have a theory about it, and I'm not even sure if I can come up with anything more than a brief paragraph about it, but I thought it was very interesting Sunday morning when the senior minister of the church I work at had all the guys who were firstborn sons stand up, and a huge majority of the guys in the congregation stood up.
Interesting.
6 comments:
That is interesting. i am a firstborn son as well. But like you said, you can't really make much more out of this than an observation. I wonder if there is more to it?
Psychologists are always doing studies on characteristics of personality and birth order...I bet there could be a study done on who attends church :) I only saw 2nd service so I assume that first service was the same ...alot of firstborn men
That's what I'm trying to figure out - was it a majority because obviously you're going to have more firstborn sons percentage-wise, or is it because firstborn sons have a personality that makes them want to go to church? I don't know, but maybe I'll grab a birth order book and read about it.
in my family, the second son (matt) was into "church" more than i until we about high school. then he dropped off the scene, got into drugs, got into some trouble and became the "black sheep."
the 3rd son (adam) never got connected to the church. our mother died when he was 12 and she was the church-goer. adam not only blamed God for his pain and the loss of his mother, but also had no encouragement to go to church from our father.
all that taken into consideration, i am not sure that birth order determined the propensity to go to church. i more likely assume that life circumstances played a much bigger role.
For us, it was the middle son who never really connected to church.
The younger son connected mostly because of the influence of the oldest son (me). Since I was his youth minister as well as his brother, that influence was obviously there.
Hmmm... It makes sense to me that it's probably just because there would be more firstborn sons than second-born or third-born, b/c there always has to be a firstborn son. But I dunno. Maybe if he'd had the second-born sons stand up we'd see the same thing.
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