A Positive Word on Evangelical Singleness
Every time I convince myself that this blog is a technologically sophisticated way for me to talk to myself, someone else emails me, catches me on Facebook, or leaves a comment that alerts me to the fact that there are, in fact, a few people reading this thing. To those of you that are in that category, you should know that my hard drive crashed about a month and a half ago, and the notes that were to serve as the skeleton for the rest of the "Evangelical Singleness" series disappeared into the ether. Unfortunately, this means that I have to wing it from here on out. Reading my first post, I think that all that really remains to be said is a positive word about the way that single adults can serve their churches. Most of what I have posted so far has been criticism; it's high time I said something constructive.
I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
- I Corinthians 7:32-35, NIV
For Paul, at least in this passage, both men and women face exactly the same dilemma when considering marriage. Both can only marry at the cost of dividing their loyalties between the church and their mates. Single persons, on the other hand, can devote themselves entirely to the work of the church. In the pre-Reformation Christian tradition, Christians called to a single life of service were presented the option of monasticism as an outlet for this calling. Among Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, along with a few Anglicans, this tradition continues.
Most churches in the Protestant tradition, however, provide few opportunities for service particularly suited for single adults. As I have mentioned below, Protestants (especially those of the Reformed variety) have tended to spread monastic discipline and concern for hard work equally among all members instead of concentrating it in convents and monasteries. As a result, single adults in many Protestant churches have little access to any tradition that might help them channel their special gifts and energy into service for the church.
The anti-climactic suggestion to be made here is simply that the church must help single adults realize that their own singleness is not described by the New Testament as a state of lack, but as an opportunity for fuller service to the church. Single evangelicals need to feel encouraged and empowered to assume the responsibilities of lay ministry with a special sense of calling that cannot be assumed by married people, ordained or lay, who by definition have divided their loyalties between family and church. Churches that help their single adults to make this connection will be tapping a source of strength that has until now, in many cases, lay fallow.
This concludes my series, such as it is, on Evangelical Singleness. I promise not to get too ambitious again in the future. Speaking of the future, continue to return for more constructive thoughts on Baptist life, history, and theology.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Second-Class Citizens?
This entry promises to be rather short; I know I am not
saying anything that hasn't been said many times before.
Last time I made the case that singleness was a difficult
situation in the church because our justification for
expecting celibacy from single people was an expectation
that abstinence will issue in some sort of objective
benefit following marriage. The possibility that celibacy,
taken by itself, might constitute an offering to God, is
rarely entertained.
Undergirding this attitude is not only a rejection of
celibacy, but an assumption that adult members of the
church are married. The following link provides an
excellent example of this style of thought:
http://www.bible.com/bibleanswers_result.php?id=149
Here, a "biblical" discussion of the task of finding a
mate belies the (unquestioned) assumption that all
Christians are, in fact, meant to marry. No other
possibility is even mentioned.
This assumption of the pervasiveness of marriage is also
found in the programming of the average evangelical
church. Programming is organized around the various stages
of the life cycle, with programs for single adults
sequestered off to one side. All too often, programs for
single adults degenerate into a sort of "meat market" or
"farm team" where singles have opportunities to meet
people of the opposite sex, get married, and join the life
of the church.
Even in wider evangelical culture, the word "family" has
become synonymous with everything desirable and wholesome.
A "family" bookstore doesn't have more materials meant for
the use of families than Borders - "family" is just used
as a colorless euphemism for "Christian."
The historical punchline here is that, despite recent
trends, Baptists have traditionally resisted thinking of
the church as a conglomeration of families. For those of
us who practice our faith in the Baptist tradition, faith
has to be grasped in the context of a personal encounter
with Christ, sealed through baptism and issuing in
personal discipleship.
When Congregational theologian Horace Bushnell expressed
the opinion that "the organic unity of the family requires
an identification of the family with the church," the
Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins, who was President of The
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1899 to 1928,
was very critical of his efforts. For Mullins, being
Baptist meant coming to Christ as a responsible individual
- something that kept the family and the church at a
certain distance from each other:
"[T]he distinction between the church and the family must
be kept intact. The church implies personal relations
between actual individuals and Christ, not potential
individuals thrust into fictitious relations with Christ
as in infant baptism. We may assume that the child will
become a Christian, but we dare not assume that he is a
Christian prior to his own choice." (The Axioms of
Religion, 174)
Mullins' key concern here is obviously a concern with the
freedom of the infant to come to Christ on her own,
without being coerced through a system of infant baptism,
but undergirding his argument is a conviction that the
church is composed not of families, but of regenerate
individuals. While Mullins was certainly no enemy to
Christian nurture or to the importance of the family, he
would have stopped far short of saying that the nuclear
family was the cornerstone of the life of the church.
Christians cannot hear the voice of Christ in their lives
if they do not understand themselves as united to Christ
as individuals. Assuming that the church is constructed of
families - couples and their children - both excludes
single adults from the life of the church and guarantees
that individual people, single or not, will not be
prepared to hear the voice of Christ when he addresses
them not as husbands, wives, sons, or daughters, but as
plain old children of God.
Note: This is not a work of local-church muckraking. I
believe that First Baptist Church, Nashville does a
steller job of keeping its single adults integrated into
the life of the wider church.
This entry promises to be rather short; I know I am not
saying anything that hasn't been said many times before.
Last time I made the case that singleness was a difficult
situation in the church because our justification for
expecting celibacy from single people was an expectation
that abstinence will issue in some sort of objective
benefit following marriage. The possibility that celibacy,
taken by itself, might constitute an offering to God, is
rarely entertained.
Undergirding this attitude is not only a rejection of
celibacy, but an assumption that adult members of the
church are married. The following link provides an
excellent example of this style of thought:
http://www.bible.com/bibleanswers_result.php?id=149
Here, a "biblical" discussion of the task of finding a
mate belies the (unquestioned) assumption that all
Christians are, in fact, meant to marry. No other
possibility is even mentioned.
This assumption of the pervasiveness of marriage is also
found in the programming of the average evangelical
church. Programming is organized around the various stages
of the life cycle, with programs for single adults
sequestered off to one side. All too often, programs for
single adults degenerate into a sort of "meat market" or
"farm team" where singles have opportunities to meet
people of the opposite sex, get married, and join the life
of the church.
Even in wider evangelical culture, the word "family" has
become synonymous with everything desirable and wholesome.
A "family" bookstore doesn't have more materials meant for
the use of families than Borders - "family" is just used
as a colorless euphemism for "Christian."
The historical punchline here is that, despite recent
trends, Baptists have traditionally resisted thinking of
the church as a conglomeration of families. For those of
us who practice our faith in the Baptist tradition, faith
has to be grasped in the context of a personal encounter
with Christ, sealed through baptism and issuing in
personal discipleship.
When Congregational theologian Horace Bushnell expressed
the opinion that "the organic unity of the family requires
an identification of the family with the church," the
Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins, who was President of The
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1899 to 1928,
was very critical of his efforts. For Mullins, being
Baptist meant coming to Christ as a responsible individual
- something that kept the family and the church at a
certain distance from each other:
"[T]he distinction between the church and the family must
be kept intact. The church implies personal relations
between actual individuals and Christ, not potential
individuals thrust into fictitious relations with Christ
as in infant baptism. We may assume that the child will
become a Christian, but we dare not assume that he is a
Christian prior to his own choice." (The Axioms of
Religion, 174)
Mullins' key concern here is obviously a concern with the
freedom of the infant to come to Christ on her own,
without being coerced through a system of infant baptism,
but undergirding his argument is a conviction that the
church is composed not of families, but of regenerate
individuals. While Mullins was certainly no enemy to
Christian nurture or to the importance of the family, he
would have stopped far short of saying that the nuclear
family was the cornerstone of the life of the church.
Christians cannot hear the voice of Christ in their lives
if they do not understand themselves as united to Christ
as individuals. Assuming that the church is constructed of
families - couples and their children - both excludes
single adults from the life of the church and guarantees
that individual people, single or not, will not be
prepared to hear the voice of Christ when he addresses
them not as husbands, wives, sons, or daughters, but as
plain old children of God.
Note: This is not a work of local-church muckraking. I
believe that First Baptist Church, Nashville does a
steller job of keeping its single adults integrated into
the life of the wider church.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
An Old Landmark Reset
The series on Evangelical Singleness will return when I can find some time to get those articles into a presentable form. They are all outlined... I just need to flesh them out. In the meantime, I need to atone for some sins. I get the feeling that this blog is simply a matter of me speaking to myself on the internet. Even if that's the case, there is something I need to get off my chest.
Seminary was not easy for me. I attended a seminary that was born as a result of a denominational struggle, whose faculty were almost all victims of the purge of Southern Baptist seminaries in the early 90s. When I arrived at McAfee in the fall of 2002, the pain was still palpable in the air, and not just from the faculty: many students had inherited the conflict from faculties of denominational colleges.
For me and others like me, that is, men, my affiliation with the moderate wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that was soundly defeated when I was just a kid, was mostly a personal theological preference. For the women of our seminary, however, identification with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was more. It had to be more. For them, the difference between a lifetime of Christian ministry and a lifetime of missed opportunities hung in the balance. That some students were "moderates" because of personal preference and others were "moderates" because of existential need created an incredible amount of friction. In the midst of some conversations that certainly don't need to be aired on the World Wide Web, the fact that we all shared the same fundamental convictions about the nature of the Baptist witness was badly obscured.
I'm ashamed to admit that my own convictions were, to some extent, obscured even to myself. But this evening, as I thought back on some of these things, I realized that, for the first time in years, I was angry that Baptists in the South have kept women out of positions of church leadership. I was angry that we affirm that baptism makes a person a priest and a minister, but refuse to admit that it works on women, too. I was angry about the selectivity of "verbal inerrancy" through which women are allowed to teach children and sing in the choir, but never preach. I was angry that I Timothy 3 is used as a bludgeon to keep women quiet when so few pastors I know are really up to the standards that are recorded there. It's not about feminism. It's about exegesis. The spirit has been poured out on all flesh.
I admit that seeing a woman in the pulpit still makes me uncomfortable. But I am willing to bear that discomfort to press forward to the better future that is waiting for us.
The series on Evangelical Singleness will return when I can find some time to get those articles into a presentable form. They are all outlined... I just need to flesh them out. In the meantime, I need to atone for some sins. I get the feeling that this blog is simply a matter of me speaking to myself on the internet. Even if that's the case, there is something I need to get off my chest.
Seminary was not easy for me. I attended a seminary that was born as a result of a denominational struggle, whose faculty were almost all victims of the purge of Southern Baptist seminaries in the early 90s. When I arrived at McAfee in the fall of 2002, the pain was still palpable in the air, and not just from the faculty: many students had inherited the conflict from faculties of denominational colleges.
For me and others like me, that is, men, my affiliation with the moderate wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that was soundly defeated when I was just a kid, was mostly a personal theological preference. For the women of our seminary, however, identification with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was more. It had to be more. For them, the difference between a lifetime of Christian ministry and a lifetime of missed opportunities hung in the balance. That some students were "moderates" because of personal preference and others were "moderates" because of existential need created an incredible amount of friction. In the midst of some conversations that certainly don't need to be aired on the World Wide Web, the fact that we all shared the same fundamental convictions about the nature of the Baptist witness was badly obscured.
I'm ashamed to admit that my own convictions were, to some extent, obscured even to myself. But this evening, as I thought back on some of these things, I realized that, for the first time in years, I was angry that Baptists in the South have kept women out of positions of church leadership. I was angry that we affirm that baptism makes a person a priest and a minister, but refuse to admit that it works on women, too. I was angry about the selectivity of "verbal inerrancy" through which women are allowed to teach children and sing in the choir, but never preach. I was angry that I Timothy 3 is used as a bludgeon to keep women quiet when so few pastors I know are really up to the standards that are recorded there. It's not about feminism. It's about exegesis. The spirit has been poured out on all flesh.
I admit that seeing a woman in the pulpit still makes me uncomfortable. But I am willing to bear that discomfort to press forward to the better future that is waiting for us.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Saving Nothing for Marriage
In the early life of the church, being a Christian was risky. Most Christians are at least somewhat familiar with the persecutions that the early church faced at the hands of the Roman Empire. Somewhat less familiar is the trouble that this caused in the church after it became the darling of the imperial government. Many, perhaps most, Christians got comfortable in their brand new basilicas, but a few Christians just didn't think they were holding up their end of the bargain unless they suffered like crazy for Christ.
So these brave souls, denied the "red martyrdom" of a violent death, left the swelling churches (without breaking communion with them) and took to the deserts. There, they sought a "white martyrdom" of absolute self-denial, spending their lives in solitary prayer and fasting. After a while, these folks banded together for shared worship and exhortation, and the first monasteries were born.
At the Protestant reformation, Protestants lost the institution of monasticism, but the ideal of voluntary self-denial for the glory of God cropped up again and again. Max Weber described in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism how Reformed Protestantism imposed a semi-monastic discipline on its adherents, a discipline that forbade Protestants from enjoying any of the wealth that they accumulated through their hard work. Hard work, Weber explained, was itself a result of the Protestant obsession with self-denial. Later, Methodist circuit riders on the early 19th century American frontier, almost all of whom were single men, worked so hard that almost none of them survived until their fortieth birthday. A similar impulse sent countless evangelical Protestants all over the world in order to preach the gospel, many of them never surviving to return.
The roots of Evangelicalism, then, reach deep into the ascetic tradition. Stated another way, Evangelicalism is a way of life rooted in an assumption that God is honored by self-denial. The strange thing is not that almost all of the Christians that went before us thought that God could be pleased through self-denial, but that we have decided that we should be spared no pleasure.
In no instance is this more plain than in Evangelical approaches to sex and marriage. In matters of marriage, for instance, evangelicals are not prepared to accept that some people might be led to forgo marriage for the sake of service to the church and to Christ. I hesitate to diagnose the roots of this problem. Is it because we need marriage as a marker of our support for "family values" or of our opposition to homosexuality? Maybe it is because we're just anxious whenever anyone indicates, however gently, that "doing without" honors God.
The way we speak about sex is even more telling. Someone told me once that he was waiting to have sex until after marriage because if he did, God would bless the sex in his marriage and make it even better than it would have been. It's only a slight variation on this theme to suggest that by saving yourself for marriage, you keep something special that ought to be reserved for your spouse
With this in mind, it's no wonder evangelicals have such trouble with singleness. All of our justifications for chastity have to do with its effects on marriage. Many evangelicals that never marry must wonder why they even bothered saving themselves for someone that never materialized, for a day that never came.
To all this, I make a simple constructive suggestion: as conservative Christians, we should be addressing issues of sexuality and singleness not in terms of a divine quid pro quo, in which we offer chastity now in order to get a sexual benefit later, but as a form of asceticism. When single people voluntarily give up the right to have sex, they honor God. When married people give up their right to have sex with anyone to whom they are not married, they honor God. Sex isn't given up for the sake of receiving a benefit, but for the sake of pleasing God. I for one am tired of saving myself for marriage. I am, however, trying to live my life, my whole life, in light of the glory of God.
In the early life of the church, being a Christian was risky. Most Christians are at least somewhat familiar with the persecutions that the early church faced at the hands of the Roman Empire. Somewhat less familiar is the trouble that this caused in the church after it became the darling of the imperial government. Many, perhaps most, Christians got comfortable in their brand new basilicas, but a few Christians just didn't think they were holding up their end of the bargain unless they suffered like crazy for Christ.
So these brave souls, denied the "red martyrdom" of a violent death, left the swelling churches (without breaking communion with them) and took to the deserts. There, they sought a "white martyrdom" of absolute self-denial, spending their lives in solitary prayer and fasting. After a while, these folks banded together for shared worship and exhortation, and the first monasteries were born.
At the Protestant reformation, Protestants lost the institution of monasticism, but the ideal of voluntary self-denial for the glory of God cropped up again and again. Max Weber described in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism how Reformed Protestantism imposed a semi-monastic discipline on its adherents, a discipline that forbade Protestants from enjoying any of the wealth that they accumulated through their hard work. Hard work, Weber explained, was itself a result of the Protestant obsession with self-denial. Later, Methodist circuit riders on the early 19th century American frontier, almost all of whom were single men, worked so hard that almost none of them survived until their fortieth birthday. A similar impulse sent countless evangelical Protestants all over the world in order to preach the gospel, many of them never surviving to return.
The roots of Evangelicalism, then, reach deep into the ascetic tradition. Stated another way, Evangelicalism is a way of life rooted in an assumption that God is honored by self-denial. The strange thing is not that almost all of the Christians that went before us thought that God could be pleased through self-denial, but that we have decided that we should be spared no pleasure.
In no instance is this more plain than in Evangelical approaches to sex and marriage. In matters of marriage, for instance, evangelicals are not prepared to accept that some people might be led to forgo marriage for the sake of service to the church and to Christ. I hesitate to diagnose the roots of this problem. Is it because we need marriage as a marker of our support for "family values" or of our opposition to homosexuality? Maybe it is because we're just anxious whenever anyone indicates, however gently, that "doing without" honors God.
The way we speak about sex is even more telling. Someone told me once that he was waiting to have sex until after marriage because if he did, God would bless the sex in his marriage and make it even better than it would have been. It's only a slight variation on this theme to suggest that by saving yourself for marriage, you keep something special that ought to be reserved for your spouse
With this in mind, it's no wonder evangelicals have such trouble with singleness. All of our justifications for chastity have to do with its effects on marriage. Many evangelicals that never marry must wonder why they even bothered saving themselves for someone that never materialized, for a day that never came.
To all this, I make a simple constructive suggestion: as conservative Christians, we should be addressing issues of sexuality and singleness not in terms of a divine quid pro quo, in which we offer chastity now in order to get a sexual benefit later, but as a form of asceticism. When single people voluntarily give up the right to have sex, they honor God. When married people give up their right to have sex with anyone to whom they are not married, they honor God. Sex isn't given up for the sake of receiving a benefit, but for the sake of pleasing God. I for one am tired of saving myself for marriage. I am, however, trying to live my life, my whole life, in light of the glory of God.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
OK, I lied
It's true... I promised a series on Evangelical singleness and asceticism, but I got swamped and produced absolutely nothing. Sorry about that. I need to get back on the horse. It's a good thing no one pays me to blog.
In the meantime, I just got a bit of inspiration that might goad me to contribute more frequently: unbeknownst to me, I was quoted from the pulpit of First United Methodist Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5, 2006. Check it out:
http://firstumcphoenix.org/sermons/distantsong.htm
It's true... I promised a series on Evangelical singleness and asceticism, but I got swamped and produced absolutely nothing. Sorry about that. I need to get back on the horse. It's a good thing no one pays me to blog.
In the meantime, I just got a bit of inspiration that might goad me to contribute more frequently: unbeknownst to me, I was quoted from the pulpit of First United Methodist Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5, 2006. Check it out:
http://firstumcphoenix.org/sermons/distantsong.htm
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Evangelical Singleness
Not so long ago, I Googled the phrase "Evangelical Singleness." I ended up with little besides one (fairly good) term paper written by a seminary student, and an article on Beliefnet.com discussing the fact that "True Love Waits" doesn't hold a lot of water for someone who's still single at thirty. For whatever reason, Evangelicals (that is, to paraphrase historian Mark Noll, Christians that take the resurrection of Jesus as fact and not myth) don't do singleness well. In the blog series that will follow here in a total of five further installments, I plan to explore in some limited sense the problems with evangelical approaches to singleness as they affect both single adults and the wider evangelical church.
I have chosen the phrase "Evangelical Singleness" to describe this series for several reasons. First, "Christian singleness" would make little sense because the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches already have a well-thought out and convincingly articulated theology of marriage and singleness: for them, singleness is better. Mainline Protestants have diverged from Evangelical understandings of the human family and sexuality to the point that I don't feel comfortable lumping them together with Evangelical Christians. When Evangelical attitudes towards singleness are isolated, a series of possible questions begins to emerge: Do single adults consistently maintain a second-class position in evangelical churches? If so, why? Is there any legitimate goal for Evangelical singles besides marriage? When Evangelical teachings on sexuality are limited to exhorting teenagers to "save themselves for marriage," how can Evangelical Christians manage their sexuality when marriage is not in their future?
Secondly, and in a more positive light, I have chosen the phrase "Evangelical singleness" because single adults have a special gift that can be used for the good of the work of the church. In fact, I will argue in a few weeks that single adults are under a biblical mandate to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to the work of God in a way that married people cannot. Single people ought to be the front line workers in the church's work for the good of the world.
I will explore these issues and perhaps a few others over the next five weeks. I hope you will share your thoughts and reactions along the way.
Not so long ago, I Googled the phrase "Evangelical Singleness." I ended up with little besides one (fairly good) term paper written by a seminary student, and an article on Beliefnet.com discussing the fact that "True Love Waits" doesn't hold a lot of water for someone who's still single at thirty. For whatever reason, Evangelicals (that is, to paraphrase historian Mark Noll, Christians that take the resurrection of Jesus as fact and not myth) don't do singleness well. In the blog series that will follow here in a total of five further installments, I plan to explore in some limited sense the problems with evangelical approaches to singleness as they affect both single adults and the wider evangelical church.
I have chosen the phrase "Evangelical Singleness" to describe this series for several reasons. First, "Christian singleness" would make little sense because the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches already have a well-thought out and convincingly articulated theology of marriage and singleness: for them, singleness is better. Mainline Protestants have diverged from Evangelical understandings of the human family and sexuality to the point that I don't feel comfortable lumping them together with Evangelical Christians. When Evangelical attitudes towards singleness are isolated, a series of possible questions begins to emerge: Do single adults consistently maintain a second-class position in evangelical churches? If so, why? Is there any legitimate goal for Evangelical singles besides marriage? When Evangelical teachings on sexuality are limited to exhorting teenagers to "save themselves for marriage," how can Evangelical Christians manage their sexuality when marriage is not in their future?
Secondly, and in a more positive light, I have chosen the phrase "Evangelical singleness" because single adults have a special gift that can be used for the good of the work of the church. In fact, I will argue in a few weeks that single adults are under a biblical mandate to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to the work of God in a way that married people cannot. Single people ought to be the front line workers in the church's work for the good of the world.
I will explore these issues and perhaps a few others over the next five weeks. I hope you will share your thoughts and reactions along the way.
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