I'm working my way through Singled Out, by Christine Colon and Bonnie Field, and although I don't have a review of the book ready yet, I do have a few thoughts on how singles are received by the church. I should perhaps preface them by noting that I myself have been happily married for five years, and have spent very little time in the singles scene, so I'm not speaking as any kind of expert.
One of the points made by Colon and Field is that the evangelical church's emphasis on family can make it surprisingly hard for single adults to be made welcome and integrated into the church body. I personally have felt convicted for a while about what I've come to think of as Cookie-cutter Christianity: Christian environments where when you walk in the door you're surrounded by all of these lovely people with their smiles and warm greetings and lovely children in adorable outfits, who look like they could be straight out of a catalog. But I've mostly thought about this as it relates to questions of age, ethnicity, and disability- not family.
For a single person visiting a church...
seeing all the families filling the pews can apparently be a fairly depressing thing, especially if it highlights an unfulfilled desire. But singles see families around them all the time; what makes church worse? All of the family-oriented events, parenting-based sermon illustrations, and messages about the family as the fundamental institution in society, apparently. I was intrigued by the suggestion to look in the church bulletin and see how many of the events were obviously aimed at families, and how many of them a single person would find inviting (I suspect my church would fair well by this test, although it fails another one, namely being comprehensible to people who don't already know what all of the events and groups are about). Colon and Field had some horror stories to share about visiting churches and having people introduce themselves during the coffee hour, only to have the conversations wilt and die as soon as the church members discovered they had no spouses or children; apparently there was nothing left to talk about.
Given the example of Christ's ministry, it seems to me that if the local church doesn't consist of a fairly representative sample of the local population, we should be rethinking our ministries. That means looking past the cookie-cutter families and making sure we're welcoming and integrating singles.
I think it can become more of a challenge to make connections with people your own age once you enter the period of life when a lot of people are starting families. Understandably, getting married and having children totally rearranges your schedule and priorities.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Christian singles and married couples can support and encourage each other because of how different their lives are. I have really appreciated getting to talk with the young parents in my church. We can just talk about how our weeks have been going; there doesn't seem to be a total loss of things to say like in the example from the book.
If anything, I sometimes feel like the difficulty connecting goes the other way-- I can't pretend to know what parenting is like or to offer help or advice on something I've never done, so the depth of our conversations feels limited in one of the most significant areas of their lives. (At those times, I'm really thankful that my mother and father are usually around to offer their parenting advice-- and I can speak from the child's point of view!)
Your post made me realize how thankful I am for the kindness and openness of our church. One time, some friends had my family over for lunch. Their children knew me because I help my mother teach children's church some weeks, and after lunch, the kids got out their favorite toys and played with me for a while. It means a lot to me that my friends knew and trusted me enough to invite me into their home and their children's lives.