How should we engage in discussions about singleness as the church?
Why should we talk about singleness?
These questions and some others have been ones I've been wrestling with for a while. As a single Christian, committed to the church as a whole and to a local gathering of the church, these questions are deeply personal.
As I've wrestled with these questions, they've become a series of blog posts.I don't know how many posts yet, but I've been challenged that we need to be having this conversation in the church more than we are and we need to have it differently than we have in the past. This isn't an easy discussion to have, but it's vital to the church in our rapidly changing culture.
It's no longer the norm in our society to get married, have kids, and stay married. This may have remained the norm in the church for a little longer than society as a whole, but it's no longer the norm in the church either. People are getting married later and more are not getting married at all. This means that single adults are a much larger percentage of our churches than they have been in the past. But, I've found that we do a poor job of addressing that.
As I've wrestled with this topic and dug into it, I've discovered a significant lack of resources on the topic. Standing in my local Christian bookstore, there were two shelves related to marriage, along with over half the books in the section for women also talking about being a wife and/or mother. After some more looking, I found the very small section labelled "singles." It consisted of five books, and all but one of them was about preparing for marriage. As I turned my search elsewhere, I discovered a few more resources, although still a staggeringly few in comparison to what is available on marriage.
While the handful of practical books I found on the topic of singleness were good, they're not likely to be read by someone who isn't single - even though they need to be. I think we need more than practical books, we need to understand what the Bible actually has to say about singleness.
As a single person, I've been taught a theology of marriage to go along with the practical I've heard and seen available. And that's a good thing. Even as a single person, I need that.
But, I wonder how many of us - particularly those who are married - have ever read or heard anything on a theology of singleness? Of what the Bible has to say about it?
As I searched for this, I came across a book that I found helpful and challenging. As with most of what I read, I found I both agreed and disagreed with what the author had to say. Reading the book I found was part of what really drove me to dig deeper and wrestle more with this topic.
The book is called The Significance of Singleness: A Theological Vision for the Future of the Church by Christina S. Hitchcock. As I read, I was driven back to Scripture to wrestle with its truth. I was also challenged to wrestle with my own thoughts and experiences as a single adult in the church.
As I read the introduction to the book, I was struck by some of what Hitchcock had to say on the topic. It seems fitting to share a bit of it here as I introduce these blog posts. Hitchcock is writing from the perspective of the American church, but when it comes to the topic of singleness, almost all of what she had to say fits with my experiences and the experiences of others I've talked to within the Canadian church.
"American Christians adore marriage and are petrified by singleness. Our inability to think of singleness within the context of the entire kingdom of God has not only hurt our ability to live as single people and to live with single people; it has also damaged our ability to speak wisely, humbly, and biblically on subjects such as feminism, homosexuality, extra-marital sex, and even missions and evangelism. When anything take precedence over the kingdom, even God's good gifts, our theology starts to take a nosedive, and we'll see problems popping up all over the place. Singleness is not something to be endured, but neither is it something that is simply of practical usefulness to the church because single people have so much time and energy. The life of Christian singleness can serve as a picture of the gospel and what that means: participating in true community, finding identity in Christ, and receiving authority to act as God's agents in the world."
(Christina S. Hitchcock, The Significance of Singleness, pg. xxii)
Over the next while, many of my posts are going to be wrestling with singleness. Wrestling with what the Bible says about it, what it looks like in the church, what it looks like in life in general. These aren't easy topics and not all of them are comfortable. There are places that really wrestling with this took me that aren't places I've usually written about here, but are an incredibly important part of the conversation.
I don't pretend to be an expert on this. I'm certainly not a biblical scholar. I'm a fellow pilgrim on the journey to become more like Christ and I invite you to wrestle with this with me. I'd love to hear your perspectives, experiences, and understanding of Scripture as I write these posts. Lets start this conversation that we've been missing or avoiding in the church, that we desperately need to have.
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