The first ripple from a book about the missing men in America's churches has broken against the shore at The Grove Church in Peoria, Ill., where Pastor Mark Doebler met with a crowd in a school gym decorated with camping equipment, pine trees, and target deer. I'm not making this up.

According to Crosswalk.com, the special Church for Men Summits at The Grove were intended to entice men. The service included worship songs, 10-minute biblical talks and a gift of a knife.

According to ChurchforMen.com, the companion Web site to David Murrow's book, "Why Men Hate Going to Church," the Peoria church used the masculine service to re-launch what has been a fledgling congregation. At a grand opening Sunday, Sept. 25, in conjunction with the Church for Men Summit, some 157 adults showed up. Just over 50 percent were men.

While Murrow's book offers a rather simplistic splitting of the sexes, it also offers practical advice to churches looking to attract more men—even men who are not hunter/gatherers. For example, Murrow offers tips of the day on his Web site with pithy advice such as: if you want men to attend a course, charge them a nominal fee. This sort of advice follows on the heals of other movements intended expressly to interest men, such as Promise Keepers and Man in the Mirror.

Discipleship at the bookstore

According to a Religion News Service report carried by the Dallas Morning News, an increasing number of Christian magazines are venturing onto the shelves alongside secular glossies in places such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, even Walmart.

If you can't get the people into the church, should you bring the church to the people? Men and women have increasingly gobbled up all that Christian media has offered over the last several years. The Barna Group reported in 2002 that more Americans were reached by Christian media than by churches. In March, 2005 those findings were updated to indicate even more use of Christian media and a further drop in church attendance. The 2005 study included data on Christian Web sites, which may have accounted for the increase.

While more material may be in more venues, the results are less than encouraging in terms of spiritual growth among American Christians. Most reported to Barna that they simply haven't sunk the time and energy into growing in their faith. Discipleship is all about discipline after all.