Listening to a recent Mark Driscoll sermon dating and something caught my ear … he said that for the first time in America’s history, there are slightly more single people than married. Just over 50% of Americans are single. Out of curiosity, I did a little poking around and it’s a legitimate and very recent statistic. The figure is 50.3% of American adults. Driscoll uses this to point out why it’s so important to be welcoming of single adults in church - he refers to them as ‘not a family yet’. My mind ran in a little bit different direction, though.
I was unable to find a clear statistic on how many of those single people have kids, how many are divorced vs. how many have never been married. However, it does look like 33% of first children are born to unmarried women.
So what’s my point?
Driscoll mentioned that many churches try to be ‘family friendly,’ which I think ours does. He then pointed out that if you focus solely on families, you’re missing over half the population … ‘who are not families yet’. What strikes me is that these two don’t necessarily go together. Again, one third of women are unmarried when they have their first child. (In Britain, it’s 40%) Factor in that over 40% of unmarried people living together have children under 18 in the house, and it starts to become clear that we do need to reach families, but that we may have a misconception about what the typical American family looks like.
I did a quick mental check of our church. Last week, among the several families with children under age 12, there were more single-parent than two-parent homes. Actually, there were twice as many - 6 to 3. What does your church look like? What does it mean for how we do ministry?
Primarily, it means we need to adapt our understanding of what the typical American family may look like. In some congregations, it may mean we need to stop excoriating the immoral society we live in where women have children ‘out of wedlock’ with no condemnation, and focus instead on introducing people to Jesus and helping them move forward into spiritual formation. We also need to move beyond the stereotype of the welfare mom. All of the single parents in our church last Sunday were working mothers with full-time jobs. The Cleavers are great-grandparents now, if they ever existed, and at least a couple of their grandkids are single parents.
When we try to reach families, we shouldn’t assume that both a mom and a dad are present … maybe our events need to be less couple-oriented. The division between between the ‘family ministry’ and the ’singles ministry’ will have to become a thing of the past. In fact, this may even become yet another reason for simplifying our ministries programatically (that may not be a word, but it should be). Maybe we should try the approach of drawing people together by addressing needs that are universal, rather than trying to have a ministry to a dozen different demographics we’ve artificially created.
What do you think? Has this reality affected anybody else? Does it change your perspective at all?