singleness

Today I write for Prodigal: Never Been Kissed

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Today I share the story of my single life over at Prodigal:

There are awkward conversations. And then there are conversations you would do anything to avoid. There will be a whole tranche for each of us that fit into this latter category. For me they start something like this:

“Danny, what’s your worst ever dating experience?”, or maybe, “When did you have your first kiss?”

I can’t answer them.

This week I had one that ended up along similar lines, but I didn’t see it coming. For some absurd reason I started a blog last summer and choose relationships as my specialist subject. I had opinions and I wanted to share them. Whether anyone was listening was comparatively unimportant, and if they were I planned on ignoring them. That illusion was shattered the moment I walked into church and saw the people who had shared my post or commented on the blog.

… read more over at Prodigal Magazine

If you’ve ended up here after reading my post take a look around, you’re welcome to linger a while or stay for as long as you want. I’m always interested to hear what you think, whether you passionately disagree or find words that echo your story.

My single confession

Danny Webster 5 Comments

After a sermon on singleness and after Jennie’s story earlier this week I thought it was about time I found a way to tell my story. I’m good at analysing situations, being objective about what is going on, deconstructing cause from effect. I can write about singleness in the church, I can write about dating, I can even write about marriage as far as that might seem from where I am now.

Where I am less sure about navigating my course and finding words to describe and explain is when I am the subject. I used to think it was because I was taking an objective standpoint, unburdened by emotional vagaries.

What I am actually doing is denying that I have any part to play. I pretend I don’t exist. Like a researcher conducting an anthropological study I assume I am invisible, that my presence is irrelevant to whatever may be in my sights.

So when I write about the dynamics of dating in the church I write about other people and not me. And when I think of whether the level of single people in church, and my church in particular, is a problem, I do not write from a personal perspective.

When I write an open letter to the ladies I may use language that conveys emotion, I may come across as honest and brave. But too often these emotions and this honesty is on someone else’s behalf, or in a corporate general sense.

Even now, I’m finding ways around actually telling my story by telling you how I avoid telling my story. The mind has remarkable agility when it comes to finding guises for respectability to avoid what needs to be done.

I am single. And I always have been.

And that’s where my story starts and ends. But a lot happens in between and I should therefore have something to say about singleness. It’s not a category or a label I use very often, perhaps partly to shield myself from having to decide whether or not I am happy with that status. If I don’t define myself in this way I tell myself that I am letting other parts of my life take the leading roles, maybe in my more spiritual days I view this as doing what Jennie speaks of: I am getting on with my life. I have never considered myself to be waiting for life to begin.

Maybe I have done a good job at getting on at life. But I have done this by seeing singleness as a part of my life that doesn’t matter.

It’s not mattered because I have disconnected myself from it. I have stepped outside of my situation and my relationships with others and tried to get on with life.

Whatever attraction or rejection I may feel or have experienced has been categorised as unimportant and more or less ignored. So when I have liked a girl, and not had the guts to do anything about it I have forced myself to get over what I define as infatuation. Or when that girl starts going out with someone else I tell myself that I was never going to make a move so it doesn’t matter.

I told myself that relationships don’t matter.

But I still wanted friends. I still wanted to be wanted and included, and a part of the crowd. I looked on enviously at communities forming and thriving, or relationships that helped each other get better. And while defining romance as an unnecessary addition I still wanted it.

This narcissistic self denial had an impact as I viewed women I liked as out of my reach. I confused attraction with infatuation and thus justified relegating it out of sight. Without making a move, without ever being rejected, I defined myself as rejected.

Because my singleness was a thorn in my side that I needed to ignore. I not only saw it as a problem, but I decided that it was other people’s problem and not mine. I did not want to be viewed that way, I did not want to be needy, or viewed as the reject that I had subconsciously branded myself.

Most of all I was ashamed. I was ashamed at never having gone out with a girl. When I was at school I hid behind my Christian piety, when I grew a little older I learnt that the bravado covered over others in the same place as me. But that was years ago now.

Now it is something a bit more painful. To go with the singleness is a legacy of not asking girls out. Of failing to stand up and man up when it was the thing that good Christian guys do.

My postulating on relationships came at a price. The price that I knew one day I would have to pay. With a post like this that lays it bare. This is my confession.

Singleness is not a prelude

StandardDanny Webster 34 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Jennie Pollock and continues along the theme of singleness. I hope you enjoy…

© David Hawgood

When I left Uni with a good degree but no job, I followed the promptings of that ‘still, small voice’ and became a teacher on a missionary ship sailing around the Caribbean and Central and North America.

It was a two year commitment, and I had a great time, made some lifelong friends, saw some amazing sights and generally had a great sort of double gap year.

Towards the end of my commitment I was recruited to join a music ministry in the same missions agency (OM). I worked with them first in London then in Atlanta, GA, being effectively a tour manager for a Christian band. We travelled extensively in the US and Europe, and also did tours in Canada, South Africa, Australia and Turkey.

I loved it. I was totally in my element: loving my work, loving my boss, loving the team, loving the travel, loving the new friends I made around the world. It was so much fun, and all for a great purpose, which made it even more worthwhile.

I did it for eight years.

And somewhere in the middle of it all I suddenly realised something: I was still treating it like a gap year. I was thinking of it as the thing I was doing before my life really started.

The life where I was married, living in England, paying the mortgage on a nice little house in a suburb somewhere, taking care of our 2.4 kids. My real life. The life I had always expected and wanted.

I realised that because I thought this wasn’t really it, I was letting it pass me by and not really making the most of it or engaging properly with it. Everywhere I went, everything I did, I did like a tourist. I absorbed the experience without letting it touch my life – and without my life touching it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think our cultural attitude to singleness – particularly within the church – is similar to my attitude to my life in OM: it’s fun, but it’s not the real thing. It’s the phase you have to get through while waiting for your real life to start.

Sorry, but I have news for you: this is your real life. You need to start living it.

When I pitched a post on singleness to Danny, I was going to call it ‘Waiting Well’. I was going to talk about how while you are single you should not be consumed by the desire for a relationship, because that can easily slip into idolatry, seeking a mate with all your heart instead of seeking God. I was going to advise you to focus on becoming the person God is calling you to be, not only because it is the most satisfying path and a generally good thing to do, but also because when you do meet that special someone, you’ll have something genuine to bring to the relationship. This is all still true and worth mentioning.

I was also going to say that the best thing you can do is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. This is always worth repeating.

As I thought about it though, I felt my emphasis was wrong. Calling the post ‘Waiting Well’ implies a preparation phase before the real thing, and that’s how many sermons on the subject tend to approach it, but that is not a helpful mindset. Marriage is not the thing that will ultimately fulfil you. It is wonderful, and I look forward to mine, in faith that God will keep a promise made long ago, but your wedding day is neither the end of your story (as Hollywood tells us) or the beginning of it.

It is a transition, sure; a major scene-change, the start of a new act with new characters and new scenarios, but the months or years of singleness before it aren’t prelude. They are not the bit where the orchestra warms up, playing notes and scales you don’t really have to listen to before the real thing starts. They are the real thing.

If your perception is this is just a phase you have to get through, marking time before the real thing starts, you won’t engage with it properly, and are liable to wake up one day, as I did in Atlanta, and realise life has drifted by.

If you are single you are living in God’s best for you right now. You’re not missing his will for your life. You’re not in the second-best role. You aren’t waiting for his plan to start; this is it, it’s started.

Embrace it. Enjoy it. Stop waiting and start living. What are you going to do with the time God has given you?

Jennie Pollock is Editor for New Frontiers UK Media and Communications and is a little closer to 40 than 22. You can find more of her writing at http://jenniebeanbag.wordpress.com and while you’re at it, follow her on twitter.

Singleness and the church

Danny Webster 1 Comment

This is not another post with tangential references to a Leonard Cohen song, I was going to title it ‘A bunch of lonesome heroes‘, but in the end went for something more self-explanatory. It’s about singleness in the church, and in particular in the church in London.

London is a peculiar place. And the church in London is somewhat of a outlier as well. The church is younger than in the rest of the country, even taking into account differences in the overall population it is still astonishing that 57% of people in their 20s who attend church do so in London. This creates one problem for the church outside of London – the lack of young adults, but it also creates problems for the church in London that are not as often recognised.

For churches in the centre of London there is frequently a distinct lack of older people, families and even married couples. That’s not to say they’re absent altogether, just that young single people make up a disproportionately large block. A while back a theory of church growth was in vogue, it was know as the homogeneous unit principle, and it came with its very own acronym: HUP. The idea was that people felt at home around people like them so it made sense for churches to reach out to people who were like them.

This isn’t a post about church growth, but I’ll say this: sometimes it works, we like things to be comfortable and therefore are inclined to go where the path is smoothest and when the congregation is like us there are less obstacles to us feeling at home. The problem is that this could descend down a road of ever intensifying stratification and the end point of that would be an infinite number of churches with a single preacher/worship leader/pew filler: me, or you. But not both of us. At its more practical it means that churches develop that are mono generational or mono cultural. This comes to the fore in London with churches that are young and hip. That means the church family becomes slightly dysfunctional.

It means that churches in central London have a high proportion of single people. For my church the natural affect of being based in the centre of the city is aided and abetted because it was planted only eight years ago, so most of the newcomers are students or young professionals moving into London.

This does two things, firstly it means that the members of the church suffer from not having the full range of people to interact with and learn from. In particular there is a gulf where father and mother figures should exist to provide wisdom and guidance to the younger generation. Secondly, it means that a culture of singleness is fostered as normality.

And this becomes enshrined in all sorts of aspects of church life, whether it is the make up of small groups or the type of social activities that build community around the more formal parts of church life. Added to this is the occasional fallout of relationships that do occur: how friendship groups are rent by couples splitting up. This all makes life a lot easier when a comfortable culture of friendship between groups of guys and girls is the norm.

Into this climate we import a further demographic trouble maker: the disparity between men and women. This isn’t as bad as sometimes it is presented to be, it’s roughly 60-40 in favour of the ladies, or the guys if you’re thinking of prospective dates. While the norm for relational dynamics is the friendship group and the limited dating activity is partly attributable to not wanting to disrupt this, beneath the surface many people remain discontent with the status quo.

It goes something like this: the girls look at the guys and think they need to sort themselves out and ask girls out, in the back of their mind lingers the fear that if the odds stay the same a chunk of them will stay on the shelf. And the guys return the looks, slightly paralysed by the pressure to make a choice and make the most of the favourable proportions. Guys know they ought to do something but don’t want to get it wrong, girls want the guys to ask them out but think it’s too forward to make this desire clear.

Without the wisdom of elders and the frank conversations between people at various stages of romantic liaisons, this becomes a secret minefield out of which the culture of singleness thrives.

This is all a bit detached and technical but I wanted to try and tease out some of the reason singleness has became an issue in the church, and identify the particular form that it takes in churches in London.

I’ll write more later in the week about my own personal experience of singleness. Of all the issues I write about it is perhaps the one which I have the greatest personal experience to draw on, but perhaps something I have dwelt on the least.

What do you think: is singleness an issue in the church? If so, why, and what can be done about it? Do we really believe that single people are equal with those who are married?

Is singleness an issue in the church?

Danny Webster 4 Comments

Should the church do anything about the single people in its midst?

I threw this out on twitter and got more feedback than on anything I’ve ever tweeted before. So one thinks there might be a few things to ponder here.

The responses fitted into two broad groups, those who thought it wasn’t really an issue, and those who wanted the church to stop being so sympathetic and patronising.

But maybe we conflate the church with the church leadership, or the church staff, or the officially organised and sanctioned programmes of the church.

Because the church doing something about it is you and me deciding to help people get together. Or encourage people struggling with relationships. Or discipling people to help them not find their identity in being someone’s girlfriend – or having that girl on your arm. The girls blame it on there being too few guys, and the guys say there’s too many girls. (seriously, they do.)

And I’ve heard enough sermons with the intentional brief asides that challenge guys to man up and ask girls out. And I’ve had enough conversations with girls frustrated with guys not asking them out, and with guys daunted by the prospect, or dizzied by indecision.

The core criticism seems to be that the church treats married people as the norm, and single people as those who are waiting for the right person to come along. Thrown into this mix are those with the specific calling to be single, which we are told to remember to affirm as a gift from God andSt Pauland John Stott are cited as our exemplars.

This description lets two groups of people off the hook and leaves the people out side these mutually exclusive groups rather stranded. If you’re married then you’re ok, if you want to be single, you’re affirmed. If you are single and pretty desperate not to be you’re kind of in trouble.

You are in trouble because the church doesn’t know what to tell you. Should they tell you that marriage is an ideal that you strive for? Of counsel that singleness is a wonderful calling?

We’re not very good at living in a place where things don’t add up. We’re unable to handle the ideal of one thing, the gift of another, and the role of God in redeeming humankind and working in each of our lives at all times.

We want it simple. We want someone else to do something about it. But we also want our independence. So we like the idea of speed dating in the church. Of semi arranged marriages avoiding the social awkwardness of dating, and well, removing the risk element from it all.

But that’s the fastest post I’ve ever written, so I haven’t really thought this through. What are your thoughts? Is there such a thing as a singleness problem, and if so, is it in the number of single people or the way in which they’re treated?

Please tell me.