Church single folk: Is your church’s single ministry terrible?
Church married folk and pastor folk: Do you have any idea if your single ministry is terrible or not? (you probably don’t)
Can you fill out this survey if you are a single Christian (anyone who is unmarried)? It is completely anonymous. Can you also ask your Christian single friends to fill it out?
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SinglesMinistry
And if you’re married or a pastor, can you please pass the survey along to any single Christians you know?
My gut is that singles are very neglected in the Church and most of us (myself included) don’t really know effective ways of ministering to them. Instead of trying things that aren’t helpful, let’s ask them for their input!
Thank you for your help with this, I believe it will help bring real change within the Church. I will post analysis of the survey here on my blog and will share it directly with pastors. It will also be incorporated into future books I’m working on.
The survey will close on August 12th.
Related posts:
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
I had trouble with the survey link so I’m leaving my comment here. In most churches the majority is married so by default singles become like a special interest group like music. In churches I’ve been to, there’s no ‘Married’ ministry, marrieds are just assumed to be the church (although sometimes there’s groups for divorced or young marrieds). As you get older and more singles get married, you start to feel irrelevant. It just seems to happen that way rather than being church policy.
The one suggestion to improve things is to have singles be in leadership more (and not just of the singles ministry). Once I attended a church where the lead pastor was single and it just made us feel included at the table. In lieu of that, having the lead pastor show interest and participate is welcome.
bummer about the survey link…Has anyone else filled out the survey on your computer? That’s the only setting that should lock you out from filling it out. If so, do you have another computer (or tablet or smartphone would probably work too) that you could fill it out on? I appreciate your comments, but would love to get them inputted into the actual survey data where they’ll be permanently engrained in the data. Let me know about the link, hopefully we can figure something out. If the first thing I mentioned isn’t the case, try loading up the link on a different browser (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.)
I’m done and do not have any problems to fill out the survey.
Thank you for caring. It seems like most pastors have no clue.
You’re welcome! I hope this survey and the follow-up articles are helpful. I know the dive into Scripture has really changed my theology of singleness. Check out the latest article if you haven’t already: http://www.atacrossroads.net/category/marriage-2/singleness-marriage-2/christian-singles-survey/