For evangelical Christians, conversations about singleness are inclined to be predictable. Whether it’s a sermon, a panel discussion, or a conference message, discussions are frequently relegated to the subject of how this season could be escaped through dating or marriage. Singleness is usually presented as a way to an end but rarely as a worthwhile end in itself.
Over time, this mindset has cultivated a shallow theology of singleness throughout the church. Our disproportionate deal with escape routes from singleness leaves us unable to convincingly portray the fantastic thing about this season or provide a substantive balm for the difficulties it brings. Furthermore, we struggle to focus on and rejoice all that a single, celibate, and sometimes childless life can teach us concerning the Christian journey.
In part, it is because our reading of Scripture has led us to raise our call to physical fruitfulness over our baptismal identity. We have created a hierarchical relationship between marriage and singleness, with marriage holding the place of greater spiritual maturity and singleness the lesser. Married men and ladies often serve because the source of Christian wisdom for singles, but the one season is seldom lifted up as a source of wisdom for many who are married. This marriage status hierarchy shows up in singles’ conferences, which steadily feature married speakers, while conferences on marriage infrequently include single speakers.
To effectively minister to a growing population of singles each young and old, we’d like to learn from those that have frolicked considering deeply about their experience with singleness. We need a conversation that centers their voices and provides a vision for the way singleness will not be merely a pathway to a greater life but a destination at which one can flourish and thrive.
Anna Broadway pursues this goal in her book Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling. Through interviews with lots of of singles from world wide, she curates a conversation that invites all believers to contemplate the complexities of living without marriage in various places and cultures.
In her quest to uncover the important thing to a thriving single life, Broadway demonstrates how flourishing is accessible to those that make small, on a regular basis decisions to embrace their need for deep connectedness and belonging. However, this requires us to dismantle the marital status hierarchy we’ve created and refocus on the calling that the whole church, each married and single, has been saved to satisfy.
Community, celebration, and support
Broadway structures her book across the common needs experienced by single people. While a few of these needs may not surprise readers, others will. With each glimpse into the lives of the interviewees, Broadway invites readers to watch how the needs that single people report aren’t unique to them. Rather, they point to our shared human experience in a fallen world.
Two of the primary topics Broadway introduces are community and celebration. Throughout her research, she found that integrated community between singles and married people was rare. The reasons for this estrangement often revolved around questions of value. Marriage was considered superior in comparison with singleness, rendering singles as unnecessary for married people’s social and spiritual well-being.
Theodora, a British Protestant woman, summed up what Broadway heard from many singles: “Singleness [is] viewed as, like, a terrible thing. The goal [is] to get out of it and get married as soon as possible.” Other interviewees cited cultural aspects, corresponding to churches lumping singles together in young adult groups and a broader suspicion of relationships between singles and married people.
Throughout much of the book, Broadway’s interviewees highlight the struggles they faced as second-class residents of their faith communities. But her extensive research also reveals the wonder and joy that emerged once they formed deep familial connections with one another and their married counterparts. Whether this took the shape of a daily invitation for dinner from a family at church, the willingness to deal with an unexpected roommate, or weekly meetings with an intergenerational small group, interviewees consistently shared how small moments of intentional connection helped to construct strong bonds of community.
Intertwined with the necessity for community is the necessity for celebration. When it involves celebrations, few carry the importance of those related to marriage and youngsters. So, Broadway acknowledges the issue that singles have find comparable events to rejoice. However, somewhat than simply providing creative replacements, she challenges us to alter the main target of our celebrations by seeking to the church calendar. She writes, “These seasons remind us that all Christians, single and married alike, belong in God’s family. We all have much to rejoice. We all have some ways to rejoice and weep together.”
The power of Broadway’s argument rests in how she goes beyond simply providing an addendum to our existing singleness-and-marriage paradigm. With each chapter, she works to interrupt down our dysfunctional perspectives and align them anew through the lens of Scripture. By using our identity in Christ as the usual, she frees us from the restrictions of the marital status hierarchy we’ve created. When we step into the interconnected nature of our baptismal calling, each singles and married people can flourish.
Broadway’s interviews offer insights into other common needs, including food, housing, sexuality, leisure, and emotional health. However, one particularly poignant chapter focuses on singles’ experience with disease, disability, and death. Through this specific set of stories, lots of which involve chronic disability or illness, Broadway underscores what number of singles fear suffering or dying alone.
Whether the period of suffering is brief or prolonged, it leaves many singles with the identical questions that Broadway’s interviewees posed: Will people really take care of us? Will people really come be with us in our last days? Kim, an American Protestant in Moscow, faced this reality when, despite being a part of church community, she received only a few visitors during a hospital stay. In her own words, those few days were “some of the depressing times of [her] life.”
For some, family and friends provided a much-needed lifeline to assist them find healing or to transition peacefully to life everlasting with God. Colin, an American Catholic, helped take care of his friend Deirdre after her cancer diagnosis. His support included moving in together with her to assist support her financially and running errands. He even planned a final life celebration for her family and friends when she entered hospice care. Reflecting on that have, Colin told Broadway, “Regardless of our state in life, to give you the option to be there, and to assist out to the extent possible, and to stay by her side until the tip, is what we’re called to as disciples.”
Stories like these illustrate the church’s superpower of interconnectedness. But exercising it requires commitment, and commitment requires self-sacrificial service. By sharing the stories of singles who either gave or received this sort of service, Broadway places them within the role that is often reserved for married individuals, portraying them as guides for Christian living. Their relentless commitment to support each other models the style of love Jesus calls us to embody for each other.
An identity shift
Diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity, the lads and ladies Broadway interviewed share the type of insights that may encourage contemplative conversations about singleness. Especially in her section on sexuality and sexual minorities, she gives readers the chance to grapple with complex and multifaceted questions, even in the event that they don’t agree together with her answers.
However, in a couple of chapters, I wanted Broadway to ask us right into a deeper place of contemplation. While her discussion on emotional health and leisure is useful, I feel there are worthwhile lessons remaining to be unearthed. A better examination of loneliness, shame, and rest could have challenged our understanding of identity and connectedness, helping the church grow in maturity.
Ultimately, Broadway’s book draws readers in to reflect on their very own life seasons. As one considers the experiences described by lots of of singles and plenty of married people as well, a perspective shift will begin to occur. With each chapter, it becomes clearer that the needs that Broadway examines aren’t solely related to marital status but somewhat arise from our shared humanity.
Even though our struggles might take different forms, married people and singles each struggle with finding a way of identity and belonging. We all desire to be known and to know others deeply. The sheer volume of stories shared on this book demonstrates that the important thing to flourishing is, in some sense, the identical for singles and married people alike. Our ability to thrive is directly linked to how well we embrace our oneness in Christ.
Colin encapsulated this concept so beautifully when he told Broadway: “[It’s] our baptism that offers us our identities, not our marital status.”
This baptismal identity reminds us that the fullness of life comes when our life is lived in and for Christ. Singleness is a present since it provides a chance to live in a committed relationship with God and his people. This relationship is supposed to be enduring—through all of life’s ups and downs, in sickness and in health, in abundance and in scarcity, we self-sacrificially love each other. For singles to thrive, they have to live on this place of interconnectedness, and for the church to thrive it must accomplish that as well.
I hope for the day this will not be only taught inside our churches but believed wholeheartedly.
Elizabeth Woodson is a author, a Bible teacher, and the founding father of the Woodson Institute. She is the writer of Embrace Your Life: How to Find Joy When the Life You Have Is Not the Life You Hoped for.
