church and the changing american family

Listening to a recent Mark Driscoll sermon on 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?

a hodgepodge: or, when anything and everything seems more important than broadcasting yourself …

… that’s probably a good thing.

There’s a lot going on these days. We can look forward to a couple more months of Hillary and Barack beating each other over the head by proxy (or sometimes directly), an indeterminately long period of economic recession and $4 a gallon gasoline, and the continued ascendancy of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus/the good girl of pop with a million names over all the world.

Also, lots of good movies out these days: There Will Be Blood, for which Daniel Day-Lewis totally deserved his Oscar; Gone Baby Gone, the well-directed and well-acted movie that kept me in the dark until very very nearly the end (which rarely happens); Atonement, which moves like an incredibly interesting glacier that in the end runs over your grandmother’s house (at least that’s how jolting it is); and Into the Wild, a fascinating story about searching for the meaning of life. Plus of course the ones I want to see but haven’t yet, like No Country for Old Men.

In slightly bigger news, I am very much looking forward to becoming a dad. Becky is starting to show her pregnancy in her ridiculously cute belly, and there’s a small heart pounding like mad in there. I know, because I’ve heard it.

I find myself thinking a lot about theological and ministry issues, like: What is the nature of Biblical inspiration? What did Paul mean when he said scripture is “God-breathed”? Why do I feel like even the best churches I see around me frequently marginalize women?

Trying to take more of a role in helping move in a positive direction at the church. Pushing certain steps to strengthen the ministry. Also starting a small group in my home to help develop relationships.

Did I mention Becky is having a baby? Yeah, that’s cool.

… and the firstfruit of religion is emptiness

I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant person when it comes to my faith … I see lots of room for diversity in how people relate to God, the ways in which we worship, etc. You don’t have to do it my way — even if you attend my church. As a matter of fact, much of the time we won’t do it my way, because I know that what works for me might not work for the people I’m worshiping with. Feel free to worship God in your own way.

But there’s a strain of Christianity that I find myself becoming much less tolerant of lately. Throughout my life, I’ve seen it expressed well. It ruled at the bible college I attended, the churches I used to go to … in the lives of many, including myself. The following of Christ has been turned into a maze of rules and regulations. Loving Jesus has been reduced to following a set of laws. And my peers and friends have reaped the consequences.

Don’t get me wrong … I know they/you/we meant well. (I am talking about the conservative evangelical/”independent fundamental” tradition) I know the goal was to be the most sincere, most devoted, most right Christians we could be. But somewhere along the line, we got so obsessed with a particular culture (perhaps, ironically, the one ingrained in a certain generation’s mind as the ideal time in America’s history) that we lost any hope of keeping our faith connected with the rest of our lives. This is probably not as true for my parents’ generation, and certainly not for my grandparents. That’s because they still had a connection with the culture they were so bent on preserving in the church. But the rest of us were faced with very limited options… we could leave the church, or we could be one person there and another person the rest of the time. Or, we could completely disassociate ourselves with the rest of the world and only function in that highly churched environment.

But it gets worse … because of the disconnect between the church and the rest of our lives, a whole generation has grown up in these churches with no concept of what it means to have a God who who is relational — who interacts with them and who loves them and is present in daily lives and who likes rock and roll and loves a good party. Church is a thing people do. God is someone who is out there. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. But it doesn’t do anything in our gut, and we’re not exactly sure how it ties in with the rest of our lives. And so, this religion of hymns and suits and skirts and good behavior has succeeded not in developing vital spirituality, but in producing a spiritual emptiness in the lives of its children.

I haven’t always felt this way … even after deciding that culture wasn’t the place I wanted to be. I knew that different people need to worship in different ways. But now I am pursuing the call God has given me to minister, and I am doing damage control. Thanks be to God that he has given us the chance to make a difference in people’s lives, and to pursue true spirituality in community with others. I believe there is life after religion … and it gives everything that religion ever falsely promised and much, much more. It’s found in authentic relationship with God and with each other. And I want it more and more each day.