Buffy Slays Female Worshippers
August 27th, 2008
According to a recent study, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is responsible for a steep decline in the number of female worshippers. Yes, you read it right. More than 50,000 women a year have left the Christian churches in England over the past 20 years. “In short, women are abandoning the church,” says the report’s author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby.
Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularized by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.
Women’s ordination, as priests and now bishops, has dominated debate and headlines – but while looking at women in the pulpit we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift with more consequences for the church’s survival is underway.
Dr Aune’s research shows that “more than a million women worshippers have left churches since 1989.” She asserts that the church must do a better job of addressing women’s issues if it hopes to prevent this mass exodus. Obviously these women have a need that is clearly not being met through formal religion. But with all do respect, may I suggest that there may be more at stake here than reforming traditionalism and hierarchies?
Once while passing through Samaria, the Lord Jesus struck up a conversation with a woman who had come to draw water from a well. This woman too had a need that was clearly not being met through formal religion. She’d been through five broken marriages and the man she was currently living with was not her husband. This woman had a thirst for something that neither her religion nor her many relationships could fulfill. Jesus didn’t offer better programming or a more modern approach to women’s issues. What Jesus had to offer was living water, promising that whoever drinks of it will never be thirsty again.
People today are searching for something outside themselves to quench the thirsting in their souls. Dr Aune believes that “with the pressures women face, churches must adapt to make themselves more accessible” by introducing services and activities that address the needs of women and the modern influence of feminism. While this may seem like the popular thing to do, better services and activities cannot possibly fill the void when what is really needed is a drink from the living water that Jesus Christ has to offer. Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” – John 4:13-14. How can Buffy possibly compare to that?
