When a single woman leaves church (re-run)

OK, so I did edit, then delete, my post about why a single person leaves a morning congregation. I felt rotten and it made me squirm ... because it went all wrong. (For weeks I said to myself “don’t write about that Ali”, and maybe that was best, but thank you all for your comments - I have kept them.) And despite saying otherwise, I think I did start out on the defensive, out of the thought that 'everyone will frown and wag their finger and tell me I should take initiative etc so pre-empt that and make your case and make it good'. But no-one did, and it was probably unfair to the very people who didn’t in the first place. (And there were other things I couldn’t blog, but in the absence of them the whole thing came out skewed.)

So, this is a re-run - leaving all that and particulars aside, I really only wanted to make these points:

1) I was just illustrating this particular point with my story, because it’s been made many times before (see this great article for starters), that demographically split churches don’t work so well for older single people. But by using the word “older” for women (sorry!) I mean any woman for whom the majority of her friends are now married with kids and moved on to morning service, which probably kicks in around 25 for some. So the single person then makes the choice – go to evening service, where you might be significantly older and losing your friends anyway, but you will have the accessibility of other single people, or go to morning church with your peers, who have kids. The reasons the morning option gets problematic is that the reality, and the good reality, is families and single people have different priorities, obligations and availabilities. So, for instance, I didn’t mean at all to fault people with kids that they can’t drop all and come and see a movie. The point is more that they can’t drop all and come see a movie. So, the single person will have to go and find someone else to go see the movie (or go places on Saturday or whatever). That’s where the difficulty lies.

2) I will keep the point that I know church is not a social club, and it doesn’t exist to provide me, or any other single person, with friends. The problem is that if you don't find Christian friendship at church, it does get very hard to find it somewhere else. And as we all know in big cities, if you don't have a reason to see people regularly, it gets very hard to keep up with them. So the single person who comes in to family church may not be having a great life getting out and about with single friends they have somewhere else. If most people they know have kids, chances are they’re not (and it’s not like we have to get out and about doing exciting stuff, but people to do life with is the thing).

3) (Related to 1) I'm all for stay-at-home Mums. If I was a Mum I'd want to be that too, at least when the kids were small. But this does create a chasm between the life of stay-at-home Mums and single working women. If most of the church is married with kids, it just seems to work out that most of the women do their socialising during 'office hours', and at night when the single woman comes home from work, they're unavailable with kids and husband. (Sometimes I wonder if it's easier for single men in the church, because the married men keep a more similar lifestyle.)

4) A while back everyone was pointing to a talk by Tim Keller called ‘It takes a city to raise a child’. I didn't agree with all of it, but one point he made was that cities are great for people in minorities, because they can find others in their minority (and it might be in his talk on singleness where he mentions that they don’t let single people live out I the suburbs in America). So, if you live in a city, and there are groups of those “older” single people, one of the advantages might be that you can join them. I listen to women get up in church and say that play group is great because you get to meet other Mums doing what you’re doing and you can help and inform each other, and I read people writing about how great it is to have other people modeling marriage to you in church, and others writing about the joys of others sharing their similar anxieties and experiences of having kids growing up with you ... Single people would no doubt benefit from being able to “do” singleness and share it’s joys and struggles with others too. (This is more of a comment, not a recommendation for demographic splits and homogenous congregations as a good solution. In an ideal world you can have both together.)

5) I think it's hard for single people to feel needed as a relational person by families (which could be just an error of perception, but certain things feed that perception – read on). And maybe we don’t actually need to be needed relationally and can just get on with other forms of serving. But that does rather deepen the struggle many single people have in the first place (ie loneliness and disconnection etc). There are ways in which it can be discouraging (and a little embarrassing), to read a lot of what’s written, even though I do appreciate it, about how families can care for single people. The implication of it all seems to be that this is noteworthy ministry because no family would choose to extend friendship to a single person, if they were choosing friends, and that in social interactions between families and single people the benefits all go one way. Single people want real and normal mutual, reciprocal friendships (again, maybe we don’t have to get these in church, but will want them from somewhere). No able-bodied and ministry-minded single person wants to go to family church and feel like there they are a social burden, who can only be on the receiving end of ministry from families. As a single person I do feel like I am more level, and more able to contribute relationally around other single people, such that there are perhaps more opportunities to do good in a congregation with more of them.

And maybe that’s all. This probably doesn’t make sense or work so well as a post any longer, and I am wondering what I am actually trying to say, but argghh, now I know why I don’t like writing, or shouldn't write, such things. And I might go back to writing about crochet and nothing for a few weeks.