If the ordinary believers in your church and mine were to stop mentoring the people they see each and every Sunday, the church would be devastated. The most crucial work of ministry has little to do with “out there” in the wider Christian world and everything to do with “in here” in the local church. It has little to do with the few and the famous and far more to do with the many and the unknown.

There is a way of telling history that focuses on the impact of the few great figures that rise up in any generation. This “great man theory” says that history can best be understood when we focus on the dominant figures of the time. History, it says, turns on the actions, decisions, obsessions, and natural abilities of the few and the extraordinary—the Luthers, the Napoleons, the Lincolns, the Churchills. Understand them, and you understand the world as it was and the world as it has become.
I think Christians sometimes understand the church through a similar grid. We assume that the few figures who rise in prominence at any time are the key to understanding the church as a whole—that they in some way represent the Christian faith at that time. Hence if we tell the story of the church in the early twenty-first century, we may tell it through the lives and ministries of Sproul, Packer, MacArthur, Stott, and Piper. We assume that if we understand them, we have gained a representative understanding of Christians and ministries during their time. Understand them, we think, and you’re understanding all of us.
The great man theory has generally fallen out of favor among historians for a good number of reasons, among them that it’s too simplistic and that it’s difficult (or even impossible) to prove. That’s not to deny, of course, that some people have an outsized impact on any generation. It’s simply to deny that history revolves around the few rather than the many. And it’s to deny that the church depends on the few rather than the many.
We are thankful for preachers of extraordinary ability—the kind who step up to the podiums at the major Christian conferences or whose voice goes out over the airwaves. We are grateful for their ministries and grateful for all the ways we have benefited from their words.
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Sermons on marriage abound, but finding sermons on singleness requires a treasure hunt. Messages on biblical manhood and womanhood often give applications in the context of and preparation for marriage yet neglect the daily realities of striving toward Christlikeness as a single. Marriage is implied as a “when,” not an “if.” Not understanding why they are not married and hoping to help them down the aisle, well-meaning church members quickly bring a single person’s attention to the new guy or girl who walks in the door and asks if they find them attractive. But guess what? Nowhere in Scripture does God promise marriage to every believer. He promised the Marriage Supper of the Lamb when Christ will gather His bride, the church, to Himself (Rev. 19:7-10).

Single believers are caught in the middle of a game of tug of war.
On one side, Team Culture pulls and yells, “Forget marriage, at least for a little while! You do not need a spouse; go pursue your dreams and be your best self!”
The opposing Team Church yanks back, “No, getting married should be your #1 priority! Come visit the meat market…I mean the singles ministry and check out all the available options!”
Who wants to volunteer to be the flag on that rope?
Unfortunately, many single believers experience these constant pressures from the voices talking in their ears every day. In the last year, I realized that I myself have been stuck on the rope as a ministry project allowed me to study, research, and challenge my own thinking on singleness and marriage.  So, what exactly is each side saying?
The Culture
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of unmarried Americans has steadily increased since the 1950s (source). A 2022 Pew Research Center study revealed that 30% of U.S. adults are not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship (source). In addition, 34% of women and 63% of men in the young adult population are single.
Why these continually growing percentages? Here’s two significant contributing factors:
The culture tells singles they do not need marriage. Instead, culture contends that it provides plenty of easy ways for singles to fulfill their “needs.” Living with a partner has become a socially acceptable norm. Sexual interactions can happen with any individual at any time no matter how long people have known each other. A quick Internet search opens a world of porn and graphic movies to fulfill sexual fantasies from home. A single can have “fun” without commitment.
The culture tells them they as an individual are enough. A single does not need anyone else, but is self-sufficient.. They need to value and love themselves unconditionally. Singles have the freedom to do whatever they want with their lives and should take advantage of it. What they think matters and deserves a platform. It is all about image and climbing the ladder of success and popularity.
Girls, especially, are being fed these messages right now. Last winter, Miley Cyrus’ record-breaking song “Flowers” played three times in one Spotify ad break, telling girls they could love themselves better than a guy ever could. Since it’s not 1937, the upcoming Disney live-action Snow White won’t feature a girl saved by the prince, but instead “dreaming of the leader she knows she can be…if she’s fearless, brave, and true” (source).
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Eating the forbidden fruit was nothing if not Adam and Eve’s attempt to live on their terms rather than God’s. Technology is making it ever easier for us to live with this “on my terms” posture. Optimize-everything tech fuels our delusions of the world’s controllability, tempting us to eliminate all threats and inconveniences. Other technologies tempt us to violently subdue nature—life, death, even our own gender—when it doesn’t suit the whims of our pleasure.

The beginning and ending of a life are the most sacred moments in existence. They’re mysterious miracles. God’s domain. A soul is born out of a void of nothingness and begins a story of being. And at the moment of death, a life’s physical reality ends, yet the soul doesn’t return to nothingness—it continues to exist in another place.
Life’s origin and ending are so sacred, so powerful, so profound that fallen humans can’t help but be tempted to control them. One of the great—and oldest—temptations of our flesh is to “play God” by assuming for ourselves what is the Creator’s prerogative.
Our Insatiable Desire for Control
Our high-tech modern world amplifies the ancient human impulse to achieve Godlike control over uncontrollable circumstances (especially those we perceive as threatening, harmful, or inconvenient).
This impulse isn’t all bad. We can’t control inclement weather, but we can minimize its harm through creative interventions like durable shelters, insulation, indoor heating and air conditioning, and weather-appropriate garments. Likewise, we can’t control myriad viruses, sicknesses, and ailments that affect our bodies, but we can reduce pain and preserve life through the wonders of modern medicine. There are good, God-honoring ways to employ technological tools as part of our “subduing the earth” obedience to the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28).
But as William Edgar points out, the word for subduing (kabash) isn’t meant to be violent but gentle. When we gently intervene to bring order to some chaos in the world, we honor our calling. But when we violently, recklessly, or unnecessarily intervene—especially in ways that might help us but harm others—we fail in our task.
Modern technology conditions us to bypass gentle subduing in favor of reckless, convenience-first control. From smartphones and “app for that” culture, to one-day Amazon shipping, to the instant answers of Google searches and AI prompts, we’re becoming trained to believe we can get what we want when we want it. While none of these things may be problematic on its own, the cumulative effect is that we start to think everything can be optimized and efficient, that all vestiges of inconvenience, discomfort, and uncontrollability can be eradicated from our lives.
Playing God at Life’s Beginning and End
This expectation of control leads us to use technological interventions to “play god” with the beginning of life and end of life. We start to believe a new life can be created on demand in a laboratory or ended on demand via abortion. We start to believe that the circumstances of death can be planned and controlled via euthanasia, that dead loved ones can be brought “back to life” via AI seances or other “digital resurrection” technology, or that death itself can be defeated with enough data monitoring, supplements, and algorithmic tweaking. But this is folly. 
In his short book The Uncontrollability of the World, Hartmut Rosa argues the modernity is structurally driven “toward making the world calculable, manageable, predictable, and controllable in every possible respect.”
On birth, for example, Rosa argues that even though “there is still something palpably uncontrollable about the emergence of new life,” modern reproductive technologies (including IVF and surrogate motherhood) have “made children more ‘accessible’” as well as more “engineerable” (e.g., embryo screenings and other tests that “allow us to determine, even before birth, whether a child meets our expectations”). Yet he wisely asks, “If whether or not I have children, and what kind, lies entirely within my own power and that of my doctors—does this not change my relationship to life overall?”
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