Has Prayer Really Been Feminized?Scot Bower - 12 Sep 2011

An interesting debate was emerging on twitter this morning with both Brian Heasley (one of the leaders of 24-7 in Ibiza) and Carla Harding (24-7's international Prayer Director) blogging on the perception that prayer has become/is becoming an activity dominated by women.

Carla and Brian's opinions are not necessarily representative of 24-7 as a movement. Personally I think we're pretty balanced (24-7's facebook demographic shows we have 56% female and 44% male who *like* our page.); but we would be interested to know what you think, what your experience is.

Brian writes:

Sometimes I get worried that people think prayer is for girls! With our summer teams that join us here there are we have many more men than women. my accountant wife tells me 80% of our teams are women! I know this is always true of mission teams in general but it did get me thinking about the feminization of prayer.
Over the last century prayer has been feminized, maybe because as the growth of christianity has happened men have worked and women have stayed at home...

 Continue reading Brian's thoughts on his blog

 Carla writes:

Are women drawn to prayer and men drawn to community leadership?  Is the trend a gender or cultural bias? I think there is an element of what you see is what you replicate. Though many streams of the church have embraced female leadership in the last century there seem to be more men that women leading in this context.  Could women be more involved in prayer because we've lacked male champions to point the way for their peers?

Continue reading Carla's thoughts on her blog.

There is obviously a spectrum of experience and opinion on the subject. We'd love to hear what your perception is. Are your prayer meetings principally attended by women? If so is that a bad thing? How do you engage the guys as well as the girls when it comes to prayer? You can let us know by replying in the comments below or through our facebook page.

If you'd like to stay on top of conversations like these as they emerge you can follow @247prayer on twitter or join us on Facebook.