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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Single with cheese: Are we listening? Andrew C. Thompson, Jan 28, 2005
Have you ever sat in front of the speaker at a drive-thru and repeated your order over and over again? No, I said a single with cheese. And no ketchup! A few weeks ago, my church held a fellowship gathering intended to revive our flagging Singles Ministry. It was billed as a coffee-and-dessert get-together open to any and every single person in the church.
The get-together was a success. More people showed up than expected. Lots of ideas for future ministry were raised. And the cheesecake was fantastic.
The truly surprising part of the whole evening was the age range represented by those who attended, all of whom considered themselves "singles."
Youngest person: 21. Oldest person: 74. Uh... Houston, we have a problem.
Once upon a time, a single person was easily defined: He or she had graduated from high school but was not yet married. A single person fell into a fairly limited age range, from 18 to 22, or 23 tops. The single people in the church were a relatively small percentage of the congregation, and they were also temporary.
That is not the case anymore. Singles are young and old and in between. They are twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, forty-somethings, and even eighty-somethings! Some have never been married, some are divorced, and some are widowed. I consider myself a single: I am 28 years old and I have never been married, but I am engaged.
The singles demographics in our churches have changed in recent decades. We have known this since it began happening, but our churches are having a difficult time adjusting to the new reality in their midst. I have to admit that it took that singles get-together at my church to finally bring the new reality home to me. The reality is that we have tons of single people in the church, and many of them will remain single for the rest of their lives. Whether always single, divorced or widowed, today's singles are a large group who need to be recognized and cared for as singles.
To do effective ministry, we need to see people as they are, not as some outdated label they should be. There is an enormous amount of potential for ministry among our single people, but we tend to act as if they do not exist—or worse, as if they only exist so that we can try to get them a suitable mate. We should instead be focusing on integrating singles fully into the life of the church.
Single people are a blessing to the church, and we need to see them that way. The Apostle Paul believed that singleness was the preferable state for a Christian. In I Corinthians 7:32-33, he wrote, "The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world." It is actually easier for a single person to be a faithful Christian than it is for a married person! It is time to do away with outdated labels and outdated models of ministry. We should recognize our singles for who they are and begin treating them as full members of the body of Christ.
It is time for us to start listening to what our single people have been trying to tell us all along.
