Does the Church Have a Singleness Problem?

A critique, an exhortation, and a word of Gospel hope.

Last week, I was having dinner with my parents when we got on the topic of marriage. It was an open dialogue, and one we’ve discussed many times over the last decade or so of adulthood as I’ve navigated life as a single woman. Through my twenties and these early years of my thirties, my parents have never made comments pressuring me towards marriage or motherhood; they never treated my relationship status as a problem. Interestingly enough, it has been other Christians who have given me the most grief about being single.

By grief, what do I mean? Well, I’ve heard singleness positioned as an indication of selfishness, a marker of immaturity, and an unwillingness to compromise. There have been points when I felt more discouraged about being single not because I am without “my person” to enjoy life with, but because it felt like I had to convince other Christians that I am worthy of their respect. Having a husband felt like having a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in some church spaces, and if you didn’t…it came with some distinct disadvantages.

Some of this grief spilled into the recent conversation I was having with my parents where I shared fresh frustration over my observed opinion that the church ascribes a disproportionately higher amount of attention, resources, and even value to married couples and families than it does single, divorced, widowed, and/or elderly people. More often than not, it seems singleness is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a healthy way of life worthy of support.

Transparently, I feel pretty tired of this conversation. Singleness is just a sliver of who I am, and even recently told some friends that I was growing increasingly uninterested in conversations about marriage and singleness because I find so many other topics more compelling, engaging, and important. However, the fact remains that people are interested in conversations about singleness and marriage, and individuals like me often encounter complications in their day-to-day lives due to their relationship status and its impact on their place within their communities and churches. This conversation matters to people because treating singleness as a problem causes problems.

Here are three problems I’ve observed that occur when we treat singleness as a problem:

1. It can cause single people to feel less welcomed and worthy in the church and more like second-class citizens in the kingdom of God.

2. It can weaken communal bonds outside of the nuclear family that are needed to help men, women, and children thrive, further perpetuating loneliness in the church and beyond.

3. It can blind us to how the philosophy of individualism has infiltrated and infected the church for both married and unmarried people.

So yes—I do think the church has a singleness problem. But more than that, I believe a disordered system is the actual problem in the conversation about singleness in the church. We miss an important point in this conversation if we fail to recognize that the house is burning from the inside; things are broken, and people have been hurt. I won’t pretend that I know how to fix it, but by the end of this essay*, I hope to offer a transparent critique on where we’re going wrong, provide Scriptural exhortation for singles and married people alike, and weave it all together with a thread of Gospel hope.

* Note: Since I am a woman, much of this essay is written from that perspective.

Problem 1: Singles as second-class citizens

When we treat singleness as a problem, we can cause single people to feel less welcomed and worthy in the church and more like second-class citizens in the kingdom of God.

While Scripture is quite clear that singleness is a full and faithful way of journeying with Jesus (see Isaiah 54 and Isaiah 56, amongst the oft-quoted passages from Paul), it can feel like the church views singleness as a problem and a signifier of sin. This posture can lead to hurtful assumptions and assertions, including statements like:

• Single women are a temptation to other women’s husbands.

• Single women are inevitably prone to lust and jealousy.

• Single women are less mature in both faith and life.

Oof.

At times, it feels like it would not only be less painful, but much safer and easier to fit in with a church’s rhythms, routines, and rituals if I were a married woman rather than a single one...and even better, if I were a married mother. I could find community at the morning mom’s group without a second thought, or have conversations with married or single men in the church without calculating the optics. In certain churches, finding fellow singles in leadership roles, particularly women, is nearly impossible, which can cause that community to feel less hospitable to the unique needs of people without nuclear families and/or spousal support. Please do not misunderstand: I do not think that single people need to be exclusively ministered to by people in the same life stage as them to be ministered to well. However, I can say that it can feel legitimately challenging and intimidating to bring sensitive issues of concern to male church leaders as a single woman; a distinct power dynamic is present in these conversations, even in trusted relationships. Questions run through a single woman’s head, like:

• Will my opinion be respected?

• If I become emotional, will my concern be chalked up as a hormonal overreaction?

• Will theology be wielded as a weapon against me?

• If I bring my concern forward, could it jeopardize my good social standing in this community?

• Will he even meet with me?

Perhaps this sounds completely overblown—the considerations of a classic over-thinker. All I can say is that being a woman means holding a thousand complicated calculations in your head at all times. Single womanhood in the church is, therefore, complicated as well, for reasons including theological postures and reasons far beyond those, too. It can be a hard road to walk.

I still believe in the goodness of the church despite some of my complicated experiences within it, but I can understand why some women have decided to leave. I echo

Jenna Mindel

’s well-articulated thoughts in her excellent piece for Christianity Today, “I’m a Gen Z Woman, I’m Staying in Church,” in which she says:

“Just as Jesus was countercultural by embracing women in a culture that ridiculed and reduced them, the call for Christians today is the same: not to reduce one another by cultural stereotypes but to embrace each other as distinct individuals made in the image of God, as beloved brothers or sisters in Christ. There are communities all over the world that are faithful to Jesus, and unfortunately, they are all imperfect and flawed.

For my fellow Gen Z women, I encourage you to return to the pages of Scripture, where we see Jesus cherishing women. Outside of Scripture, we can read the words of faithful Christian women throughout history who share our burdens and our love for Christ.”

As Jenna reminds us, our church communities are imperfect and flawed, but Christ’s posture towards women—single or not—is one that never treated them as second-class citizens. The church could be better at recognizing the challenges single women confront in their communities and calling everyone to model Christ as we carry forth his vision for the Church.

Problem 2: Nuclear family as sole community

When we treat singleness as a problem, we can weaken communal bonds outside of the nuclear family that are needed to help men, women, and children thrive, further perpetuating loneliness in the church and beyond.

I’ve written about the challenges of loneliness before on my Substack in an essay titled “The Hard Work of Combatting Loneliness.” A couple of things interest me with this particular angle of the conversation on what it means to be a single woman in the era of the Loneliness Epidemic.

First, as modern society has evolved, single women’s ability to provide for themselves has increased, effectively diminishing the need for the financial support and safety previously provided by a husband. You’ve heard this before, I’m sure. But what’s less talked about is how women are reared from a very young age to form strong community ties within our gender, thereby weaving ourselves into a stronger social fabric designed to catch and prevent us from falling through the cracks into loneliness. Plenty of think pieces have explored the sociological reasons that women are more successful at pursuing and preserving friendships and extended family relationships than men are. And while it is good that women are good at forming strong communities and reaching financial well-being, it is not good that men are simultaneously reporting increasing levels of suicidal ideation, loneliness, and sexual addiction. Something needs to change. This is not the sign of a healthy society.

So is the solution here for more women to marry men so that everyone will be less lonely? Is a healthy society a more married society? Humbly, I’d argue that a solution of greater size and scale is needed to address the problems that the loneliness epidemic has made apparent both outside of the church and in it. As anyone who is married will probably tell you, being married is not enough of a solution to prevent loneliness for men or women. Even the healthiest of marriages will feel the very human strain of loneliness within them; we are designed to disappoint each other. We need thicker ties and stronger bonds beyond romantic partnerships and the subsequent nuclear family structure to address the problem of loneliness and the weakening of community bonds.

“It is not good for man to be alone” is not a sentiment relegated to the marital covenant; it should be read as a collective invitation for deeper community ties between neighbors, friends, extended family, and nuclear family. As

Anna

reminded me in this great note, the nuclear family was never designed to be a self-sustaining community. Further, in a blog post titled “The Difficulty of Community,” Tim Keller puts forward the idea of covenant communities and compels us to look to the past as we consider how to form healthier support networks and churches, writing:

“Ancient people thought of themselves primarily as members of a family or a clan. They could not imagine prosperity and good for themselves apart from the prosperity and good of their community. Today, we can’t even think of ourselves as members of an audience. Ancient people thought of their relationships with their family, clan, people, and neighborhood as covenantal—the relationship was more important than their individual needs. We think and act first and foremost as individual consumers. Our needs are most important. If they are not being met, we go elsewhere to have them met.”

If we were able to restructure our communities to encompass a broader inclusion of people—men, women, grandparents, cousins, neighbors, coaches, old friends and new friends, aunts and uncles, etc.—I believe we’d not only be helping single people, but everyone. The good of the group would be prioritized, once again weaving the community together to form a stronger social fabric that will not only prevent its members from slipping through the cracks of loneliness but also provide the kind of accountability that encourages virtue and discourages vice.

Singles need to be around children to shake them out of their tidy preferences and selfish tendencies; children need adults who aren’t their parents to help in their formation; grown children need reliable help to assist with their aging parents; aging parents deserve to live with dignity and love instead of impersonal care. Men need to be around women to understand that not all women are the same, and women need to be around men to learn the same, etc., etc.. In short, we all need each other. If we continue to uphold the nuclear family as our primary community, we will miss out on experiencing the richness of what it means to love and be loved as part of the greater family of God.

Problem 3: Individualism as gospel

When we treat singleness as a problem, we can overlook how the philosophy of individualism has infiltrated and infected the church for both married and unmarried people.

Problem 3 is the one that I believe merits our greatest attention and concern. Spoiler alert: the conversation we’re having today about the problem of singleness is not really about whether or not singleness is a selfish choice, or if people treat single people worse, or if the church idolizes marriage. Instead, I believe this is a conversation about how societal values of individualism and progress can impede healthy formation and the pursuit of Christ-centered lives for all people. Yes, I mean married and unmarried people!

Individualism is the poison in the pie—the intoxicating promise that if it looks good, feels good, and is called good by others, it must be good. It is so common in American society that I wonder if we even notice it at all anymore. But do we realize how individualism has influenced the way our neighborhoods are built? How our cities are laid out? How we get around? How we vacation? How we choose a job after college graduation? How we meet our spouse? How we relate to our elders? How we treat children? Our lives are so steeped in individualism and the pursuit of personal preference that I don’t think we realize how focused we are on optimizing every variable to minimize our pain and promote our pleasure.

I have to admit, it has taken me my whole adult life to realize how much of a chokehold the philosophies of individualism and the American Dream have had on my life. Is it possible that earlier marriage could have revealed that to me sooner? Certainly. But it’s also possible that I could be eight or nine years into marriage with three kids and a house and still be on the relentless pursuit to Build My Best Life Now™️.

Individualism’s influence can be easier to spot in the lives of single people who are fully embracing their unencumbered independence, but it is certainly not an ideology exclusively adopted by single people. All around us is the prevailing sentiment that upward mobility, greater autonomy from others, and the achievement of one’s goals and desires is what life is really about.

O. Alan Noble

discusses this brilliantly in his book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World¹, writing:

“No matter how much we consciously affirm that our existence is already justified through God, virtually every other voice we interact with will tell us, ‘No. Keep striving. You haven’t done enough. If you quit now, your life will be a waste. Do something else to make it worthwhile.’ At its best, the church will be a sanctuary from this idolatrous babble, and here, if nowhere else, you should find other souls who will remind you that your life is not a quest for significance or self-actualization, but an act of joyful participation in God’s grace. In the liturgy of the church, in sacrificially serving each other, in reminding each other that we are not our own, and in coming to the Lord’s Table, we can push back against the contemporary anthropology as a community. Too often, churches in America fail to live up to this standard, even though we have the resources in our tradition and theology to correct the lie that we are obligated to justify our own lives.” (p. 131-132)

For single people, freedom of movement and autonomy in decision-making can make life feel worthwhile…until you have built a life with no accountability, no responsibility, and no community. For married people, the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfillment that the church promised would be yours can make life feel worthwhile…until you’re feeling like your spouse may not be making you as happy as they once were, and you start to wonder: “Should I do something else?” Individualism can propel us into the pursuit of careers and callings that are nothing but self-serving, capital-building campaigns for our own comfortable lives.

By our nature, humans are poor judges of what makes life worthwhile, or to put it another way, what makes life good. Is life good because you finally married someone awesome, or because you used your freedom to travel the world, or because you accomplished many impressive things? Or is life worthwhile because you understood that what gives life its worth—love—is not contingent on a spouse, a career, or anything you accomplished, but on what Christ accomplished for all of mankind while we were still sinners? (Romans 5:8) At the risk of sounding like a cheesy Sunday School teacher, the answer here isn’t more marriage, it’s more Jesus.

On the other side of individualism is a charge from Christ to love him and keep his Word. And this Word calls us to do exceptionally challenging things in the context of our exceptionally normal lives in the name of love. It calls us to embrace each other as brothers and sisters, to be content with what we have, to extend hospitality to strangers (Hebrews 5). It calls us to give a feast and invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind—those who cannot repay us (Luke 14:14). Single and married people are called to these things, and even called to do them together, side by side. Life in Christ is a group project. All of us have been invited by Jesus into a way of being and loving each other that is so beyond our ambitions, our dreams, our hopes, our aspirations, our parameters, and our preferences. Our imagination of what makes a life good can be so limited.

Maybe these thoughts feel like they do not belong in a conversation about singleness, but I believe they do. We are all meant to belong somewhere and to someone, including beyond our romantic relationships. It is God’s design that our human relationships would not satisfy us. It is also God’s design for us that we would learn dependence on him and dependence on others that he has given to us as co-laborers in Christ. I believe that by living into this calling, we can find the real love we’ve all been searching and yearning for.

So, is there a solution?

What now? About 3,000 words later, and you’re still reading this essay (wow, thanks!), perhaps hoping for some practical thoughts on how to move forward as a single person or a married person. If you’re a pastor, I could implore you to consider some ways your church may be structured that feel inhospitable to single people and adjust accordingly. Ask single people what they need, and listen! If you’re a married person, I could invite you to consider investing in more relationships with single people by inviting them into your home and your lives. Be specific, be direct! If you’re single, I could encourage you to consider putting down firmly planted roots in a place where you are beholden to other people and allow these people to impact your choices. Let your life be inconvenienced by others!

These are good things for us all to consider as we seek solutions for some of these complex problems. I could say much more. But beyond practical solutions, what I really want to end with is this:

Ultimately, I believe the solution to the church’s trials and troubles with singleness and marriage and selfishness and individualism is that we submit our lives to Christ and ask him to bear our burdens as we do. Maybe your burden is loneliness in singleness, or immense anxiety in parenthood, or an unrelenting performance mindset, or an unyielding depression. Whatever it is, I hope that we all could learn what it means to more fully belong to each other with Christ as the tie that binds—to weave our lives together in a way that honors our differences and supports each other in our deficiencies.

There is not one way to serve God, to love others, to live the good life. But there is one way to the good life: his name is Jesus.

1. In lieu of reading this entire article, you could probably just go read Noble’s book, You Are Not Your Own. It is, as the kids say, straight fire.