Singleness and the Church (Part V)

The other day I saw an advert for The Purpose Driven Family, a study curriculum developed by Pastor Rick Warren at the famous Saddleback Church, and I was reminded all over again why I started this series on singleness. As a full disclaimer, I should say that I’ve never looked into The Purpose Driven Family curriculum beyond yesterday’s quick skim of the ad-copy, so I’m making these judgements based solely on the cover; but based on that cover, a campaign like The Purpose Driven Family illustrates the challenges of being a single person in the church that I’ve been trying to articulate in this series.

To understand what I mean, try to imagine yourself as a single Christian—a gay man who has chosen to walk the path of celibacy, perhaps—a single woman who has served Jesus all her life and never felt the need to marry, maybe—a divorcee who is trying to pickup the pieces in a way that honors Jesus, let’s say—a single mom whose boyfriend bailed when she got pregnant—a young adult who hasn’t yet found “Mr or Ms Right,” and isn’t so sure they ever will—a—well—you get the picture. Imagine living out one of the many permutations of the single life, as a Christian, and this particular Sunday your pastor announces that for the next 40 days your church is going to focus specifically (perhaps solely) on how to turn your marriage, your kids, or your nuclear family into a power-house for Jesus.

What response are you likely to have?

If you are like any of the single Christians I’ve known, you’ll probably just hold your breath and bear it for the next 40 days at church. Quite possibly you’ll check out mentally for those said 40 days. It’s not impossible you’ll decide to skip church altogether until the Purpose Driven Family thing is done.

Am I saying that the Bible has nothing to say about being a Christian mom, dad, kid, or member of a nuclear family?

No. It has all kinds of things to say about how the Gospel can intersect and transform your family life. Of course it does.

Am I saying the church should never talk about Christian family life, for fear of ostracizing the singles in their midst?

No again. Of course there is a time and a place to do so.

All I’m saying is that if and when a church does launch this kind of a family-focused ministry, it needs to address the fact that it may be unintentionally communicating to the single people in its community that they do not matter as much as married people, that it believes married life is the only “serious” way to follow Jesus, or that God is really just the great matchmaker in the sky whose ultimate goal is simply to pair everyone up with a compatible life-partner, 2.5 kids, and a white picket fence around the yard.

As far as I can tell, none of those things are true.

God’s goal is men and women who are following Jesus with all they got, on a shalom-oriented mission for him in the world, and living that out with every breath no matter what circumstances they find themselves in. Marriage is one way to achieve this goal, sure. But so is singleness. And a church that wants to challenge its married people to live on purpose for Jesus should think just as seriously about how to extend that same challenge, with equal weight, to its single people.

A while back I did some writing for our denomination on this topic, and I developed a small “discussion starter” questionnaire that church leaders might use, to think through if, how, and to what extent they actually affirm singleness as a meaningful path for following Jesus. I want this blog series to sound as practical note as possible, so I offer it here as a little thought-experiment in closing.

1. What percentage of our church households are singles?

2. Do we have any singles in meaningful positions of leadership?

3. Do our practices around Mother’s Day or Father’s Day exclude or alienate singles?

4. Do we have couple’s focused ministries, activities or events that explicitly or implicitly exclude singles?

5. In our discussions of outreach do we explicitly or implicitly specify “families” or “couples” as the preferred demographic?

6. In our vision/values/mission documents, do we explicitly or implicitly state our focus is on families?

7. Do we have singles-focused ministries that “isolate” singles from the broader church community?

8. In our teaching or preaching on Christian marriage, families or sexuality, do we include teaching that presents singleness as a legitimate expression of one’s sexuality and/or celebrates it as a meaningful path for discipleship?

9. In our hiring of or searching for pastoral staff, board members or other leaders, do we implicitly or explicitly communicate that single pastors will not be considered?

10. Do we have ceremonies of commissioning to service, or covenant friendships, or other creative ways of publicly acknowledging and affirming people’s choice to pursue singleness?

11. Do we have single mentors, single pastors, or other single Christian leaders who can help younger singles navigate the unique pressures that are part of a single celibate life?

12. Do we encourage informal and intentional connecting between singles and couples (e.g. do singles get invited over by families and/or couples)?

13. Do we provide Divorce Care, or similar grace-based, biblical ministries to help people deal with the grief and loss of a divorce?

Suffer the Singles to Come to Me (On Singleness and Celibacy, Part IV)

There’s a very famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew where the crowds are bringing their toddlers to Jesus and the disciples try to prevent them from doing so. If you’ve read it before you’ll know that Jesus becomes quite indignant with his disciples and tells them to “Suffer the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14, KJV), because “the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.”

It’s famous, of course, because the Lord is clearly validating children here in a way that would have been, at the very least, counter cultural to his original listeners, but resonates deeply with our culture, where (unlike the ancients) we tend to put children on a pedestal and idealize childhood. For us, there are probably fewer images more lovely than the one of the Lord tenderly blessing a handful of playful children—our children—as a quintessential expression of his ministry. Of course, we assume, as we drive our kids hither and thither from soccer practice to piano lessons to playgrounds and back, making no end of sacrifices for their well-being—of course Jesus cares as much about children as we do—of course he was willing to put as much on the line for them as we are.

And he is; don’t get me wrong.

Children will always have a special place in his heart—though not because of their perceived innocence and child-like wonderment (as we might assume)—but more because of their vulnerability, weakness, and (at least in his culture) their low status on the social totem pole. Nevertheless, Jesus clearly loves children, and enjoins his followers to do the same.

A while back I was reading Matthew 19, though, and I noticed for the first time that this passage comes immediately after Jesus’s radical teaching on divorce and remarriage in Matthew 19:1-12, where he tells us that God’s intention was that marriage should be a permanent, exclusive union between a man and a woman (19:9).

I noticed this, and for the first time it occurred to me to wonder why the disciples don’t want the children to be brought to Jesus for a blessing in 19:13.

What if it’s because they learned the lesson of Matthew 19:1-12 too well? What if Matthew 19:13-15 is Jesus’s step to correct a pendulum that had swung too far the other way?

What I mean is this: in Matthew 19:10, when they hear Jesus’s firm stance on the permanency of marriage, the disciples say, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife it is better not to marry.”

The logic here is not completely clear to me, but it seems they’ve added it up and have decided that if marriage “can’t be escaped," we ought not to jump into it in the first place.

And what’s stunning to me, is that in Matthew 19:11, Jesus doesn’t tell them they’re wrong. He simply says, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those for whom it has been given; and the one who can accept it should.”

If you read it very closely, Jesus seems to be agreeing with the disciple’s conclusion (that it’s better not to marry), but also wisely acknowledging that most can’t walk that path. So he offers marriage as a concession to those for whom “becoming a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom” is just too strenuous of a path. Paul is probably taking his cue from the Lord Jesus when he does a similar thing himself in 1 Corinthians 7:1-7.

There are probably other ways to take Matthew 19:11-12, but if this reading is correct, it would certainly explain the “let the little children come to me” fiasco in Matthew 19:13ff. Because if you were a disciple that day and you had heard Jesus say that marriage is a concession for those who can’t walk the path of celibacy, but if you can handle singleness you ought to … you could be excused, I think, if you figured that Jesus had actually, in that teaching, minimized the importance of family life altogether. And it would be at least understandable if, the next time you saw a bunch of families bringing their children to Jesus for a blessing, you tried to prevent it.

Surely the Jesus who said what he said about marriage in verse 11 and 12, would not want to be bothered with a bunch of children in verse 13, right?

Well: wrong (see verse 14-15), but I can understand why you’d think that.

Because the New Testament consistently and clearly discusses singleness with very high esteem—as an ideal way to serve the Lord—and it often talks about marriage as though it were a necessary concession for the “not yet” era of the Kingdom of God, a concession which will become obsolete once the “already” has come in all its fullness. There will be, after all, no marriage at the resurrection (Matthew 22:30), and those who can live into that reality already, on this side of the resurrection, Jesus seems to be saying, should do so.

(You might quote Ephesians 6, and say, doesn’t Ephesians 5:22-33 put as high a value on marriage as you possibly can, making it symbolic of the union between Christ and the church? But that verse actually proves too much, in a way. If marriage is a symbol of the union between Christ and his church, then at the eschaton, when that union is perfect and complete, marriage will have served its purpose and will no longer be needed.)

All this brings us back Matthew 19:13-15. Whatever else Jesus was doing by blessing those little children that day, he was certainly also preventing us from taking the above logic too far, too soon.

“Even though the institution of marriage has a shelf-life,” he seems to be saying, “and even though singleness is a good way to follow me, even so, till that day when the Kingdom has arrived in all its fullness, there is still a place, now, for married life, and families, and children. So let the little children come to me, and do not prevent them. For the Kingdom of God belongs to them (as much as it does to single people).”

On this reading Matthew 19:13-15 is not so much an unmitigated endorsement of all things children, and a summons to the church to focus on the family above all else. It is, instead, a boundary marker, preventing the church from swimming too far out, so to speak, into the sea of “singleness and celibacy.”

Put less metaphorically: Matthew 19:13-15 is there to bring marriage and family, up to, and on par with, singleness as a viable way of following Jesus. So that the church doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the singles are the red-ribbon-Christians and the marrieds are the “also-rans.”

If I’m on to anything here, I gotta say that this is not a problem than needs correcting in the modern North-American Church—the problem of elevating singleness and denigrating marriage, I mean. As I have argued in previous posts in this series, the modern North American church tends to elevate marriage as the ideal and barely even acknowledges that singleness is a thing (except as a problem to be “fixed” by marriage).

If Matthew 19:13-15 was there to correct the over-swing of the pendulum towards singleness, in Jesus's day, Matthew 19:11-12, is here to correct the over-swing of the pendulum to the other side, in our day.

But my point here is not to pit one of these two paths against the other, singleness or marriage; it’s just to illustrate that Jesus seems to think that both are necessary, and a church that really wanted to experience the life of the Kingdom would value, celebrate and encourage both.

Because God’s ultimate goal is not “married-Christians.” His ultimate goal is fully-devoted disciples. Marriage is one way to experience and live out one’s discipleship, of course; but so is singleness. And a church that really understood what it meant to bring their children—and their marriages—and their families—to Jesus, would make sure their single people were also there, receiving their blessing too, and discovering that the Kingdom of God belongs as much to them as it does anyone else who finds themselves at his side.

Towards a Theology of Celibacy, Part III

(Note: this is adapted from a paper I prepared for the FMCiC in 2016. You can find the whole paper here: Pastoral Reflections on Singleness and Celibacy)

Any church that wants to treat the Bible's teaching on marriage seriously will have to grapple, at the same time, at some point or another, with its teaching about celibacy as well.  Few books I've read or sermons I've heard on the topic of marriage actually do this. Instead they tend to treat Christian marriage as though it were some how the ideal, and ignore the sometimes startling things the Bible says about the goodness of the single life. There are a number of Bible texts that laud singleness as a path for following Jesus, and often these texts present marriage, if anything, as a concession to those who are unable to walk the path of celibacy.  If we wish to have a theologically rich understanding of marriage and singleness alike, I think, we will have to let these texts speak with their full weight.

The first, and most obvious, is 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul addresses the Corinthian church on matters of marriage and celibacy. What stands out in this text is the way in which Paul seems to view marriage here as a good and proper concession to the frailties of our broken sexuality, rather than an arrangement that is somehow superior to singleness. “It is good for a man not to marry,” he writes (7:1), “but because of immoralities (porneia, sexual immorality), each man is to have his own wife and each woman is to have her own husband” (7:2). Later in the passage he will say that it is “good for the unmarried to remain single” (7:8), but if they are likely to “burn with passion,” they should marry. Here Paul lines up celibate singleness and marriage as equally legitimate expressions of Christian discipleship, though he is clear that he sees an advantage in singleness. The advantage, specifically, is that unmarried Christians are free to serve the Lord with an undivided heart, whereas married Christians have divided interests (7:33-34). Finally, it should be noted that in this passage Paul  refers to celibacy as a “gift.” Given the fact that the term Paul uses here for gift (charisma) is the same he will use later to describe the supernatural empowerings of the Holy Spirit—gifts of healing, tongues, prophecy and so on—it should be noted that Paul does not single out singleness as a unique “gift,” as distinct from marriage. Rather he notes that for some the “gift” is to live a married life, for others it is to live a single life (7:6), but both situations are gifts from God and, presumably, require the empowering of the Spirit to live faithfully and well.

Another passage that deserves careful reflection is Jesus’ teaching about “singleness for the sake of the Kingdom of God,” in Matthew 19. After hearing Jesus’ firm position on divorce and remarriage, the disciples respond that, given this view of marriage, it is “better not to marry” (19:10). Given the church’s tendency to see marriage as the ideal expression of the Christian life, Jesus’ response is fascinating, because he does not deny their conclusion. He simply states, with a line of reasoning similar to that of Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 7, that “not all people can accept this statement” (19:11); in other words, because most people cannot successfully embrace the celibate single life, marriage is the best alternative. He goes on to say, however, that those who are able to “accept” the celibate life should in fact “receive” it, offering a clear and unambiguous affirmation of celibate singleness.

A final text we ought to consider is Jesus’ teaching about marriage at the resurrection. In an effort to point out apparent inconsistencies in his teaching about the resurrection, the Sadducees ask Jesus about a woman who was married seven times: who will she be married to at the resurrection? Again Jesus’ response is startling for Christians used to assuming that marriage is the highest ideal for the Christian life. “In the resurrection,” he says, “they neither marry nor are they given in marriage” (Matthew 22:29-30). In other words, marriage is an earthly institution that serves a good and useful purpose in this life, but will be unnecessary in the life to come. This is not to marginalize or trivialize marriage in this present age—the Scriptures are uniformly clear that marriage is a blessing and a gift from God—but it is to put marriage it its proper perspective. Marriage serves an end and is not an end in itself; and celibacy, too serves an end, though it is not an end in itself either. Both are, in their own way, signs of the coming Kingdom where the human arrangements of husband, wife, master, servant and so on, will all be overshadowed by the heavenly relationship of “brother and sister in Christ.”

A church that takes the scripture’s teaching on celibacy seriously will recognize it, celebrate it and affirm it as a distinct and meaningful path for discipleship, one that requires the support of the Christian community if it is to flourish, one that is highly valued and respected in the teachings of the apostles and in the explicit word of the Lord, and one that makes as valuable a contribution to the community as do marriage and family. Similarly, churches that wish to be shaped by the Scriptures when comes to singleness and celibacy will reject the popular notion that in order to be effective a pastor must be married, or that marriage is a qualification for ministry. This is directly contrary to the plain teaching of the Bible, which, if anything, gives the advantage to the single pastor, who is less encumbered by the demands of a family and a household in the discharge of his or her ministry. At the very least, churches that wish to be shaped by the Scriptures in this matter will take intentional steps to offer a counter-culture to the highly sexualized culture of contemporary Canadian Society, to be a community where singles are affirmed and supported, and celibacy is embraced as a meaningful path for Christ.

Singleness and the Church, Part II

A “plausibility structure” is the intricate network of symbols, social supports and embedded ways of communicating that a culture has in place to make a certain way of life seem “plausible” to its members.

Take marriage as an example.  Lifelong monogamy does not "come naturally” to the species, one might argue, but societies that enjoin their members to practice it have a whole slew of things in place to make this way of life seem “plausible.” We have sacred ceremonies to celebrate it. We make laws to govern it. We have an elaborate system of record keeping to keep track of who has entered into it. We tell stories which idealize it, and so on.

For centuries, in fact, we have maintained a rather sophisticated “plausibility structure" to make married monogamy seem “plausible,” to nip-in-the-bud any nay-saying voices that might hear the idea and say: “Really? One partner, exclusively, for life? Who could possibly?” (Indeed, the notable decline of interest in traditional marriage in modern day Canada is linked, I would argue, to a steady erosion of the “plausibility structures” that once encouraged Canadians to believe that marriage was a viable path to walk).

If marriage seems too loaded an example, try American gun-control.  No wonder meaningful gun-control laws feel so impossible in America, when 1 in 4 of its eligible citizens owns a gun, when the country itself own almost half of all the citizen-owned guns in the world, when there are 25 times more gun homicides than in any other comparable country, when the right to own a gun is ostensibly encoded in the founding documents of the nation, when a steady stream of entertainment media glorifies gun violence, and so on.  How do you convince citizens to accept restrictions on their freedom to own firearms in a nation where there are all kinds of “plausibility structures” in place to encourage guns, and next to no structures in place to make effective gun control sound “plausible”?

The concept of “plausibility structures” is crucial for any Christian community that wishes to take seriously the Bible’s perspective on sex, and authentically encourage its unmarried members to walk a path of abstinence and celibacy. Most of churches I’ve experienced have been this way. They taught their members that sex ought to be experienced only within the bonds of marriage, and taught by extrapolation that unmarried Christians ought to follow a path of abstinence. Yet such churches had no more “plausibility structures” in place to encourage celibacy, than America has for gun control.  That is to say: there was nothing there to make celibacy appear “do-able,” other than the guilt, shame, or idealization that swirled around sex-talk generally.

Instead, these churches focused on the family, and preached sermon series on how to have a godly marriage, and celebrated newly-weds, and provided little support for divorcees, and targeted “young families” as their preferred ministry demographic (either implicitly or explicitly).  None of these things communicates that “we actually think singleness is a very good thing, a good way to follow Jesus, a way of life that is rich, and important, and, especially, plausible.”

I first learned about "plausibility structures" from Christian Sociologist Jenell Paris-Williams.  She suggests that churches fail in their calling if they do not intentionally make celibacy a “plausible” option for Christian singles, and that if a church wishes to promote a traditional sexual ethic it has an especially poignant obligation to build "plausibility structures" around that ethical teaching.  She argues that the extent to which one’s community presents a life-style choice as “plausible” greatly influences the likelihood one will choose it, and be successful in pursuing it. Her wisdom on this matter merits an extended reference, I think:

Celibacy is surely a strenuous spiritual path, but today the cost of celibacy is unreasonably and unnecessarily high. When it comes to moral teachings about sex outside of marriage, we isolate sexual pleasure from all the other good things that are connected to sexual relationships. People are commanded to abstain from sexual intimacy, but no one addresses how abstention may also limit the person’s access to family, touch, children, financial stability and so on. It’s hard to be a celibate person in an unchaste church whose broader context is an unchaste society. In striving for moral virtue, the celibate also bears the church’s collective sin of failing, in a highly sexualized social context, to make a counterculture in which celibacy is plausible. (Jenell Paris Williams, The End of Sexuality (Downers Grove, Il:  InterVarsity, 2011), 136.)

Wesley Hill, a gay Christian who has chosen to live the path of celibacy, writes extensively on this theme.  In Washed and Waiting, he makes the poignant observation that the church was meant to be God’s sanctified remedy for human loneliness, God’s “compensation” to celibate Christians for their sacrifice of sexual intimacy (see Mark 10:29-30).  He challenges Christians to recognize that “the New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced” (Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2010), 111).

If the church is going to live into its identity as “the primary place where human love is … expressed and experienced,” it will have to take far more seriously the extent to which it supports, encourages, and values the single people in its midst.  It will have to ask hard questions about how authentically and how practically it serves as God’s “compensation” to celibate Christians for the sacrifices they have made to pursue this particular path of discipleship.  If it did, I think, it would find itself building structures in its life together that makes the path of celibacy not simply “plausible” for those who walk it, but rich, and rewarding, and life-giving.

Singleness and the Church, Part I

Here’s a quick mental exercise for you.  If you are a church-goer, ask yourself: when was the last time I heard a sermon or Christian teaching on the topic of marriage, family, children, or sex?

Now ask yourself: when was the last time I heard a sermon or Christian teaching on the topic of singleness?

This purely speculation on my part, but I’m willing to bet that the former (teaching on marriage and family) was both more recent and more frequent than the later (teaching on singleness).  Christians have an unnoticed tendency, I think, to idealize, romanticize, and over-emphasize marriage, and ignore, under-emphasize or subtly denigrate singleness as a legitimate way to follow Jesus.   I don’t have a lot of hard data on this, but my gut and my experience tells me it’s so (hence the quick mental exercise at the start of this post).

I wonder a lot about what impact this idealization of marriage has on single people in the church.  I wonder this in part because it is, in fact, quite unbiblical. The Bible actually puts singleness on even par with marriage as a very good way to follow Jesus, and, if anything, portrays marriage as a concession for those who can’t walk the walk when it comes to singleness. (But that’s gonna have to be a post for another day.) More importantly, I wonder about the impact of our emphasis on marriage, because on a spiritual level it seems like a bit of a double standard, to tell unmarried people that they ought to walk a path of celibacy, on the one hand, but offer them none of the spiritual support and recognition in the church that married people get.

Whether or not I’m on to anything here, all the signs in Canadian society suggest that this issue—how does the church relate to, make space for, and spiritual care for the singles in its community—is going to become increasingly relevant in the coming years. In a 2005 study of Canadian social trends, Susan Crompton suggests that Canadian singles, what she calls the “won’t marry’s,” represent a “small but distinct” segment of Canadian society who face a whole slew of unique social pressures related directly to their single status.  Statistically, wont-marrys have fewer socio-economic opportunities, have a higher likelihood of not entering the work-force, and tend to have a median income 16% lower than that of “will-marrys” (Crompton, “Always the Bridesmaid: People Who Don’t Expect to Marry,” Canadian Social Trends, 77, Summer 2005).

These pressures are likely to sharpen and intensify as more and more Canadians opt to remain single. A 2011 Stats Canada study, for instance, found that the percentage of single Canadians has increased from 39$ in 1981 to 54% in 2011.  Most notably, this study found that for the first time ever there were more people living alone in Canada than there were couples with children.

The Canadian dream of a spouse and a house and white-picket fence enclosing a yard where 2.5 kids gleefully play the day away seems to be evaporating.  And as it does, I wonder if the Church realizes that in the gospel, which clearly affirms singleness as a good way to follow the Lord, we have all kinds of spiritual resources to minister well to this growing segment of the population.

My gut tells me it does not realize this.  Partly because of the results I get when I conduct the aforementioned mental exercise (and I'm the preacher in my church!), but more because when I look around the Church in general, I see all the highlighter ink getting used up emphasizing the ministries we do for kids, families, and marriages, and very little of it getting spent on highlighting the special issues and unique opportunities that single Christians face as disciples of the Lord.

I offer this mostly as a word of encouragement today to any of the single Christians who stop in at terra incognita from time to time to peruse some of my thoughts on God, life, faith, love, words, and spirituality.

But I also offer it by way of a preamble to the series I’m starting this month here at my blog.  For the next few weeks, I’m planning to use this space to explore some biblical, theological, pastoral and practical issues related to being a single Christian in Canada. I’ll be travelling this road as a foreign pilgrim, of course.  I married young (20 years old) and have been happily married for going on 25 years now, so I speak humbly and from inexperience on this matter.  But still, I am a pastor, and I care very much that all God’s children should find their place in the life of the church, whether they are married or not.  It is a place of joy, freedom, service, and worship for all, and if the church has been subtly (or not-so-subtly) communicating that you can only find it well if you’re married, than I believe it’s something we ought to repent of, and learn to do better at.