cars and live lavish lifestyles. Their greed for money and power is evident for all to see,” says Karangwa adding, "The few times I have gone to church the sermons have left me unsatisfied as they are not "intellectually stimulating”.
I don’t think pastors prepare well for sermons and this discourages many men.”
Religion offers solace, compassion, encouragement and comfort to mankind and that’s why women are more likely to seek it than men.
Whereas culturally men are expected to suppress their feelings as expressing themselves is seen as a weakness, women are free to cry. But could there be more than meets the eye?