ABCnews carries the Christian Science Monitor article, “Churches Work to Welcome Singles.” G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes (excerpt):
Across the nation, religious communities of varied stripes are taking steps to welcome the growing the number adults who have chosen ? at least for now ? not to marry.
According to U.S. Census projections, singles will constitute nearly one-third of American households by 2010. Already, the nation’s 86 million unmarried adults make up 42 percent of the workforce and 35 percent of voters.
Conversely, the most recent Census numbers show that married-couple households have dropped from nearly 80 percent in the 1950s to just 50.7 percent today.
The demographic shift means a vast cultural challenge for family-centered institutions to embrace everyone from young adults postponing nuptials, to divorcees choosing singleness, to widows and widowers who have lived with a partner for years.
As congregations adjust, singles ministries with a match-making undertone are giving way to new projects meant to weave individuals into the wider fabric of community life. But whether these single lifestyles are being blessed, tolerated, or gently criticized varies largely along regional and denominational lines.
“I will probably leave this church the day we announce we’re having a singles ministry function,” says the Rev. Marc Dickmann, pastor of Commitment at Warehouse 242, an evangelical church in Charlotte, N.C. “Our vision of community is not one of ostracizing or isolating single people as lost souls. The attitude of churches used to be: ‘You aren’t married. What’s wrong with you?’ But we know it doesn’t work that way for everybody.”
***
As congregations seek new ways to bring singles into their mainstreams, the challenge yet to be surmounted is how much a community will acknowledge or accept about a single person’s personal life. At Warehouse 242, singles who cohabitate may take part in church life but are forbidden to lead small groups, since their lives fall short of church standards. By contrast, at Christ Church United, an unmarried couple may have a child baptized as long as they agree to join the church. No commitment toward marriage is expected, McDaniel says, because “sometimes it isn’t a good relationship, but we still put the child first” by welcoming a bond with the church through baptism.
So far, singles are often being welcomed in communities across the religious spectrum along the lines of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about personal lifestyles. But whether the probing goes deeper with time or not, the process of discovery for what makes for a holy single life in the 21st century will surely be lived out in settings where married couples and single people explore the depths of faith side-by-side.