It is wonderful that so many religious organizations have organized singles ministries because it is often difficult to be single in your worship community. Being single often creates unique needs in your faith community. Effective Singles Ministries address those needs.
Although churches intend to nurture all their members, it is often an emotional strain to see so many families collaborating at church when your marriage just came to its untimely demise due to death or divorce. Often, sympathetic support feels like pity and the pressure to re-marry is poorly timed. Empathetic righteous outrage may feel encouraging or destructive. In many Christian churches, so much emphasis is placed on the spiritual relationship of husbands and wives, that suddenly finding yourself solo can make you feel like a bass gasping on the sand. It seems easier to drop out for a while.
What have your experiences been? How did your faith community help? Did anything happen that you would like to share as a cautionary tale to religious leaders? (We need to walk the line here on being specific enough to be helpful and vague enough to avoid libel.)
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1 comment:
AM,
How profound !!!
When I first moved to the area, I had first shopped around at about 4or so of the area churches. I actually found most to be very accomodating while being mostly just friendly/accepting on the surface.
Churches for the most part are very family oriented and there is a lot of pressure to be married or to be a family before their other members to be "fully accepted" or "valued."
I never found that pressure from day one at Faith Community Church in Gambrills. They have several elders/members in their church who are single plus a very personable and dynamic Director of Christian ED who was a former Singles Pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Bowie.
Within several weeks I felt like I was just part of a bigger family. They viewed my being single as a unique opportunity to serve the congregation and encouraged my participation almost immediately.
The focus is completely off of me and completely onto the Gospel message of Jesus Christ ( whom I might add was also a single person ) So its all about who he really was and is, and what he did for each one of us individually; not just the families and not just the couples.
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