By Audrey Martin

THINK OF that outdoor event in which you have to scope out an area to choose the best place to put down your blanket.

For a single, this metaphor can apply to a congregation. It means the individual often doesn’t know where to position him or herself, and that doesn’t mean just a pew.

As a single friend said to me recently, “eventually you have to put your blanket down somewhere.” But this can be a continually frustrating experience.

As a single person with numerous single friends, I can affirm all the challenges singles face in the church. We’re often getting up with our blanket and moving elsewhere in order to feel less isolated and more welcomed and accepted.

For a growing number of singles, this process becomes too painful and they simply fold up their blanket and walk away from church. This doesn’t kill their spirituality, but it certainly deprives the church of its full potential.

For decades now, the overwhelming focus of many evangelical churches has been the family and the preservation of the traditional nuclear family.

This, despite the ever-changing demographic in our world, and thus church membership, that points to an increasingly large number of singles and those who do not fit that traditional template of family.

Singles, whether they are never married, separated, divorced, widowed or without a spouse at church, make up a silent but large minority.

Many congregations ignore this fact, or simply don’t notice it, leaving singles feeling consistently invisible and without a voice.

It’s possible that Baby Boomers, when they entered marriage and parenthood, brought this intense emphasis on ‘family’ to close ranks against anything that might destroy or dilute the family.

But a fortress, by its very nature, shuts out as well as closes in. So the inadvertent result is the disenfranchising of those who do not share an experience of nuclear family for one reason or another.

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It is true, however, that some congregations have moved beyond this, with a welcoming, accepting environment in which people take the initiative to speak to them and envelop them in the larger family.

A recent Christianity Today article expressed the singles experience with 12 people sharing:

www.christianitytoday.com/singles/newsletter/2008/mind0227.html

They show a consistent experience in various churches – primarily the struggles, but also a more positive element.

Indeed there are specific ways people can support singles in their church, and give them the sense of their true worth in God’s eyes, expressing God’s broader and inclusive sense of ‘family.’

• Invite singles to sit with you in church and perhaps even invite them out for lunch.

• Leaders need to recognize singles on special days that honour mothers, fathers and other minorities.

• Special events could include encouragements to invite people to bring a ‘guest’ rather than, or along with their spouse.

• Practical help for the immense challenges that go with single parenting.

• Recognize the spiritual gifts, including advantages of time and focus that come with singleness, and  seek represent them in leadership opportunities. Their experience and perspective can in invaluable in an eldership.

• Recognize singles are complete individuals, honour their singleness as equally blessed as marriage.

So next time you see a single person in church, wave at them and tell them to come and put their blanket down with you so you can embrace them into family –  the kind God has always had in mind.

Audrey Martin is student media advisor at Trinity Western University. For further perspectives on singleness:

www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?nationalupdates/020205singles

May 2008