The Blogger Blaster provides an excellent metric to determine whether your church is one worth attending or not:
Lets start by looking at Mothers Day. Now… Sermons on both days have formulas that are almost always followed… but in each case… are slightly different. On mothers day… women will be celebrated and praised to the point of near worship. Mary will be mentioned over and over again. Then… in the sermon… the minister will take some particular positive attribute of mothers… and use it as a lesson… and hold it up as something for everyone to aspire to.
Then Fathers Day comes along. its a whole different story. It often starts with a mens breakfast… where an old man will stand up and read a list of fatherly attributes… and its assumed of course that you don’t meet them… then you are chastised for not meeting them… and challenged to meet them in the future. Then the service rolls around… and everyone will lament the failures in society and blame them on who? Right. Dads. And then the formulaic sermon… of course there will be no mention of Joseph… no… instead the minister takes a negative attribute of males… this morning at my church it was pride… and complains about how it affects the family of fathers… and uses it as a negative example to show people something to avoid.
Let me be perfectly clear. I will never, ever, attend a church that makes a habit of putting women on a pedestal and celebrating female traits while repeatedly demonizing men and castigating male traits. That is the hallmark of a church which has abandoned the worship of God the Father in favor of elevating current societal norms to sacred writ.
Because men have their flaws and engage in sin, it is correct for a pastor to exhort them and hold them accountable. But if your pastor is not capable of holding both men and women to account for their behavior, he should be your ex-pastor.