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.