Why Singleness Is Not a Curse

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Dani Treweek

   When Jesus says in Matthew chapter 22 that in the resurrection age they neither marry nor be given in marriage, they'll be like the angels. If we aren't going to be husbands and wives in eternity, where we will be our most fully perfected human selves relationally, then what dignity or meaning or significance or goodness does that give to not being married in this age and as those who live in the overlap of the ages?

2. 00:32

   Adriel Sanchez

   Hey, Pastor Adriel here with Sola Media, and I'm joined by Dani Treweek, and excited to have a conversation with you about the church and singleness—something that is sort of a controversial topic today, and an area where I feel like there's probably a lot of room for growth for church. I feel that way personally as a pastor and wanting to do a good job ministering to and caring for the people in our church who are single or maybe called to this vocational life as well. And so she is the author of this book, The Meaning of [Singleness]: Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church. Just talking to you a few moments ago, you were talking about the importance of having a proper theology of singleness. And so I would love for you to just unpack what is the proper theology of singleness, if you can, in our short time together?

3. 01:21

   Dani Treweek

   Well, I did a PhD for four years on this, and I only still explored a tiny little segment of it. But never married, as a single Christian myself, have a lot of single Christian friends, men and women—not just never-married men and women, but divorced, widowed, same-sex attracted, opposite-sex attracted. There's lots of context of being unmarried in the church today, but the common theme that seems to bind a lot of these single Christians together is this: the sense of where do we fit, how do we fit, and how is this church family as much our family as it is everybody else's?

4. Dani Treweek

   And so that is certainly expressed pastorally, or a concern pastorally. I think there's all sorts of things that we could do in our churches to kind of fix that in the short term. We could run more events, we could change the language we use, so on and so forth. But unless we actually have grappled with what God's Word says is the goodness, the dignity, the purpose of singleness in light of the gospel and in light of the eternity that we're all heading towards, then making those changes are good in the short term, but I don't think they're going to produce long-lasting change. And frankly, I think we also need to revisit our theology of marriage a little bit, too, because that's having some significantly detrimental effects on a lot of married people in the church, too. In terms of what is a theology of singleness, there is a very broad conversation there.

5. Dani Treweek

   But my particular research was looking at an eschatological vision of singleness, namely, when Jesus says in Matthew chapter 22 that in the resurrection age they neither marry nor be given in marriage, they'll be like the angels. If we aren't going to be husbands and wives in eternity, where we will be our most fully perfected human selves relationally, then what dignity or meaning or significance or goodness does that give to not being married in this age as those who live in the overlap of the ages? So that was me sort of unpacking what is the thread there, and how do we pull on that thread, and where might that take us? And I did a PhD on it because I had an inkling that there was something there. But I was thinking, I don't want to just make something up. I want to see if this is actually faithful to Scripture and theology. And what I discovered was that essentially, for the first 1,500 years of the church, Christians had a deep eschatological value of singleness that we've kind of lost a hold of.

6. 03:57

   Adriel Sanchez

   Yeah, it's interesting that you say that, because I think that there's a sense among some that the single life is not really the whole life. And so if—thinking about this eschatological vision—if in the new creation we're not given in marriage, we're not married, well, then what does that say to that? There seems to be a disconnect there, at least. And as you were talking about singleness and this eschatological vision, it did make me think of 1 Corinthians 7—such an interesting passage, right? Because Paul is—it's almost like he's saying, okay, if you need to get married, if you want to get married, fine, but… And there, when he talks about singleness, he does tie it to this kind of eschatological vision, absolutely, there in 1 Corinthians 7, because he's saying, consider the times.

7. Adriel Sanchez

   And he sort of ties it to really the coming of the new creation, the consummation of history, which—we're still living in this age of tension now. We're still looking forward to the return of the Lord Jesus and so forth. And so I wonder if you could speak to how that particular passage plays into singleness and the eschatological vision.

8. 05:07

   Dani Treweek

   Yeah, absolutely. I didn't actually spend a lot of time, surprisingly, in 1 Corinthians 7 in my PhD research on singleness, which I did a little bit. And what I did do, I did do a reception history, so looking at how verses 29 to 35 in particular have been understood through church history. And really, what is going on in that passage is deeply eschatological. That is his framework. He talks at one point, because of the present distress, I think it's better to remain as you are. And there's lots of discussion: was that a particular crisis going on in Corinth or in the empire at the time? Was it a famine? Was it persecution? Was it sickness? In the end—or is it not a present distress as such, kind of the present distress being the eschatological times we're in? In the end, I thought, actually, I don't think it matters much what that verse specifically references, because the rest of what Paul says there is very much, this is what I mean, brothers: the present form of the world is passing away. The time is short.

9. Dani Treweek

   He's very much framing his discussion here on the fact that we do live in this—I call it the awkward meanwhile—between Jesus's resurrection and his return, where we are still very much creatures in this good though fallen creation. We are here. We are not yet in the new creation. And yet, Paul will tell us in Colossians 3, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above and not on earthly things. So we're meant to be here, living here, but in light of where we're going and the future Christ has already secured for us.

10. Dani Treweek

    And so, to cut a very long story short, for me, that actually holds out—what I think Paul does in 1 Corinthians 7 and other places in Scripture is he holds out marriage as a wonderful, good, unique, vital relationship for all sorts of reasons in this creation. And yet at the same time, he can say, and not getting married is really good for these reasons. And in fact, at one point he says he thinks it's better not to get married.

11. 07:08

    Adriel Sanchez

    He says—I feel like he says that multiple times in 1 Corinthians 7.

12. 07:11

    Dani Treweek

    Yeah, I have to keep saying, that's Paul that's saying that, not me, the unmarried person. Because people—we just don't grapple well with the idea that Paul actually has a really high view of singleness. But also, that really high view of singleness is held alongside a really high view of marriage. This isn't a zero-sum game where if we talk well about one, we have to diminish the other one. Paul basically says in 1 Corinthians 7: singleness is great, marriage is great, get on and serve Jesus.

13. 07:39

    Adriel Sanchez

    It reminds me of when Jesus is giving teaching on marriage and divorce. I think it's in Matthew 19. And the response of the disciples is, well, if that's the case, it's maybe better not to get married. And Jesus's response there is really interesting. It's not, you got me all wrong. It's, well, to some people who have this particular gift—he almost seems to say the exact same thing that Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians chapter 7. He doesn't go back and say, no, you have to, or this is the one way in which you can be whole or something like that.

14. 08:15

    Dani Treweek

    So I completely agree. It is unexpected, because he starts talking about eunuchs, of all things. What I think is interesting about that is his disciples have kind of—he said, divorce is not on, guys. This is not God's plan for you. And his disciples go, oh, gosh, if it's that hard to kind of get yourself free of a wife if she's—if you're not on board with this anymore, maybe it's just better not to get married. And I think Jesus kind of says, yes, but let me shift your perspective here. This is not about what's convenient for you.

15. Dani Treweek

    He goes and talks about the eunuchs. And what I think is so interesting there is the eunuchs—their life was a life of service to the king. They were those who were—the word literally means bedroom guard. They were those who served the king in kind of the most intimate part of the palace. And I think there's something very interesting about Jesus talking about the situation of the eunuchs. So there's those who have been—were born that way, there's those who are made that way, there are those who choose to live as if they are for the sake of the kingdom of God.

16. Dani Treweek

    And I think that's—Jesus's perspective is not just, don't stay unmarried just because life is going to be much easier for you. Actually recognize the fact that being unmarried gives you a particular opportunity to invest in the kingdom, which is what Paul echoes in 1 Corinthians 7:29–35, where he talks about the undivided devotion of the single person.

17. Dani Treweek

    But let me say here, I think part of the challenge for us is that any kind of theology of singleness that we can claim in sort of the contemporary evangelical world is one that I call very instrumental, which is: singleness is good because it lets you do more stuff for Jesus. And I think there's certainly an element in which, certainly, me being unmarried gives me a freedom and a flexibility to serve Jesus in particular ways. But my argument in my book is actually there is not just an instrumental value to singleness—of what do you do with it that makes it good—but there's a unique dignity that belongs to being single as that which kind of points towards that eternity we're waiting for, when none of us will be married to each other. So just as I look at my friends' marriages and that's meant to set my eyes on eternity, my prayer is that my friends will look at my singleness and sort of see a little glimpse of, oh, that's where we're all heading. And that's going to be great.

18. 10:42

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah, I love that. Now, what I'm noticing is there's kind of a pendulum shift where people feel like marriage is under fire in our culture, and nobody wants to get married anymore because they don't understand what marriage is, and we need to recover this high view of marriage and the importance of getting married. And I think some of it is a reaction to the idea that I don't need another person, I can just be great on my own as an individual. And so I'm seeing, I think, people in the church [unclear] to that ideology that's out there, that's fairly common, maybe we might say, in the culture. When they hear about a theology of singleness, I think they think, oh, well, that's—it's trying to give credence to this idea. But it's not, right? They're talking about something different, really.

19. 11:26

    Dani Treweek

    Well, yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of anxiety, and I think legitimately so in many ways, about the lowering marriage rates, the lowering fertility rates. In the Western world, there's a lot of discussion about this, and there is—whether we want to call it a crisis or not, there is something here that we need to be addressing. But I think the challenge for us as the church is not to respond with a kind of knee-jerk cultural reaction, but to be people of God's Word, to be theological and pastoral in our response to this.

20. Dani Treweek

    So what does that look like? Well, it looks like recognizing that Scripture has such a high view of marriage as a wonderful gift that God has given us in this life, that also is vitally important as we think about eternity to come. So our desire to see marriage rehabilitated shouldn't just be a desire that's kind of like, if we don't get more people married, our civilization is going to die. But it should be a desire of, actually, we need to honor this vision that God has given us. In the same way, our response to singleness should be looking at the world around us going, this worldly view of singleness is so impoverished. It doesn't hold—kind of this selfish, live-for-yourself lifestyle, that's not what Scripture calls us to. But Scripture does have a positive, good, dignified view of singleness as the lifestyle of a Christian disciple who is living for Jesus and loving other people in relationship.

21. Dani Treweek

    And as I said before, the Bible holds these two things to be true at the same time: marriage and singleness, both being good. So I think the challenge for us at the moment is to work out how do we have those important conversations about retrieving the importance and the goodness of marriage in the church in a way that is biblical rather than just cultural knee-jerk reaction, but to recognize that doing that also means that we need to have the same conversation about the goodness of singleness in the church as well.

22. 13:28

    Adriel Sanchez

    Man, that's so good, because I feel like in reaction—we need to recover the goodness of marriage, maybe a biblical vision of marriage, maybe it's just a reaction against the culture—but in the process, oftentimes losing a biblical understanding or vision of singleness. Where—it's interesting, because sometimes I'll hear people, pastors, theologians even, say things about singleness—it's just like, that doesn't seem at all like what Paul was saying in 1 Corinthians chapter 7. It seems like just the opposite. It seems like a very low view of this idea that one can be called almost vocationally to this. And so really, I think you touched on something really important there. How do we maintain a biblical vision of both, so that we're caring well for all the people that God has brought to us in this diverse church of the Lord Jesus Christ, where we all have these different gifts that we're using for the building up of the body?

23. 14:26

    Dani Treweek

    Yeah.

24. 15:16

    Adriel Sanchez

    Would you say, just in your own experience—do you feel like the church generally does—I mean, I feel like I know the answer here—but a good job of maintaining a biblical vision of singleness? I mean, where are we really missing it? And where do you think there needs to be some real growth?

25. 15:36

    Dani Treweek

    Well, no, I don't think that we do. You can tell from my accent as well, I'm not from America. I'm from Australia, in case anyone hadn't recognized. But we have very similar kind of experiences, I think, in the church, in sort of Western evangelical worlds, when it comes to marriage and singleness. And there is a lot of people in our churches who are single or single again for all sorts of reasons, who are hurting, who long to feel like they actually have a place of meaning and purpose and significance within their own family—that is their church family, their primary family, the family that they've been adopted into—but who feel at the most tolerated, or kind of like the oddball guests at the wedding who kind of get shuffled onto this other table 'cause no one's quite sure what to do with them.

26. Dani Treweek

    In Australia—I'm not sure what the statistics are here, and I imagine it would be less uniform than in Australia—but in Australia, about one third of adults in every church congregation in Australia, Protestant church congregation, are unmarried. That's one third of the people sitting in a church on any given Sunday are not married. That's a big portion of the church. And if we're not actually helping those men and women to know that they are as much a part of that family, and as much called to serve in that family and participate, we've got a problem. Because that could be the Apostle Paul sitting in our midst. It could be Jesus himself, who was unmarried. And I think we do need to recognize that, again, the Bible holds out for us the challenge to see the single life as being not a tragedy, even as singleness doesn't always feel good.

27. 17:25

    Adriel Sanchez

    Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 7 is sometimes marriage doesn't either. It's sort of interesting how he does that. Yeah.

28. 17:30

    Dani Treweek

    Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. He says in 1 Corinthians 7, get married, you'll have fleshly troubles, and I would say I want to spare you that. Yeah. But both marriage and singleness—their dignity and meaning and significance shouldn't be defined by our experience of them as good. Marriage remains a good gift from God even as marriages struggle at times. And so the same is true of singleness. I don't need to feel good about my singleness to know that it is still God's good purpose for me for so long as he has me single. Now, that doesn't make my experience illegitimate. It doesn't mean that I should just put a smile on my face and pretend everything's fine. But it does mean that I can get on with serving Jesus and loving other people, even as my situation is not what I ideally might have chosen for myself—in the same way that married people who are having challenges in their marriage would be able to say that. Yeah.

29. Dani Treweek

    I think the challenge for us is to recognize that singleness is, in God's sight, not a pity. It's not a tragedy. And let me just say as well, I'm so tired of hearing people say, Genesis 2:18, God said it's not good for man to be alone, therefore being single is bad. That is not what Genesis 2:18 is about. Adam was the only human being in the garden. He was quite literally alone. And God created the woman, who, yes, became Eve, became Adam's wife. But she was much more to Adam than just his wife. And her female descendants were much more to the men that they lived around than just their wives and just the mothers of men. What we see in Genesis 2 and 1 is the creation of human community, of which marriage is a really core part in this creation. And every time someone says to me, or I hear someone say, Genesis 2:18 says it's not good for man to be alone, therefore being single is bad, what they are saying is that I am alone. And I am not alone.

30. 19:29

    Adriel Sanchez

    You have community.

31. 19:30

    Dani Treweek

    I have the body of Christ. Yeah. And I just don't think people understand how tragic it is for a single person to be told that they're alone, because it's not true. The gospel tells us that is not true. And so what we actually need to do is make sure our communities are places where singles do not feel alone. I've had so many single Christians tell me the time they feel most alone and lonely in their whole life is at church. And that's a tragedy. So what are we doing in our church families to make sure single and married people know that we equally belong, and we actually equally need each other as the body of Christ?

32. 20:15

    Adriel Sanchez

    Maybe we can just go there now and think about that. What would you say would be good steps in the right direction? And even for, I think, for pastors who are having conversations with members of their church who are single, who are saying, I feel overlooked, or the language that's used here, it excludes me, or it excludes other single people. What are some of the ways that we can begin to recover that proper theology of—yes, of marriage, but also specifically here, of singleness?

33. 20:49

    Dani Treweek

    Well, I think the first step is, again, as we've been saying, actually grapple with what the Bible teaches on this topic and use that as the foundation. But then, in terms of what are some practical, pastoral, small things that can change—the idea of language that we use. I've been in churches, for example, where the children in the church will start in the service and then they'll head out to their programs halfway through. And the person up the front who's leading the church will say, okay, kids, it's time to go out to your programs. Wave goodbye to all the mums and dads as you go outside. And all of the rest of us—and not just singles, might I say, also infertile couples, married couples—at that point kind of go, I'm invisible. Then, if they're waving to the mums and dads, all it needs is for that person to say, wave goodbye to the grown-ups.

34. 21:33

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. To your family in Christ. Yeah.

35. 21:36

    Dani Treweek

    It doesn't cost anything to change that language, and is actually much more representative of who we are sitting there in that church building. Another one is—and this is a little bit of a hobby horse of mine—where do people sit on a Sunday in church? I love my church. I still have a low level of anxiety turning up to church every Sunday by myself, walking in by myself, working out where am I gonna sit? If I sit here, is someone gonna come and sit next to me? Often I end up with just two empty spots, one on each side of me. Or am I always the one who has to go and say, can I come and sit with you? I like to do that, but it's exhausting to be the one to always have to ask. As soon as church is over, if I'm sitting next to a mum or dad, they're off to go and get their kids, which I completely understand. But then I'm left going, all right, who am I going to talk to? And the whole thing starts all over again.

36. Dani Treweek

    So even just, where do people sit in church? Why do we think that families always need to sit with each other every Sunday instead of actually dividing and conquering? Take your kids with you and go and sit with other families. Go and see who's sitting by themselves. See who the newcomers are. A friend of mine, Rebecca McLaughlin, she says a person alone in church is an emergency. Now, she knows that's a bit of an overstatement, but it's her commitment that, actually, if there's someone sitting in church alone, there better be a good reason why they're sitting alone. They shouldn't be feeling like they need to be sitting alone.

37. Dani Treweek

    And so I'd encourage pastors and just church members to look around on a Sunday and notice where people are sitting. Are all the singles kind of sitting together? Are they spread out, hovering by the door so they've got a quick getaway? How does even just the geography of where we physically place ourselves in church represent who we think we are to each other? So there's things like that that I think can be very small, practical changes that come out of a recommitment to understanding who we are as the family of God, married and single together.

38. 23:38

    Adriel Sanchez

    I wonder if also, just in terms of praying for the congregation—sometimes our churches will have a congregational prayer. And when we include the singles, if the prayer is just that they would get married soon or that they would find a partner, that kind of a thing, where it's like—it sort of almost assumes there's something missing. And just like if you were praying for somebody to be healed of sickness, right? The resolution, the healing, is once they're [unclear] than the solution to the problem—there it is. How should we be praying for the single men and women in our church?

39. 24:14

    Dani Treweek

    Well, I think the way to pray for them is to ask them what—I'm talking more here on a personal level—but I hear lots of stories, it's happened to me too, of people coming up after church and sort of saying, I'm praying for you. I'm convinced that God's got the person waiting for you. And I kind of think, well, I'm not sure how you're convinced of that when I'm not convinced of that. God hasn't given me this direct revelation that there's a husband waiting in the wings for me. So—but I take what they're saying there as a genuine desire to love me. They're concerned for me, they wanna love me, they're praying for me. That's an incredible privilege, to have people praying for me. But what I wanna say at that point is, well, thank you, but could I actually tell you how you could be praying for me? Whether it's to do with my singleness or something else.

40. Dani Treweek

    And so, whereas we're praying corporately from the front, recognizing we're praying for those singles who are struggling in their singleness and who are praying for a husband or a wife, we join our prayers with them; for those who are embracing their singleness, and we thank you for the service of them in this church. Just recognizing there is more to the single Christian than just the fact that they don't have a husband or wife. If the main ministry that we have to singles is matchmaking events to set them up so that they're no longer single, that's not really a singles ministry. That's a getting-out-of-singleness ministry. And so I direct a ministry called Single Minded. We've got lots of resources on our website, which is about helping churches to actually think how can we meet the needs of the single people in our church communities. That's not just helping them find a husband or a wife.

41. Dani Treweek

    And recognizing as well that there are—this singles ministry, matchmaking side of things works really well for singles in their 20s. The older you get, the more cynical you become about that. But also, there's people in the single demographic in our churches who either are not free to get remarried, do not wish to be married or be remarried, they're same-sex-attracted Christians who are really struggling. And if all they're hearing is get married, we're not meeting their needs either. So I think it is seeing the people who are in front of us as the individuals they are, rather than just a category of people, and then responding to that.

42. 26:36

    Adriel Sanchez

    Thinking about singleness and officers within the church, you think of the passage that Paul writes in 1 Timothy 3, where he talks about the qualifications for elders in the church, and he says the husband of one wife, that kind of a thing. And so there are some who take that to say, well, if you're single, you technically can't serve in the church in this capacity. It's an interesting—you think of the Apostle Paul, right? But I wonder if you have that.

43. 27:07

    Dani Treweek

    Yeah. Well, in terms of that verse in particular, my understanding, my read of it, is that he is saying a husband of but one wife—that is, not a man who has many wives or more than one wife—which I think is consistent with what he—then he goes on to say about the qualifications of eldership. And so I don't think that that is saying you must be married to be in pastoral ministry in a church. It would exclude him. It would exclude Jesus.

44. 27:36

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah, that's right. That's right. Lots of very wonderful theologians.

45. 27:40

    Dani Treweek

    The reality—what I think is very interesting is we know next to nothing about the marital status of most of the early church leaders. We know Paul was certainly unmarried at the time he was writing 1 Corinthians. We know Peter was at least married at some point, because it talks about him having a mother-in-law. And then in 1 Corinthians chapter 9, Paul talks about, we have the right to take along a believing wife. That's right. So there's some hints. But actually, I think it's quite funny when you go and you look at Twitter profiles or social media profiles of a lot of evangelical pastors today, the first thing you see is husband, father, pastor. And then you go to the New Testament and we've got basically no insight into whether they were husbands and fathers.

46. 28:23

    Adriel Sanchez

    And so I'm gonna go change my Twitter, actually, right after this.

47. 28:27

    Dani Treweek

    But I do think it's interesting that it just doesn't seem to be a significant concern as we hear—we read in the New Testament. And so that verse, I think, is saying you need to be a one-woman man. I think that's the literal Greek, actually. Yeah, a one-woman man. I don't think it is a prohibition against single men or women engaging in service in the church. But the reality is, in our time and space, there is very little opportunity for that. And I think that's part of the problem, actually. When we don't have visible role models of unmarried—there tend to be more unmarried women who are visible in that sense, but particularly men—when we don't have visible role models of godly, mature Christian men who are unmarried and living a life of service and delight in Jesus, then that just becomes an uninhabitable thing for Christian men to actually aspire to. And I think that's one of the things we need to reckon with.

48. 29:28

    Adriel Sanchez

    Great. Well, Dani, I'm very encouraged by your gifts and the work that you're doing, and I look forward to hearing more from you in the days ahead. May God continue to bless you, and thank you for joining us today.

49. 29:40

    Dani Treweek

    Thank you.