Yet it’s a trope that is accepted and spread among our churches—and they even use suspicious and questionable stats to back it up.
A while ago on the Bare Marriage podcast I talked with Beth Allison Barr and Miranda Zapor Cruz about the myth of the 93%, which goes something like this:
When dad comes to Christ first, 93% of families will follow.
When mom comes to Christ first, 17% of families will follow.
When kids come to Christ first, 3.5% of families will follow.
It’s been quoted at length my multiple preachers and authors.
This stat has been shared for years by prominent pastors, and is ubiquitous in Instagram reels.
● Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, quoted it in his 2000 sermon, “15 Qualities Every Family Needs to See in a Dad and Why.”
● Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors, quoted it in a 2021 episode of James Dobson’s Family Talk Radio.
● J.D. Greear, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, quoted it in his 2017 address to the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) National Convention.
● Josh Howerton, Texas megachurch pastor, quoted it in his 2024 Father’s Day sermon, saying it came from a “recent study.”
The problem? No such study has ever been produced. It was mentioned in a PromiseKeepers workbook in 1996, without citation, and has been parroted ever since, unquestioningly.
As we talked about in our discussion of this stat in the podcast, it has been parroted even though modern studies in the American evangelical context show something very different—that both mothers and fathers matter in faith formation, with mothers being slightly more important.
So why do they share a stat with no backing, rather than actual studies? Because that fake stat says what they want to believe—that women actually are inconsequential, and men are the important ones.
We taked about this on the podcast two years ago now, but every week I see more and more Instagram reels pop up sharing this same false information. It’s not going away. so it’s time to revisit it and look at the impact this false idea has had.
Is this just a harmless claim? Or is it doing serious damage to the church?
Well, here’s what I’m worried about:
I recently asked on social media if anyone could recall witnessing, in their own churches, seeing women’s ministries being removed. My heart broke as I was inundated with stories from men and women alike who told me that, yes, they did in fact see this happen.
But why is it happening?
To answer that question, we have to go back in time to when church culture began to shift in ideology to this idea that it was men who needed to be taught, pastored, and reached by the church, effectively turning women into afterthoughts. Or erasing us entirely.
The message these church leaders center is, “I’m going to pastor the men,” (as SBC megachurch pastor Matt Chandler explicitly said in a clip I shared), but then, in all too many cases, this turns into, “so therefore we don’t need women’s ministries.” Because when you have a situation where the pastor is focused mainly on reaching men and building men up as leaders, then the message he is communicating is, “I’m not here for the women.” Women are not being shepherded or invested in by church leadership.
In fact, women’s ministries can become a threat to the pastor, because they can raise up strong women who are grounded in Scripture who may prove a threat to the pastor’s vision. So it’s better to make sure the women don’t meet separately. It’s better to not invest in women’s leadership.
Well, then where do the women go if they want some spiritual nourishment, some counsel, or if they just need some advice? Usually, it would be to a women’s ministry leader, but increasingly, churches are getting rid of women’s ministries. They’re getting rid of the places where women usually have been able to use their gifts.
Women no longer have anyone to turn to in their church.
Share this post so that other people know that the 93% stat is a myth!
Amanda Cunningham used to run the Women’s Ministries at the Rockwall campus of Lakepointe Church, and she’s gone on the Julie Roys Show to talk about how they got rid of their women’s ministry.
They had tons of volunteers. They had qualified women. And they still got rid of it. Because at Rockwall campus, supposedly, they wanted all the campuses to offer the same thing, and so they promised that rather than women’s meetings and frequent get-togethers, instead “we would do one or two big events a year for women,.” Those events hadn’t materialized. Women are being ignored and left out of church life.
So these women who had been getting together and who had been able to exercise their leadership gifts, now no longer have those opportunities.
I also received a long testimony from someone who used to work for Christ Church of the Valley, which is a multi-site church in Arizona. But before we get to his story, let me share with you a little snippet from the church’s handbook:
WHO ARE WE TRYING TO REACH?
Reach the man so we can reach the whole family.
“When a Mother comes to faith in Christ, the rest of the family follows 17% of the time; but when the Father comes to faith, the rest of the family joins him 93% of the time.”
David Morrow, “Why Men Hate Going to Church” (Page 47)Reach the younger generation so we have a future.
Reach our neighbors so we can change our culture.
(note how their support for the 93% stat is to quote another man quoting the stat without a citation).
Do you notice what’s not there? Women. The church’s mission statement is about reaching men; reaching children and youth; and reaching the community.
But women? They’re afterthoughts.
Here’s what a former employee in the graphic arts department told me (used with his permission):
CCV has prided itself on this “reach the man, so we can reach the whole family strategy” going back as far as 2006, when I first came on staff as a Graphic Designer. As part of the onboarding process for new employees, we were given the book by David Morrow, “Why Men Hate Going to Church” – that book is where much often referred to talking point of “When a Mother comes to faith in Christ, the rest of the family follows 17% of the time; but when the Father comes to faith, the rest of the family joins him 93% of the time” comes from.
One of my first major responsibilities as a designer on the MarComm Team was to help establish a “target audience profile” – which was a wholly made up profile of an affluent male in the suburbs of Phoenix AZ.
The only actual data that was used was Salary data from the neighborhood the church was located in. The profile was similar in nature to the old “Saddleback Sam” concept from Rick Warren’s book.
CCV’S TARGET WAS NAMED MIKE HAAS.
Mike was a fictional profile we made up, with a stock photo of a middle-aged man, he played golf, wore expensive watches, drove a Land Rover, was married with 2 kids who played sports, was financially successful, but also in debt. Once that profile was created – we used to inform literally EVERYTHING we did as a church. From Marketing Campaigns, to the way services were designed, and even into who we hired – they had to look like, talk, and act like Mike Haas would.
This fictional profile, in addition to the strategy to “reach the man, so we can reach the whole family” permeated every single aspect of ministry for the entire church, but especially the MarComm team. We were instructed not to use feminine colors, fonts, or photography in designed marketing materials. I remember creating a Mother’s Day graphic in my first year on staff and I had to make it look as masculine as possible while still appealing to mothers – it was a lot!
EVENTUALLY, THE STRATEGY ALSO INFORMED A “NARROWING OF OUR FOCUS” BY CUTTING WOMEN’S MINISTRY.
Back in 2006 when I started, the women’s ministry was THRIVING. They would do quarterly events where they would attract hundreds of women. They would always use the excuses like ‘we moved women’s ministry into the Small Groups ministry where women can connect more intimately.’
In 2015, after nearly a decade of using the Mike Haas fictional profile as our guiding light as a church, the leadership decided to quietly let that fade into the background. The staff was growing quite a bit and the more staff that found out about the Mike Haas profile, especially the female staff, the more chatter began spreading around about it in a negative way. So in an effort to quell any of further objection to the strategy, it became more of a background thing as opposed to a regularly talked about thing that guided ministry decisions.
In 2017, the founding Pastor retired and passed the baton to one of his younger Executive Pastors, Ashley Wooldridge. Ashley is a massive proponent of the “reach the male, so we can reach the family strategy”
(He goes on to talk about what has happened since, but it involves other people, and I’ll leave it at that.)
The latest data once again shows that Gen Z women are leaving the church faster than Gen Z men, and for the first time in history there’s a demographic age group where the women are less religious than the men. That’s huge.
(and it points to a needed correction on the rhetoric about Gen Z men’s religious involvement: It is not that Gen Z men are flocking to church, as the Theobros are saying. It is that women are fleeing faster, so Gen Z men now make up more of a proportion of church goers than Gen Z women.)
That’s the fruit of this:
when you tell women that we don’t matter,
when you tell women that we can fulfill our greatest calling and it still isn’t going to be that influential because it’s only the man that really matters,
when you deny women any opportunities to use their gifts and
when you even get rid of the very, very, very limited few places that we could–
why would you expect women to stay?
I’d love to leave you all with a quote from one of my guests on episode 253 on embracing women’s equality in the church:
There are churches that do it well. Like, it’s not like this needs to be invented. There are churches that do not use these kinds of statistics and don’t set up men and women in these hierarchies. It’s not actually that hard not to do it.
It might be hard to unlearn it. It’s not reinventing a theology that doesn’t exist or a history that has never existed. It really is returning to what the church used to do and what some churches have always continued to do.
Miranda Zapor Cruz
Our podcast discussing how this stat was spread, with lots of clips of people using it
A quick 12 step template to vet a church using its website to make sure it’s safe for women
Our book She Deserves Better, which looks at what millennial and Gen Z women were taught in youth group
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