What about singleness?

Question 11106

Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times a year and on singleness roughly never, and then we wonder why unmarried believers in their thirties quietly drift away from congregations where they have started to feel like a problem to be solved.

The New Testament has a much higher view of the single life than we do, and it comes from an apostle who was unmarried and from a Lord who never married at all. That should give us pause before we treat it as a temporary inconvenience.

Christian singleness in the New Testament

Paul writes at length about this in 1 Corinthians 7, and his conclusions are startling if you have grown up in a church culture that assumes marriage is the goal. He says in 1 Corinthians 7:7 that he wishes all were as he himself is, which is to say unmarried, though he immediately adds that each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.

His reasoning is practical. The unmarried person is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord, while the married person is rightly and necessarily concerned with pleasing a spouse. Paul is not sneering at marriage. He is observing that marriage takes time and attention, and that Christian singleness leaves a person with a freedom that marriage does not.

Jesus says something similar in Matthew 19:12, speaking of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, and adding that the one who is able to receive this should receive it. That is a remarkable statement in a Jewish context where marriage and children were assumed for everybody.

Neither state is superior

Having said all that, I want to resist the swing to the opposite error. Genesis says it is not good for the man to be alone, and marriage is presented throughout Scripture as a gift and a picture of the gospel itself. Paul warns Timothy about those who forbid marriage, and centuries of enforced clerical celibacy have produced more damage than fruit.

So Christian singleness and marriage are not in competition. Paul’s language is that both are gifts, and a gift is something given rather than achieved. The married believer has not won something and the single believer has not missed something. They have been handed different tools for the same work.

What I would say is that Christian singleness has a dignity in the New Testament that our churches rarely convey. If the two greatest figures of the faith were both unmarried, we cannot go on treating the single life as an antechamber to real adulthood.

Chosen, and not chosen

Here is where a good deal of Christian teaching becomes unhelpful. Most talk about singleness assumes it has been chosen, and for many people it has not. They wanted to marry. They prayed for it, waited for it, and it did not happen, and being told their situation is a gift can feel like being handed a wrapped box containing something they never asked for.

Others are single through bereavement or through a divorce they did not want. Others again are single because their convictions ruled out relationships that the wider world would have made available. The circumstances are enormously varied and the word covers all of them, which is one reason blanket sermons on the subject land so awkwardly.

I would not tell anyone in that position that they ought to feel differently. Unwanted Christian singleness involves real grief, and grief deserves to be named rather than corrected. What I would say is that God is not withholding something better while he waits for you to become content. Contentment is not the entrance fee for a spouse.

Loneliness and the church’s failure

The hardest part of the single life, from everything I have been told, is not the absence of romance. It is the absence of someone who notices. Nobody asks how your day went. Nobody rings when you have flu. You make every decision alone and carry every anxiety alone, and Sunday can be the loneliest morning of the week if everyone around you leaves in a family group.

The New Testament answer to that is the church as family, and it is not a metaphor. Jesus said that whoever does the will of God is his brother and sister and mother. Paul told Timothy to treat older women as mothers and younger women as sisters in all purity. That language assumes a level of belonging most congregations do not come close to providing.

Practically this means inviting single people into your home rather than into your programmes, and doing it on an ordinary Tuesday rather than only at Christmas. It means letting them be genuine aunts and uncles to your children. Christian singleness becomes far more bearable inside a congregation that is actually a household. More on this in my answer on biblical guidance for single Christians.

Purity without shame

Scripture is clear that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage, and that applies to everybody regardless of how long the waiting has been. I am not going to soften that, and I have written on it elsewhere in my answer on sex before marriage.

What I will say is that we have often taught this in a way that treats desire itself as shameful, and that is not the biblical picture. Desire is part of being a creature God made. The call is to hold it under discipline, not to pretend it has evaporated, and a believer who struggles with that is in the same position as every other Christian struggling with something.

Nor should Christian singleness be described as though it were principally about what a person is not doing. A life defined by abstinence is a thin thing. A life given to friendship, hospitality, service, work done well and prayer that nobody sees is a rich one, and the restraint makes sense inside that and looks absurd outside it.

A future that does not depend on marriage

Isaiah 56:5 is one of the most tender passages in Scripture on this subject. God promises the eunuch, the person with no descendants and no prospect of any, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. In a culture where childlessness meant oblivion, that is an extraordinary promise.

Jesus also told us that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage. Marriage is a good gift for this age and it is not the shape of the age to come. Every married couple is heading for a state in which the single believer is already living, which rather changes the perspective.

None of that removes present sorrow, and I would not use it to tidy anyone’s grief away. But it does mean that Christian singleness is not a smaller portion. Whatever you do not have now, nothing that matters eternally has been withheld from you.

Things we should stop saying

Let me offer a short list of remarks that well-meaning Christians make and that unmarried believers have heard several hundred times. Your turn will come, which nobody can promise. God is preparing someone special for you, which is not in the Bible. You just need to stop looking, which is advice masquerading as wisdom. And the worst of them, delivered with a knowing smile, that you must be very holy to manage without.

Each of these treats Christian singleness as a puzzle to be solved rather than a life to be lived. They also put the single person in the position of having to comfort the person who spoke, which is a peculiar reversal that happens surprisingly often.

What helps instead is astonishingly ordinary. Ask about their work and remember the answer. Ask them to pray about something in your life, which signals that you regard them as a spiritually serious person rather than as someone waiting for their real life to start. Invite them on holiday with your family. Ask what they would like from the church rather than assuming.

So, now what?

If you are married, look around your congregation this Sunday and find the person who always leaves alone. Invite them for a meal, and then do it again next month so that it becomes ordinary rather than an act of charity. That is the single most useful thing most of us could do about this.

If you are single, resist the temptation, which is one of the great hazards of Christian singleness, to put your life on hold until circumstances change. Give yourself to something worth doing now. And if the loneliness is heavy at the moment, tell someone rather than managing it alone. Who in your church could you ask to be family to you, and what is stopping you asking?

I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. (Isaiah 56:5, ESV)