Now of course as an evangelical I don't share Halden's disdain of evangelicalism (though, obviously, I still find his blog interesting to read). But this article interested me.
I have long had the impression that in evangelicalism my fellow evangelicals often display an attitude that posits that real adulthood is defined by marriage. If you're not married you're not really an adult. If you're not married you don't know anything about sacrifice. Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride so married people display a special uniquely Trinitarian relationship that single people can't hope to touch (and shouldn't because that would lead to adultery, polygamy, or fornication) and which is a special mirror of the mystery of the Trinity. Those saints of old who were single such as Jesus or Paul or Jeremiah were considered single because they were so apt to die due to persecution it was not wise to be married. Call this the "unless you're smuggling Bibles into China you had better not resist God's design for you to be married" argument.
Correlating to this is the conviction that the unmarried but most especially the unmarried male is least fit of all the image-bearers of God to speak to "relationships" (which in most cases refers chiefly to dating, marriage and parenting but can occasionally seem to fan out into the compass of all human interaction depending on which set of evangelicals we're hanging out with). I've seen married people say that this or that community group leader was just not necessarily gifted ideally to be a group leader because as a single man there were things he just wasn't able to speak to in the lives of married people or parents.
I have been told in rather pointed terms myself that I haven't been in a relationship and know nothing about sacrifice. It is as though bearing the cross can only truly be understood by a married man or woman who has children he or she worries about. And I cheerfully grant that, yes, I don't really know what that kind of sacrifice is like. Conversely married people may not know what it is like to drop everything at your day job to go help a disabled man whose wheelchair has broken down on a hot August day on a busy street to head to his place and make sure he's okay and provide help. One sacrifice is not inherently better or worse than the other.
I've heard evangelicals talk about things like "the epidemic of singleness" or "adultescence" and about how this is a sign of a great evil maurading the American culture for years now. I just keep wondering if this is the disaster people say it is. If more and more people are part of this epidemic of singleness then perhaps more and more pastors should be single. In terms of pastoral application a pastor who makes all of his applicatory points in a sermon about being a spouse and father is a pastor who is essentially saying that whatever practical truths can be gained from the scriptures basically don't matter to the unmarried except to tell the unmarried they should stop resisting God's design for them and go get married as soon as possible.
I have often seen things play out where an unmarried man seems to be at the bottom of the social world of evangelicalism. At best he is simply someone who has so much spare time he should be using it all in the service of the church and at worst he's a predator whose assumed desires must be channelled into God's design for him, marriage. He is unfit to speak to the life issues that matter (i.e. marriage and childrearing in a lot of evangelical congregations).Yet no sooner has this man exchanged rings, said the right words, and (if you will) waved his magic wand then he becomes endued with all gifts of wisdom and authority and insight to pontificate, if he chooses, about every form of human discourse and quality. This is even more true if he and his lovely bride (after all, all evangelical brides are lovely, aren't they?) have sired a brood, preferably as big a brood as they can afford given God's providential provision.
The preference for the married man in evangelicalism was, for me, distilled in a sweeping declaration made by a pastor who said that there is no way a single man can do more for the kingdom of God than a married man. I notice that John R. W. Stott is going to turn 90 this April and he has been celibate his whole life. It's strange to think that in American evangelical culture he wouldn't get hired to be a pastor because he's single. He wouldn't be a suitable man for marriage counseling because, well, you know, he never married. He's unfit to discuss the matters of dealing with or raising children because, you know ... . He hasn't accomplished more than this married pastor for the sake of the Gospel, I guess.
Since it's illegal to ask prospective employers questions about sexual conduct tacit discrimination in favor of the married man seems, no doubt, to many evangelicals the safer and easier and more biblical route. Of course there are the arguments that since many people eventually marry a pastor needs to be someone they can relate to after they are married. A pastor should be married so as to be less prone to the risk of sexual impropriety (more on this later). A pastor should be married so that he can understand how parenting his own children makes him a better shepherd to the flock. And so on. These are all usual cases as to why an unmarried man, let alone an unmarried woman, just isn't pastoral material.
But if more and more people are marrying later and later the time in which they are single becomes longer. The same Paul who outlined the criteria of an overseer also said to Timothy that the older women should instruct the younger women and the older men should instruct the younger men. What if evangelicalism has in some ways strategically misconstrued the role of the pastor? There may be things a woman would go to a pastor about she shouldn't be going to a pastor about at all but, instead, to older women in her life. The issue might not be that that married pastor isn't fit to discuss issues or that that unmarried pastor isn't fit to discuss issues dealing with marriage but that the woman doesn't HAVE to go to the established authority figure in the church to get wise counsel. Ditto for a man.
I don't see any necessity for me to consult with a pastor if I have a problem when a friend or family member will do. For that matter the reason there are deacons in churches is because the apostles recognized that there were things that teachers were not really suited for. There are pastors who think that because their gifting is to preach and teach that helping people in need is basically not necessary and not really the mission of the Gospel.
Rather than say the unmarried pastor has no idea how to counsel married people or parents consider the reverse, that married men have no competence to counsel unmarried people who may struggle on the path of celibacy. The pastor who can't go a few days without intercourse without getting "wiggy" certainly isn't able to counsel someone who has not married into her thirties. The older I get the more confident I am that neither marriage nor singleness are actual callings at all but are disciplinary vocations. There is some practical teaching on the one and not so much in the other where evangelicalism is concerned.
Evangelicals have all sorts of ways to divine how one is not called to singleness and they all more or less boil down to "I'm horny!". Evangelicals don't seem to have a comparable litany of reasons to choose a celibate lifestyle because "I'm sometimes horny but what God has providentially given me the opportunity to do is more important than marriage." won't pass muster. In fact we immediately get back the "smuggling Bibles to China" arguments.
Yet paradoxically a pastor who committed fornication and has since settled down into a marriage is going to be more widely heard and accepted. "It's all right," folks will say, "He just needed to get married and once he got married he had an acceptable, godly outlet for his urges." That he didn't display any sexual restraint prior to marriage and is thereby unable to counsel from experience to singles the way he, as a married man, is considered fit to counsel marrieds won't really come up much. The odds that married pastors will accept being dismissed as able to speak to single life because of early marriage or fornication lying down are not high even though when the shoe is on the other foot they'll still say the unmarried guy is less fit to be a pastor than the now-married fornicator. The marriage sanctifies the guy who had no sexual self-control, which may even be true, but reveals that, if this is how evangelicals actually reason, then there's a whole lot of special pleading going on.
And even if we skip the whole "you can't ask about that" stage of the hiring process; even if we skip the whole issue that a married man who fornicated prior to marriage has no platform from which to advise a church full of singles how to remain chaste; the truth is that even churches who hire a married man to a pastoral role on the assumption that he is less prone to sexual sin can still be chastened by the Ted Haggards of the world. Let me rephrase my pondering this way, if Ted Haggard were caught doing drugs with a gay prostitute and he WEREN'T married would ANYONE in the evangelical fold have given him the debated second chance he's been given? Probably not. I mean, "maybe" they would.
I don't know for sure but mainly I doubt it because if Haggard had been caught in what he was caught in and he wasn't already married the assumption would be, on the part of evangelicals, that this was proof that unmarried guys just aren't really ultimately fit to be pastors, right? Some high profile pastors would probably have blogged about how this would be a case study in why they prefer to just hire married guys because single guys are too prone to sexual temptation. Except, of course, we know Ted Haggard actually IS married.
Then again, what if we took seriously that scripture is scripture? What if we took seriously that Paul affirmed that both marriage and singleness were divinely sanctioned paths? What if we acknowledged, as Paul did, that there are sacrifices inherent in both paths? Paul wrote that the married would have many cares and distractions and he would spare us that. He also wrote that for those who weren't married, well, there was all that sexual immorality to refrain from. Do we suppose that the hard time Paul was writing about was persecution? Famine? A recession? Oh, well, it couldn't have been that because we need to get the adultescents to stop being immature and go get married, right? I don't need to throw in a sarcasm alert, do I?
Now if John Stott's 90th birthday weren't coming up the same month I saw this article about evangelical singles I wouldn't have written this at all. But those two headlines hit me this month so I'm writing about them. Single evangelicals are getting passed over as pastoral candidates by churches whose leaders probably have not really done as much for the kingdom of God as John Stott has, if we're even going to bother to say that there's some kind of race as to who does more of what that matters. How many married pastors haven't accomplished what Stott has because they have been so busy being married and raising their half dozen kids while pastoring that they haven't written landmark works on the atonement but have instead had, maybe, the time to rehash more important works on the atonement by scholars like, say, John Stott?
Don't get me wrong, both kinds of men are needed in the leadership of the church. I've just grown tired of the non-Stotts acting like they're more apt to lead in a church because they're married and he's not.
And singles, at least the ones who aren't overwhelmed with bitterness because they haven't gotten married or gotten laid yet and are angry at God, don't really need to be told how beautiful marriage is and how lovely it is to have married friends. I'm more for the flesh and blood marital unions of friends and family in my life than I am for marriage as an abstraction or an institution necessary for being varsity as opposed to junior varsity in the kingdom of God. Evangelicalism in America will remain due for reminders that the varsity/junior varsity distinction between the married and single is still out there (or its inverse).
I don't know what the future holds. I don't know if I may or may not find "the one", say the magic words, wave the magic wand and then, by evangelical standards, become endued with all wisdom and authority to pontificate about all human intercourse and qualities. If I do I don't see that I will have changed with respect to my obligations toward Christ and my neighbor as a recipient of the Lord's mercy. Whether or not church leaders can afford to or able to judge by things other than appearances I can't control. God guides His Church despite themselves so that's not my fight to wage. It won't hurt to throw in a few observations about things I wish were a little different. Why not hire than single pastor, eh? It's not like that single pastor can't eventually marry, right? So maybe he doesn't know what it's like to counsel married people. Married people don't always know how to counsel married people.
If we're Protestants who take scripture seriously it's the truth of scripture that should be more pre-eminent than the traditions and personal experiences of a leader, right? As the scriptures tell us, men look on outward appearances but God looks on the heart. Some of the single men who seem unqualified may be qualified while some of the married men who seem qualified are unfit. Without divine intervention we can presume, and we can guess, but we won't know until a long way past our committment.
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