Single college women and sex...

The New York Times magazine published this article on abstinence clubs at Ivy League schools. Janie Fredell, a Harvard student (and most often cited in the article), insists that abstinence can be argued from a secular point of view. Certainly there is new awareness among secular audiences that perhaps an overly-free-sex culture is not good for women (or men).

Be that as it may, more often than not Christians have been the ones seen as pushing abstinence in sex education and as the sine qua non for non-married people. Teaching about abstinence among Christians fails, I think, unless Christians can talk about abstinence in terms of a virtue - the virtue of chastity. Chastity is a virtue for all Christians, single or married, or divorced, or hormonal teenager. Chastity is the virtue that, in part, reminds us that sex isn't all about ME. I've got to pay attention, at the very least, to the needs of the other person involved. To practice chastity well requires a community of people who agree that chastity is a virtue and who are willing to help each other live that kind of life. It is not the kind of life that a secular culture can sustain - and that, I think, is a great difference between secular abstinence and Christian virtue.

Being never-married in a married church....

There are all kinds of single people in the church but one of the points I try to make in the book is the degree to which singles are largely ignored, to the Church's great detriment.

Let me try to narrate an account of one set of singles:
You are born. Your parents baptize you (or wait till you request it, depending on your affiliation). They bring you to church each week. You learn prayers and when to sit and stand and sing. You go to Sunday School and learn Bible stories. Eventually you become a teenager. You go to youth group. You get confirmed (or baptized). The people in your church love you because you're "THE FUTURE". You feel the love. You graduate from high school. And suddenly....

you fall off a cliff into the dark,murky,depths of singleness.

Now you are a single person and officially an adult. You have questions. You have doubts. You want to participate. You want to matter to this group of people called "The Body of Christ". After all, you were baptized there. They promised to "confirm and strengthen you" in the way that leads to life eternal. Where have they gone?

You try to find others who might ask the questions with you and live the faith with you. You despair a bit because the announcements each week deal with children's Sunday School or the new adult Sunday School class. You despair a bit because the sermons seem always to relate to married couples. You go to Adult Sunday School and discover you're out of place because they're all married and you're not.

You discover that most other people don't want to ask questions because they're married now and have children and any questions about faith are reserved for their children. And they don't have time to do much else other than raise their children. Understandable, you think. But still. Where's your place in all this?

You maybe find a small group of people (three or four) who are also not married. You get shunted into "the group that meets for brunch once a month with other unmarried folks."

You find yourself at a crossroads. If there is no place for you here in this Body of Christ, maybe you ought to leave. Or, you could get married. You struggle a bit but take the latter path. You sign up for an online Christian singles site. Maybe you find "the One". Maybe you get married. Maybe you have children. All this is good, very good.

But inside you're confused about the focus on marriage because you always thought that Christ was the only "the One". And in brief moments when dropping off children for Sunday School, you wonder what happened to the Church that proclaims 1 Corinthians 7.

Intentional Christian communities

When I first heard about intentional Christian communities, I thought, "Yeah, right - there can't be too many of those around." But it's one of those things where once you hear one described, they suddenly start popping out all over the place.

Intentional Christian communities are groups of Christians who commit to living together, often under a covenant. They vary in size and purpose, but they do tend to share some characteristics. For instance, many of them are experiments in living the Acts 2 community, meaning that they share some or all of their money and possessions in common, have regular prayer times and meals together, and do acts of hospitality in their surrounding communities. Most of the time, these communities are for single people only, though I have met married couples (with children sometimes!) who live in intentional communities.

I bet there are some reading this thinking: hmmm, this sounds an awful lot like monastic orders - Benedictines, Franciscans, and that sort of thing. Funny you should think that, because there is a loose coalition of several of these intentional Christian communities that consider themselves to be part of what they call the "New Monasticism." And, often these are not Roman Catholics joining these small communities (as sometimes people think) but Evangelical Protestant Christians!

I write about these communities here because I think they're one good place for single Christians to find a good community and engage in all the communal practices of Christianity without feeling like one must get married.