The church and single adults

Back when I attended Easton Assembly of God, one of the older church members felt a need to start a singles Sunday school class.

The single adult thing gets tricky. I started calling it the "Poor me, I'm Single" class since it was little more than a support group. I wanted to be involved with someone -- I was maybe 20 at the time, and wouldn't be involved in a serious relationship for another four or five years -- but the entire focus of the "class" was abject self-pity and coping with our "single disability."

Then there's the other extreme. I had another friend who, post-college, joined a "young adults fellowship" in the Allentown that often was little more than a meat market for single Christian folks to check each other out. Jenn insisted it wasn't, but people invariably started attending as unattached and then dropped out once they got involved.

Jenn would never admit it, but Faith Young Adults was a meat market.

Being single means opportunities that married folks don't have. As a single man, I was involved with the children's ministry to the point of helping to write the curriculum for two years running, in addition to a number of other church activities that took a lot of my time. When I graduated from college, I was able to announce to one and all that I was going to the missions field.

Now that I'm married, I don't have the time to write an entire children's church curriculum and I can't just up and take off for a third world nation. I have other duties as a husband and a father.

A single friend of mine who's 34 has the time to volunteer nearly every night at the soup kitchen. She'd like to be married and have kids, but since she's not, Debbee is using the time and energy she has to serve God in other ways.