I find it one of the great mysteries of the modern church. It does not exist in every context and every congregation, but as I’ve traveled and inquired, I’ve become convinced it exists in a great many of them. Here is the mystery: A lot of churches have many single men and many single women who wish to be married, but are not marrying one another. There are lots of single Christians but not a lot of weddings.

Greg Morse recently wrote an article for Desiring God titled Go Get Her: To Men Delaying Marriage which spurred me to think and write about this subject. Morse’s article is an urgent call to young men to stop delaying and instead begin pursuing a wife. But as much as I generally appreciate what Morse says, there is another side to the issue that I consider equally important: From what I have observed, young women may not be a whole lot more eager to marry than young men—at least, to marry the young men who are available to them. Hence, both young men and young women in our churches apparently want to be married, but in many cases, they don’t seem to want to be married to one another. If you speak to the men they are likely to place responsibility on the women (“They won’t accept our advances”) while the women are likely to place responsibility on the men (“Suitable men won’t ask us out”). So even if the young men do heed Morse’s call, I’m not convinced it will ultimately prove effective.

I have tried to understand this phenomenon, so have spoken to young adults, pastors, and parents about an impasse that, if not universal, does seem to be common. I have learned there are a few possible factors in play. In the first draft of this article, I wrote about each of these at length, but then decided it may better to cover them just briefly.

Before I do so, let me acknowledge that, as has always been the case, there are some people who simply have not been able to find a suitable spouse despite their desires and their efforts—people who have experienced the hard providence that God, in his wisdom, has not provided what they long for. Not all singleness is related to what I am about to list.

With that in mind, here are some potential factors that may make marriage especially challenging today.

The ubiquity of pornography has made men and women fear one another and fear the possibility of either marrying a porn addict or having to deal with a recovering one.

Many women, especially in urban settings, have attained greater educational or vocational success than the men around them and it is a general rule (though certainly not a universal one) that when this happens men can consider women above them and women can consider men beneath them.

Many women are well-established in the workforce and do not need a husband to provide for them in ways that may have been true in years past.

Christians can fall into the “soulmate myth” that there is just one person out there for them to marry and that a marriage can only be successful when they are certain they have found that one individual.

Fertility technologies allow women to delay childbearing, and therefore delay marriage, into their thirties or even forties. While Christians may not advocate the use of such technologies, the ethos of delaying marriage and family has seeped deeply into society and from there into the church.

Christians have heard messages about marriage being difficult and they may not see how the potential benefits and pleasures of marriage outweigh the drawbacks and difficulties.

Churches can make dating weird by attaching too much weight to the earliest stages of a relationship, thus causing people to shy away from relationships at all instead of risking a breakup that will become a source of gossip.

I’m sure there are many other factors, but these are ones I have both heard and observed.

Teaching

I have kept what I consider the most significant factor for the end because I believe it merits the greatest consideration. And often you find that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

I believe the church has not done a great job of teaching whether marriage is to be desired more than singleness or singleness is to be desired more than marriage. Or to say it another way, the church has not faithfully taught whether men and women generally should marry or whether they should prefer to remain single. Note the word should, which implies some level of moral obligation before the Lord.

In previous generations it may have been taken for granted that men and women would naturally pair up and marry off and, indeed, circumstances made marriage a near-necessity. Churches did not need to teach whether people should marry or should stay single because they generally married out of need. But not so today.

Aside from all that I’ve listed above there is this: As people grow up immersed in modern Western culture—as they learn in its schools, swipe through its socials, and watch its media—they gain cultural assumptions and expectations, many of which counter what Christians have long taken for granted. An older generation considers marriage normal and singleness odd; a new generation considers singleness normal and marriage odd. That may be a slight overstatement of the issue, but probably only slight.

An older generation considers marriage normal and singleness odd; a new generation considers singleness normal and marriage odd.Share

Thus churches need to teach. They need to teach whether God generally wants his people to get married, if he generally wants his people to remain single, or if he has no opinion on the matter. They need to teach whether it is still generally true that “it is not good for the man to be alone” and that mankind is to “be fruitful and multiply.” They need to teach whether in this New Testament era God now prefers for his people to remain single. They need to teach so people can know!

I am convinced that few young Christians today could confidently answer questions like these:

Does God still mean for humanity to be fruitful and multiply?

Is it God’s general will for most people most of the time that they pursue marriage?

Is singleness superior to marriage? Is marriage superior to singleness?

Is a life of chosen and deliberate singleness—not the kind that involves being utterly sold out to a life of mission and service, but the kind that involves living a more standard workaday Western life—pleasing to God to the same degree as being married?

Is marriage a kind of consolation plan for those who are emotionally unable to handle being single or sexually unable to handle being chaste?

And perhaps even a question as simple as this: What is marriage and why does it matter?

I don’t mean to tip my cards toward the answers I might offer, but simply to state that these are foundational questions for which I think few young believers today could confidently provide compelling, biblical answers.

Conclusion

I believe it would be fitting and helpful for churches to lead the way in teaching and preaching on these matters. This would then help young Christians better understand God’s will regarding marriage and singleness and help them align their expectations with his. It would spur them to confidently pursue marriage or singleness to God’s glory. And maybe in one way or another, it would bring clarity to the mystery that has perplexed both me and others.

Good morning from lovely Rybnik, Poland, where I’m hard at work filming an episode of Worship Round the World.

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Death! How shall they die who have already died in Christ? —F.B. Meyer

One of the great privileges of my life has been worshipping with Christians all around the world. As I travel, I always try to prioritize Sunday mornings with a local church, and that’s true whether it is in North America or North Africa and whether it worships in English or another language. And while I’m always especially interested in worshipping with a church that is Reformed and Baptist like my own, I am also glad to worship in any of the gospel-preaching Protestant traditions. And so I’ve spent Sunday mornings with Baptist and Presbyterian congregations, Brethren and Anglican congregations, Christian Missionary Alliance and Dutch Reformed congregations, and many more besides.
It can be jarring to worship in a church that adheres to an unfamiliar tradition. Customs may be strange and patterns may differ from what I am accustomed to. And it is at the point of such differences that I immediately find myself tempted to pass judgment. After all, my tradition and my church have thought deeply and come to firm convictions about the elements and circumstances of our worship. Everything we include and everything we exclude has been carefully considered. My first instinct, then, is to assume that other churches have not thought well about these matters or perhaps not thought about them at all. My instinct is to assume that a church is faithful to Scripture only to the degree that it is similar to own.
But I have learned that a crucial discipline when visiting other like-minded churches is to observe without judgment. It is to observe quietly and humbly and then, when appropriate, to ask clarifying questions. And more often than not, I have been encouraged and even challenged by these clarifications. This is true whether the church has been around the corner or around the world.
In one church I looked at the bulletin and saw a woman listed there as a pastor. This surprised me because I had been under the impression that this church was complementarian. As I observed further, I saw that several other positions also listed a female pastor. A clarifying question helped it make sense. In this country, they use “minister” or “ministry” where we use “pastor.” Hence, they were every bit as complementarian as my own church but simply use different nomenclature. Their “women’s pastor” is our “women’s ministry leader.” I was glad that I had withheld judgment.
In another church, I immediately noticed that the men and women split up when they entered the sanctuary so that men sat on one side with women on the other. This cuts hard against my own cultural understanding of the equality of men and women. But when I asked, I was told that separating the sexes in formal settings is normal in this culture and that it would be a significant hindrance to evangelism if men and women were to sit side by side. Men and women alike would be uncomfortable sitting pressed together. I was glad I had withheld judgment.
I have attended churches whose services included an element of dance. This was not interpretive dance or dancing in the Spirit, but a style that was obviously celebratory. I learned that in these cultures no celebration is complete without a dance and that it would be more scandalous to omit one than to have one. They also explained their understanding of Scripture to show their conviction that even while God does not demand this kind of dance, he also does not forbid it. Once more, I was glad that I had been slow to judge.
In still another, I attended a prayer meeting in which every person prayed at the same time—hundreds of voices crying out to the Lord at once. In my setting, we apply the biblical admonition that “all things should be done decently and in order” to mean that one person prays at a time and then ends his or her prayer with a hearty “amen.” This then signals that someone else can begin to pray. But a church in which everyone prayed at the same time struck me as chaotic and disorderly. Yet when I asked, I was told that this church arose out of a time of revival and that the kind of fervent prayer that birthed the church has forever remained present in the church. Not only that but the prayer meetings are carefully organized and led—just in a different way from my own setting. As I continued to observe, I felt a growing appreciation for that kind of prayer and was thankful that I had been slow to judge.
I have been in churches in which I was told they have female pastors but then learned that something had been lost in translation so that what they called pastors actually function as what I would term deacons. I have been in churches in which women were not permitted to participate in certain elements of the service that I believe are open to all believers but received a helpful explanation of why such public participation would be inappropriate in that culture. And, as it happens, I have been in churches in which women were permitted to participate in elements of the service that I believe are restricted to pastors but received a helpful explanation of why they believe such participation honors Scripture. I could go on and on.
I might not agree with all of these decisions even after gaining the necessary interpretive facts, but in every case, I have had an opportunity to learn and to grow in my respect for other Christians and the way they’ve wrestled through the issues and come to their decisions. And so, because my tendency is always to judge before carefully observing, I have trained myself instead to observe without judgment. It has become a key discipline as I visit other churches and join them in worship.