Meg Wilson
Author, Hope After Betrayel
Melanie*, an attractive brunette, sat across from me looking down at the soggy remains of a tissue in her hand. She revealed the recent counsel she and her husband received from their pastor the week prior. He had listened to both sides, looked in her eyes, and said, “If you were more available sexually for your husband, this would reduce his need to go elsewhere for gratification.” Shocked and broken, Melanie came to me for clarification.
Though I am not a counselor, I’ve heard many similar stories and have myself walked the path of a wounded wife. During the past seven years, many women like Melanie have been encouraged through our Monday night support group called, Healing Hearts. I have witnessed firsthand how being informed ensures hurting individuals are better cared for. I am also acutely aware that those who are less informed are more likely to re-injure or give poor advice. I believe every pastor and leader is well intentioned, but the damage of good intentions is still real. Having read many books and walked with dozens of hurting women, I know that not all receive wise counsel from church leaders.
By identifying major misconceptions I pray a door to greater understanding is opened and the number of emotional casualties is reduced. Families affected by sexual addiction are a growing demographic. This is a problem too big to ignore and too delicate to address without a deeper knowledge of the problem. Here are six of the most widely held misconceptions.
Misconception #1. Sexual Addiction is about sex.
The idea that a man would substitute fantasy, gratifying himself, or paying a stranger instead of loving his wife in a guilt free marital relationship simply isn’t logical. These men love their wives and want nothing more than to be free from a compulsion that pulls them away from their marriage vows. In reality, sexual addiction is about misusing the natural drugs (endorphins) our body produces when aroused in order to temporarily numb emotional pain. God created this “super-glue” of brain chemistry in order to cement marriages. Misused, the same glue forges the chains of addiction. Sexual addiction is about medicating pain. It’s not about sex. As with any addiction, there are deep roots well beneath the external symptom.
Misconception #2. Addicts need to just stop the behavior.
It is critical for addicts to get to the core issue—the pain. Focusing on the behavior goes nowhere. Finding the source and learning healthy coping mechanisms are critical tools for dealing with the deeper-rooted problem. This is much like a doctor, who understands the importance of getting past the symptoms to the root problem in order to find a cure. Focusing on the symptoms alone can lead to a misdiagnosis. A wrong turn which then leads away from health and recovery. The majority of the men trapped want to stop, but wanting isn’t enough. There is much soul-searching, gut wrenching work to be done first.
Misconception #3. Pornography is harmless.
Statistics document that men who view erotic material on a regular basis see women as objects and are more likely to act violently toward them. Studies aside, a person needs only attend one care group meeting to see the devastation this “harmless” activity wreaks on the men, their wives, and their families. The consequences can impact generations. Stories like Beth’s* are all too common.
“My husband wasn’t getting help,” Beth said. “He was still engaging in risky sexual behavior with others. But I was not going to consider a time of abstinence because I knew that would drive him deeper into his addiction.” Beth went to her pastor. He told her the wife’s body belongs to the husband, and she would be in sin if she abstained. Beth contracted herpes.
Beth, like so many women, was at risk of contracting any number of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. Yet her pastor gave Biblical counsel and well-intended advice. Experience has taught me to counsel wives to believe their husband’s behavior over his words until real trust can be observed over time. Much addictive behavior is counter-intuitive. As an inexperienced church leader I have made the same mistake.
Misconception #4. It can be prayed away.
I want to be clear on this point. I believe nothing is impossible for God, and prayer is essential for healing. However, God won’t circumvent a person’s will to choose. People driven by addiction must bring it out into the light through confession to those affected. Only then is the addict ready to dig into the causes. There is no magic quick fix. It takes much prayer by the addict, and those who love them, just to get the healing process started. (I have heard of rare cases where God provides freedom, but they are the exception.)
Misconception #5. It’s all about attractiveness.
Many like Melanie have been told if they were only more attractive, available, or supportive their husbands wouldn’t stray. The saddest part about this lie is that Satan places it as a millstone around every betrayed woman’s neck. It keeps them in a state of self-loathing and guilt. When that stone is sanctioned or perhaps even placed there by a pastor or counselor, the damage and weight stalls the wife’s healing and leaves her floundering.
Misconception #6. Sexual addiction doesn’t exist in my church.
Men addicted to sex are not lurking in the shadows, hanging out in trench coats at schoolyards. Many are sitting in the pew, perhaps some even serving on your church board. These addicts think they are the only one with this ugly secret; however, any church with more than 30 members has someone suffering in silence. The truth is millions of men in the U.S. struggle with this addiction, and the number is growing. The number of women is also growing. Thanks to the Internet anyone can log onto any depravity in the privacy of his or her own home. These men and women need a lifeline. They need the hope only Christ can provide.
Breaking the silence around sexuality and this growing addiction is critical as access to pornography increases. Many marriages have been restored even after they were damaged by betrayal. I know this very well. Many church leaders, who have equipped themselves to minister in this critical area, are being used greatly by God. Avoiding these six common misconceptions is a good place to begin. .
*Names have been changed to ensure confidentiality. For more resources go to http://www.hopeafterbetrayal.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crosswalk.com welcome's Meg Wilson as the newest contributor to our Marriage channel. Watch for Meg’s article next month as she prepares singles for marrying a fellow sinner.
Meg is a regular speaker to women’s groups, Bible studies, and conferences. Five years ago she founded the Healing Hearts Ministry to offer help and hope to women whose husbands are caught in the web of sexual addiction. Her book Hope After Betrayel: Healing When Sexual Addiction Invades Your Marriage (Kregel Publishers) was released last year. You can visit her website at www.hopeafterbetrayal.com
Find this article at: http://www.crosswalk.com/pastors/11581849/
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
How Does Submission Fit into Modern Marriages?
Sarah Jennings
Family Editor, Crosswalk.com
Images of VP nominee Sarah Palin waving to cheering crowds with her family beside her evoke discomfort among some Christians as they wonder, “How is this going to work with the wife running for office instead of the husband? What about her kids? What about her marriage?”
But the Palin’s are not alone in living out an unconventional mix of Christian values and modern opportunity. Cindy Easley, wife of Moody Bible Institute president Michael Easley, encounters countless marriages every year that pose challenges to the biblical model of husband as spiritual head and wife as helpmeet. Wives supporting their families financially, wives of unbelievers, and wives of deployed soldiers are among the women who approach Easley at Family Life conferences asking, “How should biblical submission work in my marriage?”
Seeking sound counsel for modern women, Cindy turned to Scripture and to other godly wives for answers. This past July, she shared some of her thoughts with Crosswalk in anticipation of the September release of her book What’s Submission Got to Do With It? (Moody, 2008). Here’s a peak into our conversation:
CW: Let’s start with your background. This book is about practical ways to live out biblical submission in modern, Christian marriages. You didn’t fit the profile of a submissive woman when you first got married. You write you had definite feminist leanings at one time. What changed you?
CE: God’s word definitely is what changed our minds. It wasn’t something that I thought, oh boy, I am married now, I am going to buy this! I had not seen submission done well in my family of origin. My mother was submissive, but not biblically.
[So] I studied God’s word. I could not find a way that I could water down what it says in Ephesians 5:22, “Wives be subject to your own husband.” To me it says what it says. So, then I had to figure out, okay, so what does that look like? What does that mean for me, since I am very opinionated, and I am strong-willed? I began to understand it was really more attitude than action. Action is certainly there, but I can act submissively and not have the attitude of submission.
As I was writing the book, one of the definitions of submission that I found was to voluntarily cooperate with your husband. When I began to voluntarily cooperate with Michael, our marriage got so much better. I saw him become more of a leader. I saw him step out, especially in things with the children that he might acquiesce to me in the past, and I would be wrong. Now, sometimes he [still] acquiesces, and I am right. I saw it as a win-win, personally.
CW: You mention a difference between just "submission" and "biblical submission." Could you expand on that?
CE: Yeah, one thing that I discovered when I was doing a word study on the word submission in the Bible -- it comes from a military term. It means to line yourself up under someone else’s leadership -- privates under generals or lieutenants under generals. [This definition] had the nuance of voluntary cooperation. That is what I think [submission] really means -- empowering your husband to lead by voluntarily lining up under his leadership.
Now, my other favorite word picture [for submission] that actually my husband gave me, and I have no idea where it comes from, is knowing when to duck, so God can get to your husband. I like that. (Laughter)
CW: Speaking of your husband – some women will read this book and think, “Cindy has it easy. Her husband is the president of Moody Bible Institute, a godly man. Of course she can submit.” What is your response to that?
CE: I am married to a godly man; however, I am a sinner, and I like my way. I see things differently than my husband – not only gender differences … but just because we are two different people. Yes, it [is] easier for me than many marriages because I do have a husband who attempts to love me like Christ loves the Church, but some days I make that hard.
CW: On to some of the different women you interviewed for this book. A lot of the marriages you discuss involve role reversals, where the wife is the provider for her husband and family. What special temptations do these women face and what is important to focus on in these situations?
CE: I think in that case the thing that you focus on is not that you are successful based on how much money you make, [but] you are successful in that you are valued by God. In fact, the woman that I interviewed for that chapter, the one thing that she pointed out to me is that she said often in culture we equate success or leadership with money. She said the truth is the husband that makes less money may be the one who contributes either more to the family emotionally or contributes more to society.
The example she gave me is she is a realtor, and she said as a realtor certainly she provides a service, but if her husband is the high school science teacher, his job is actually more valuable culturally than her [job]. I thought that was helpful.
CW: I have known some families, several couples, where the dad is a stay-at-home dad. The wife’s profession is something like a doctor. Do the same principles apply there?
CE: I think so, I really do. I think that you do have to be very careful of the dangers [of role reversal], but you know men do it all the time where they lovingly intervene in a family without being a lording bear of a leader. So, I think a wife can, too. She realizes that if she has been gifted with brains, the ability to work as a doctor, then for him to be able to stay home and to have that capacity to [work] with the children, certainly it makes submission very complicated, but I think it can be done.
I think that in our culture, we have tried to equate submission with being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and I think that does a disservice to women and to what submission is supposed to be, [who] the Head [and who] the Helper is. If your Head says, as Head, “I want to stay home and home school our kids because, frankly dear, I will be a better homeschooler than you would be.” You go out and work as a physician or whatever.
Now, here is another key – how she presents her husband in public is huge. If she goes out strutting, “I am the doctor, and he stays at home. I take care of the family,” or if she elevates him in public [saying], “I am so blessed to have this man who is smart enough to train our children and has the patience and the things that I don’t have.” Proverbs [says] the wife is a crown to her husband, and she elevates her husband. So, if is she is out in the public elevating him, I still think it is a win-win.
CW: Another situation that really stuck out to me was the addictive marriage. What is the difference between codependency and submission?
CE: When someone is in an addictive relationship, and they are the codependent, they don’t want to risk a confrontation. They just try to keep the status quo, because they are afraid of anything else.
What I learned as I interviewed a woman who is a therapist who is also married to a recovering alcoholic is that, in this case, submission is knowing how to lovingly, with the right tone, with the right words, with the right timing, approach a husband, intervening in their addiction, doing what is necessary to help them come face to face with their addiction. That is the most loving response a wife can have.
The key is more your attitude of loving them, wanting what is best for them, not what is best for yourself, and doing it in a way … that they know that they are being loved, not challenged.
CW: So, you are saying submission does not mean staying silent.
CE: Oh, absolutely not. No, it’s how you speak up.
CW: What other scenarios stuck out to you in this book that really challenged you or fascinated you?
CE: One [story] that I think is really helpful is the woman who is married to the non-believer for 50 years. Watching her progress – she is very honest about some of the mistakes she made.
Having been a pastor’s wife for 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of wives who wanted their husbands to be more spiritual. And they had this misconception that my husband and I -- “Oh, ya’ll must spend hours on the Bible.” I am like, Are you kidding? I have laundry to do! We never have done a Bible study together, because we prefer to study on our own and talk about it.
Watching [this wife] talk about how when she made these spiritual overtures toward her husband, how she pushed him away -- it helped me understand Scripture when it talks about winning an unbelieving husband without a word. Quietly.
It’s not that she never said anything to him. Again, it was her respecting him enough to say, “God will deal with my husband in God’s own time. I will get out of the way. I will no longer read my Bible in front of my husband, because it threatens him. I will not pray or make lavish ‘God-said’ [statements] in front of him.”
As she stepped back and allowed God to work, she found out that her husband was not as threatened by her faith as by her overt piousness. It was not [really] piousness; it was self-righteousness.
She will say today they have a fabulous marriage, except for this one thing. He is not a believer. She is still praying. She knows that this approach will lead him to Christ far more than her overt words or actions.
[Also] typically, if a woman is a really strong believer and walking in the faith, she is not going to marry a non-believer. It does happen, of course, but ... it is usually a woman who comes to Christ after marriage. She has changed, so she needs to figure out how to deal with him appropriately, instead of making him be like her.
CW: Last question. You point out in your book that leading is a hard job for men. How can wives encourage their husbands to lead well regardless of the circumstances?
CE: I think there are several ways, but most important I think is to get out of the way. To allow them to make decisions [and] when they make a decision, not to be combative or to criticize. We learn much from our bad decisions, [even] more than our good decisions. I think that if a guy knows that he is going to make a decision and his wife is going to change it anyway, either right in front of his face or later behind his back … then he doesn’t have the same pressure to [make] that decision well. He sometimes needs to feel that pressure that he is leading.
I think the other thing is if you have a husband who is passive, who is not a real quick decision-maker, [wives can] do the groundwork. Say, “Okay, this decision needs to be made. This is some research I have done,” but leave it with him. If it takes him 3 weeks to make it, let him make the decision.
I have had women say, “Yeah, but if I did that, we would never make a decision,” but I say, “How do you know? You step in every time.”
Eventually, he will make a decision. A roof needs fixing. The next time it rains, and there is a leak, he is going to call the roofer.
CW: Thanks for your insights, Cindy. If you want to learn more or purchase What's Submission Got to Do With It?, click here.
Family Editor, Crosswalk.com
Images of VP nominee Sarah Palin waving to cheering crowds with her family beside her evoke discomfort among some Christians as they wonder, “How is this going to work with the wife running for office instead of the husband? What about her kids? What about her marriage?”
But the Palin’s are not alone in living out an unconventional mix of Christian values and modern opportunity. Cindy Easley, wife of Moody Bible Institute president Michael Easley, encounters countless marriages every year that pose challenges to the biblical model of husband as spiritual head and wife as helpmeet. Wives supporting their families financially, wives of unbelievers, and wives of deployed soldiers are among the women who approach Easley at Family Life conferences asking, “How should biblical submission work in my marriage?”
Seeking sound counsel for modern women, Cindy turned to Scripture and to other godly wives for answers. This past July, she shared some of her thoughts with Crosswalk in anticipation of the September release of her book What’s Submission Got to Do With It? (Moody, 2008). Here’s a peak into our conversation:
CW: Let’s start with your background. This book is about practical ways to live out biblical submission in modern, Christian marriages. You didn’t fit the profile of a submissive woman when you first got married. You write you had definite feminist leanings at one time. What changed you?
CE: God’s word definitely is what changed our minds. It wasn’t something that I thought, oh boy, I am married now, I am going to buy this! I had not seen submission done well in my family of origin. My mother was submissive, but not biblically.
[So] I studied God’s word. I could not find a way that I could water down what it says in Ephesians 5:22, “Wives be subject to your own husband.” To me it says what it says. So, then I had to figure out, okay, so what does that look like? What does that mean for me, since I am very opinionated, and I am strong-willed? I began to understand it was really more attitude than action. Action is certainly there, but I can act submissively and not have the attitude of submission.
As I was writing the book, one of the definitions of submission that I found was to voluntarily cooperate with your husband. When I began to voluntarily cooperate with Michael, our marriage got so much better. I saw him become more of a leader. I saw him step out, especially in things with the children that he might acquiesce to me in the past, and I would be wrong. Now, sometimes he [still] acquiesces, and I am right. I saw it as a win-win, personally.
CW: You mention a difference between just "submission" and "biblical submission." Could you expand on that?
CE: Yeah, one thing that I discovered when I was doing a word study on the word submission in the Bible -- it comes from a military term. It means to line yourself up under someone else’s leadership -- privates under generals or lieutenants under generals. [This definition] had the nuance of voluntary cooperation. That is what I think [submission] really means -- empowering your husband to lead by voluntarily lining up under his leadership.
Now, my other favorite word picture [for submission] that actually my husband gave me, and I have no idea where it comes from, is knowing when to duck, so God can get to your husband. I like that. (Laughter)
CW: Speaking of your husband – some women will read this book and think, “Cindy has it easy. Her husband is the president of Moody Bible Institute, a godly man. Of course she can submit.” What is your response to that?
CE: I am married to a godly man; however, I am a sinner, and I like my way. I see things differently than my husband – not only gender differences … but just because we are two different people. Yes, it [is] easier for me than many marriages because I do have a husband who attempts to love me like Christ loves the Church, but some days I make that hard.
CW: On to some of the different women you interviewed for this book. A lot of the marriages you discuss involve role reversals, where the wife is the provider for her husband and family. What special temptations do these women face and what is important to focus on in these situations?
CE: I think in that case the thing that you focus on is not that you are successful based on how much money you make, [but] you are successful in that you are valued by God. In fact, the woman that I interviewed for that chapter, the one thing that she pointed out to me is that she said often in culture we equate success or leadership with money. She said the truth is the husband that makes less money may be the one who contributes either more to the family emotionally or contributes more to society.
The example she gave me is she is a realtor, and she said as a realtor certainly she provides a service, but if her husband is the high school science teacher, his job is actually more valuable culturally than her [job]. I thought that was helpful.
CW: I have known some families, several couples, where the dad is a stay-at-home dad. The wife’s profession is something like a doctor. Do the same principles apply there?
CE: I think so, I really do. I think that you do have to be very careful of the dangers [of role reversal], but you know men do it all the time where they lovingly intervene in a family without being a lording bear of a leader. So, I think a wife can, too. She realizes that if she has been gifted with brains, the ability to work as a doctor, then for him to be able to stay home and to have that capacity to [work] with the children, certainly it makes submission very complicated, but I think it can be done.
I think that in our culture, we have tried to equate submission with being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and I think that does a disservice to women and to what submission is supposed to be, [who] the Head [and who] the Helper is. If your Head says, as Head, “I want to stay home and home school our kids because, frankly dear, I will be a better homeschooler than you would be.” You go out and work as a physician or whatever.
Now, here is another key – how she presents her husband in public is huge. If she goes out strutting, “I am the doctor, and he stays at home. I take care of the family,” or if she elevates him in public [saying], “I am so blessed to have this man who is smart enough to train our children and has the patience and the things that I don’t have.” Proverbs [says] the wife is a crown to her husband, and she elevates her husband. So, if is she is out in the public elevating him, I still think it is a win-win.
CW: Another situation that really stuck out to me was the addictive marriage. What is the difference between codependency and submission?
CE: When someone is in an addictive relationship, and they are the codependent, they don’t want to risk a confrontation. They just try to keep the status quo, because they are afraid of anything else.
What I learned as I interviewed a woman who is a therapist who is also married to a recovering alcoholic is that, in this case, submission is knowing how to lovingly, with the right tone, with the right words, with the right timing, approach a husband, intervening in their addiction, doing what is necessary to help them come face to face with their addiction. That is the most loving response a wife can have.
The key is more your attitude of loving them, wanting what is best for them, not what is best for yourself, and doing it in a way … that they know that they are being loved, not challenged.
CW: So, you are saying submission does not mean staying silent.
CE: Oh, absolutely not. No, it’s how you speak up.
CW: What other scenarios stuck out to you in this book that really challenged you or fascinated you?
CE: One [story] that I think is really helpful is the woman who is married to the non-believer for 50 years. Watching her progress – she is very honest about some of the mistakes she made.
Having been a pastor’s wife for 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of wives who wanted their husbands to be more spiritual. And they had this misconception that my husband and I -- “Oh, ya’ll must spend hours on the Bible.” I am like, Are you kidding? I have laundry to do! We never have done a Bible study together, because we prefer to study on our own and talk about it.
Watching [this wife] talk about how when she made these spiritual overtures toward her husband, how she pushed him away -- it helped me understand Scripture when it talks about winning an unbelieving husband without a word. Quietly.
It’s not that she never said anything to him. Again, it was her respecting him enough to say, “God will deal with my husband in God’s own time. I will get out of the way. I will no longer read my Bible in front of my husband, because it threatens him. I will not pray or make lavish ‘God-said’ [statements] in front of him.”
As she stepped back and allowed God to work, she found out that her husband was not as threatened by her faith as by her overt piousness. It was not [really] piousness; it was self-righteousness.
She will say today they have a fabulous marriage, except for this one thing. He is not a believer. She is still praying. She knows that this approach will lead him to Christ far more than her overt words or actions.
[Also] typically, if a woman is a really strong believer and walking in the faith, she is not going to marry a non-believer. It does happen, of course, but ... it is usually a woman who comes to Christ after marriage. She has changed, so she needs to figure out how to deal with him appropriately, instead of making him be like her.
CW: Last question. You point out in your book that leading is a hard job for men. How can wives encourage their husbands to lead well regardless of the circumstances?
CE: I think there are several ways, but most important I think is to get out of the way. To allow them to make decisions [and] when they make a decision, not to be combative or to criticize. We learn much from our bad decisions, [even] more than our good decisions. I think that if a guy knows that he is going to make a decision and his wife is going to change it anyway, either right in front of his face or later behind his back … then he doesn’t have the same pressure to [make] that decision well. He sometimes needs to feel that pressure that he is leading.
I think the other thing is if you have a husband who is passive, who is not a real quick decision-maker, [wives can] do the groundwork. Say, “Okay, this decision needs to be made. This is some research I have done,” but leave it with him. If it takes him 3 weeks to make it, let him make the decision.
I have had women say, “Yeah, but if I did that, we would never make a decision,” but I say, “How do you know? You step in every time.”
Eventually, he will make a decision. A roof needs fixing. The next time it rains, and there is a leak, he is going to call the roofer.
CW: Thanks for your insights, Cindy. If you want to learn more or purchase What's Submission Got to Do With It?, click here.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Choosing Celibacy
The following article is located at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/september/20.47.html
Home > 2008 > September Christianity Today, September, 2008
How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem.
Marcy Hintz | posted 9/12/2008 09:35AM
On an ordinary Tuesday last spring, the Dean of Student Life at an evangelical Christian college in the Midwest said to me, her graduate assistant, "Marcy, the evangelical culture of our campus does a lot to prepare its students for the inevitability of marriage, but we do little to set them up for singleness. We need to do better. You should be the one to speak with them," she decided, "and the title of your talk should be, 'Single by Choice.'"
She was a provocative one, this dean, with sharp instincts. Her title's declaration posed an ultimatum: to reconsider the assumptions about singleness and marriage passed down to us by the lore of our Christian campus, and an ultimatum to me as a representative of the most recent generation of young adults, most of whom, according to U.S. census data, will not marry until we're at least 27. A full one-fifth of us will never marry at all.
There are several reasons for this trend toward prolonged singleness. Sociologists such as Robert Wuthnow and Christian Smith point to a changing job market that requires extended years of education beyond a traditional, four-year bachelor's degree. Many young adults devote their post-college years to volunteer or low-paid service. Few careers available in one's early 20s come vested with the 9-to-5 sturdiness that used to turn one's thoughts to starting a family.
In this climate of enterprise and ambition, few young adults experience singleness as a condition worthy of their attention or concern. When I asked my 28-year-old friend why he never came to any of our church-sponsored events for singles, he replied that he didn't know he was supposed to. In fact, though the church I attend is nestled in a college town and lists over 120 single adults in its directory of 500 members, its singles ministry has folded for lack of interest. Singleness, it seems, is not so much the harbinger of identity for these young adults as it is the default set of tracks for the train of their young adult years.
Yet what changes in the experience of these young adults when they reach their early 30s and are still single? How do they activate their desire to grow up—to commit themselves in love to a person, a place, and a plot—without a wedding planner to script this transformation and a ceremony to declare it? How do they get their community to see them as grownups without a rite of passage akin to marriage? Who are they as adults, if they tarry on as singles—laden with time, money, and experience, but in limbo and alone?
This is the question my supervisor was essentially posing to me, a 35-year-old woman, transitioning from the unmeditated singleness of my 20s to the long-term investment impulses of my 30s. I mulled over her question for six months or more. In an evangelical culture that has tended to view marriage and family as the normative template of adulthood, how would I conceive of my identity as a single?
The answer that has come to hold the most shape for me resides in the purposed way of life evoked by celibacy. I'm not endorsing here a wholesale return to traditional lifelong religious orders, but I think it's time to ask, "Why not?"
Why not call for a vowed, vocational commitment to the church? What would change in our culture of singleness if the church were to reclaim a tradition that reinvokes the memory that we live in the time between the gospel's first announcement and its final fulfillment—a time in which marriage is celebrated, but celibacy is held out as a radical sign of fidelity to Christ and his body?
And what would change in the social fabric of the church if we replenished our communal imagination with the canon of celibate saints who display a portrait of singleness both purposeful and engaging? How might singles think differently of themselves if the church classified them not with the language of what they lack (single), but with the language of a fidelity they may freely assume (celibate)?
Christians are familiar with Scriptures such as Matthew 19, where Jesus speaks of "eunuchs" who have "renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven," or 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul writes, "It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am." Singles, Paul said, are "concerned about the Lord's affairs—how [they] can please the Lord." Evangelical pastors justify the celibate life with those passages, but hardly ever promote it as a desirable calling. Therefore, I had to begin by rediscovering a picture of celibacy.
The "American family dream"—the icon of mature adulthood typically passed down to us through the verbal and visual culture of our churches—pictures first a wedding, and next a well-groomed set of children in front of a two-story house with a basketball hoop in the drive.
I draw a caricature only to reiterate Rodney Clapp's caution in Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options. The image of family inherited by the evangelical tradition, Clapp says, is not biblical, but rather bourgeois—a sentimental shelter designed to serve as a "haven and oasis, an emotional stabilizer and battery-charger for its members." Clapp does not deny that these functions are part of the design of the family to serve a great human good, but when these insular values become ends in themselves, the dream of Christian family is too small. Much like the single, the family becomes a body unto itself—set up for life, but alone.
A modest proposal
The picture that needs to be restored to evangelical consciousness, Clapp suggested in 1993, is the picture of "church as first family." He writes, "With the coming of the kingdom—a kingdom that manifests itself physically as well as spiritually, socially as well as individually, and in the present as well as in the future—Jesus creates a new family of followers that now demands primary allegiance."
In Christ, Paul had a narrative framework for his singleness. Paul proclaimed himself a celibate man. In love with the mission of the church, he never hedged his bets. He was not single "just because," and he was not single alone. Rather, Paul viewed himself as a man uniquely free to warm to the humanity of all people and to rally them together as his mothers, brothers, sisters, and sons. The tradition that grew up around this supra-familial realization of the kingdom is celibacy.
Enlivened by an understanding of the church as first family, celibacy has stood alongside marriage for two millennia as an embodiment of a vocational narrative that's wider than individual ambition and more enduring than the American dream.
"Here is a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman … in which vision are very many words of comfort, greatly moving for all those who desire to be Christ's lovers," wrote Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English anchoress. The design of her lean-to shelter, attached to the back of a church, was the design of her life: by day, she prayed the hours; between prayers, she stood at her shelter's open front, exchanging news and banter, counsel and prayer with the merchants who passed by in the lane.
I read Julian's spiritual memoir last summer, perched at the kitchen counter in my own apartment whose west window opens to the sidewalks of our campus, and whose back door turns toward my church. In the celibate life of Julian, I'd been given a picture of what I already, in fact, loved to be.
As things turned out, I never gave the talk titled "Single By Choice." I did, however, host some discussions on it at my church. Midway through the discussion series, I met one of my best single friends for lunch. After effusing for a half-hour on the overall energy of the class, I turned to her and asked, "How do you think about your singleness?"
My friend is not passive. She's an artist, she's a leader, and her eyes wear the look of someone who sees into the world with meaning. But on this occasion, her eyes looked down. When she raised them, they were skimmed with tears. "I want to be married," she said, and then looked down again.
I'm convinced that the passive or palliative approach to singleness on display in most evangelical churches lacks the substance to sustain an earnest and committed life vocation, but the solution isn't to romanticize what is, in fact, difficult.
Since the time of Paul, formal celibate orders within the church have admittedly displayed bouts of folly and excess. I dare not demolish the bourgeois myth of Brides magazine only to replace it with another falsely idealized image cloaked in a spiritual veneer.
We are celibate, but we are human. We are married, but we are human. The Christian story graces both states with a joy that is appealing, but it also softens us with the sense that our love still longs for more. My friend's honest answer knocked the triumph from my voice and reminded me that the celibate community's greatest witness might be its unresolved resolution.
In the Catholic tradition, when candidates for religious orders are brought before the bishop to voice their vow to remain committed in celibacy to Christ and his church, the bishop tells them:
"You ought anxiously to consider again and again what sort of a burden this is which you are taking upon you of your own accord. Up to this you are free. You may still, if you choose, turn to the aims and desires of the world. But if you receive this order it will no longer be lawful to turn back from your purpose. You will be required to continue in the service of God, and with His assistance to observe chastity and to be bound forever in the ministrations of the Altar, to serve who is to reign."
Celibacy Today
The terms offered by such a formal vow of celibacy are as frightening as they are appealing—and strangely, they are no different from the terms posed by marriage. While chastity binds married couples to a shared intimacy and singles to refrain from sex, both callings are self-sacrificing as well as self-giving, and both rise from an engagement of love and of faith.
This said, celibacy is not necessarily a terminal vocation. God could certainly call a single adult into a new way of being in the world. But that presumes that he or she was first in full possession of a previous identity. In other words, our attentiveness to marriage as a holy calling—a calling "not to be entered into lightly," as the Anglican service book puts it—proclaims itself most strongly when it is assumed by two people who have first known themselves to be celibate.
Though some churches may flinch from ordaining a celibate vow, we might still use the word celibacy to rightly honor and rightly name the countercultural life to which singles are called. In doing so, we encourage more than just abstinence from sex. We bless the single vocation. We recall the church's history and remember our true family. We christen singles as called-out ones, with familial gifts that amplify the church and her outward-looking mission.
A return to a culture that welcomes celibacy might happen simply through a rise in the number of Christian singles who display a winsome picture of celibacy's communal appeal. Anyone who has read Donald Miller's spiritual memoir Blue Like Jazz will hear in his narrative of pubs and coffeehouses, college campuses and Volkswagen vans the story of a celibate man who, like Francis of Assisi, is barefoot and mobile to meet the face of Jesus in everyone.
Joining Donald Miller are others like Shane Claiborne, the young man whose Simple Way community in Philadelphia has joined married couples and singles in a community committed to poverty, chastity, and obedience—a pattern first modeled by the early church and later ordered by Saint Benedict.
Singleness is no social anomaly; celibacy shouldn't seem that way to us, either. Postmodern life, Mother Teresa, and the new monastic movement have brought the holy challenge of celibacy before the church.
The church's opportunity in this is simply to name what it sees: an explosion in the number of young adults who are highly educated, creative, entrepreneurial, spiritually intuitive, and apt to invest in a calling that has some roots—like the monastics who illuminated the Book of Kells and effectively saved the transmitted text of Scripture. Or the early church fathers like Athanasius and church mothers like Macrina, theologians like Aquinas, seers like Teresa of Avila, and sages like the desert monastic Synclectica.
"Single" does not do justice to the vital intelligence that spurred these saints to wed their affection to the forward-moving family of the church. "Celibate," on the other hand, is a word that tells me they knew exactly what they were doing. Theirs was a way of life purposely chosen with their community wholly in mind.
We are a community of interpreters, continually mirroring for one another our role in the story of God's kingdom. In restoring the language of celibacy to the lexicon of the church, we'll also restore a tradition that has historically produced much life. More importantly, we'll restore a Christological story of family, in which celibacy is a viable choice, a worthy commitment, and a sacred relationship.
Marcy Hintz is a member of Church of the Resurrection in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and a recent graduate of the Christian Formation & Ministry Program at Wheaton College Graduate School.
Home > 2008 > September Christianity Today, September, 2008
How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem.
Marcy Hintz | posted 9/12/2008 09:35AM
On an ordinary Tuesday last spring, the Dean of Student Life at an evangelical Christian college in the Midwest said to me, her graduate assistant, "Marcy, the evangelical culture of our campus does a lot to prepare its students for the inevitability of marriage, but we do little to set them up for singleness. We need to do better. You should be the one to speak with them," she decided, "and the title of your talk should be, 'Single by Choice.'"
She was a provocative one, this dean, with sharp instincts. Her title's declaration posed an ultimatum: to reconsider the assumptions about singleness and marriage passed down to us by the lore of our Christian campus, and an ultimatum to me as a representative of the most recent generation of young adults, most of whom, according to U.S. census data, will not marry until we're at least 27. A full one-fifth of us will never marry at all.
There are several reasons for this trend toward prolonged singleness. Sociologists such as Robert Wuthnow and Christian Smith point to a changing job market that requires extended years of education beyond a traditional, four-year bachelor's degree. Many young adults devote their post-college years to volunteer or low-paid service. Few careers available in one's early 20s come vested with the 9-to-5 sturdiness that used to turn one's thoughts to starting a family.
In this climate of enterprise and ambition, few young adults experience singleness as a condition worthy of their attention or concern. When I asked my 28-year-old friend why he never came to any of our church-sponsored events for singles, he replied that he didn't know he was supposed to. In fact, though the church I attend is nestled in a college town and lists over 120 single adults in its directory of 500 members, its singles ministry has folded for lack of interest. Singleness, it seems, is not so much the harbinger of identity for these young adults as it is the default set of tracks for the train of their young adult years.
Yet what changes in the experience of these young adults when they reach their early 30s and are still single? How do they activate their desire to grow up—to commit themselves in love to a person, a place, and a plot—without a wedding planner to script this transformation and a ceremony to declare it? How do they get their community to see them as grownups without a rite of passage akin to marriage? Who are they as adults, if they tarry on as singles—laden with time, money, and experience, but in limbo and alone?
This is the question my supervisor was essentially posing to me, a 35-year-old woman, transitioning from the unmeditated singleness of my 20s to the long-term investment impulses of my 30s. I mulled over her question for six months or more. In an evangelical culture that has tended to view marriage and family as the normative template of adulthood, how would I conceive of my identity as a single?
The answer that has come to hold the most shape for me resides in the purposed way of life evoked by celibacy. I'm not endorsing here a wholesale return to traditional lifelong religious orders, but I think it's time to ask, "Why not?"
Why not call for a vowed, vocational commitment to the church? What would change in our culture of singleness if the church were to reclaim a tradition that reinvokes the memory that we live in the time between the gospel's first announcement and its final fulfillment—a time in which marriage is celebrated, but celibacy is held out as a radical sign of fidelity to Christ and his body?
And what would change in the social fabric of the church if we replenished our communal imagination with the canon of celibate saints who display a portrait of singleness both purposeful and engaging? How might singles think differently of themselves if the church classified them not with the language of what they lack (single), but with the language of a fidelity they may freely assume (celibate)?
Christians are familiar with Scriptures such as Matthew 19, where Jesus speaks of "eunuchs" who have "renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven," or 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul writes, "It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am." Singles, Paul said, are "concerned about the Lord's affairs—how [they] can please the Lord." Evangelical pastors justify the celibate life with those passages, but hardly ever promote it as a desirable calling. Therefore, I had to begin by rediscovering a picture of celibacy.
The "American family dream"—the icon of mature adulthood typically passed down to us through the verbal and visual culture of our churches—pictures first a wedding, and next a well-groomed set of children in front of a two-story house with a basketball hoop in the drive.
I draw a caricature only to reiterate Rodney Clapp's caution in Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options. The image of family inherited by the evangelical tradition, Clapp says, is not biblical, but rather bourgeois—a sentimental shelter designed to serve as a "haven and oasis, an emotional stabilizer and battery-charger for its members." Clapp does not deny that these functions are part of the design of the family to serve a great human good, but when these insular values become ends in themselves, the dream of Christian family is too small. Much like the single, the family becomes a body unto itself—set up for life, but alone.
A modest proposal
The picture that needs to be restored to evangelical consciousness, Clapp suggested in 1993, is the picture of "church as first family." He writes, "With the coming of the kingdom—a kingdom that manifests itself physically as well as spiritually, socially as well as individually, and in the present as well as in the future—Jesus creates a new family of followers that now demands primary allegiance."
In Christ, Paul had a narrative framework for his singleness. Paul proclaimed himself a celibate man. In love with the mission of the church, he never hedged his bets. He was not single "just because," and he was not single alone. Rather, Paul viewed himself as a man uniquely free to warm to the humanity of all people and to rally them together as his mothers, brothers, sisters, and sons. The tradition that grew up around this supra-familial realization of the kingdom is celibacy.
Enlivened by an understanding of the church as first family, celibacy has stood alongside marriage for two millennia as an embodiment of a vocational narrative that's wider than individual ambition and more enduring than the American dream.
"Here is a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman … in which vision are very many words of comfort, greatly moving for all those who desire to be Christ's lovers," wrote Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English anchoress. The design of her lean-to shelter, attached to the back of a church, was the design of her life: by day, she prayed the hours; between prayers, she stood at her shelter's open front, exchanging news and banter, counsel and prayer with the merchants who passed by in the lane.
I read Julian's spiritual memoir last summer, perched at the kitchen counter in my own apartment whose west window opens to the sidewalks of our campus, and whose back door turns toward my church. In the celibate life of Julian, I'd been given a picture of what I already, in fact, loved to be.
As things turned out, I never gave the talk titled "Single By Choice." I did, however, host some discussions on it at my church. Midway through the discussion series, I met one of my best single friends for lunch. After effusing for a half-hour on the overall energy of the class, I turned to her and asked, "How do you think about your singleness?"
My friend is not passive. She's an artist, she's a leader, and her eyes wear the look of someone who sees into the world with meaning. But on this occasion, her eyes looked down. When she raised them, they were skimmed with tears. "I want to be married," she said, and then looked down again.
I'm convinced that the passive or palliative approach to singleness on display in most evangelical churches lacks the substance to sustain an earnest and committed life vocation, but the solution isn't to romanticize what is, in fact, difficult.
Since the time of Paul, formal celibate orders within the church have admittedly displayed bouts of folly and excess. I dare not demolish the bourgeois myth of Brides magazine only to replace it with another falsely idealized image cloaked in a spiritual veneer.
We are celibate, but we are human. We are married, but we are human. The Christian story graces both states with a joy that is appealing, but it also softens us with the sense that our love still longs for more. My friend's honest answer knocked the triumph from my voice and reminded me that the celibate community's greatest witness might be its unresolved resolution.
In the Catholic tradition, when candidates for religious orders are brought before the bishop to voice their vow to remain committed in celibacy to Christ and his church, the bishop tells them:
"You ought anxiously to consider again and again what sort of a burden this is which you are taking upon you of your own accord. Up to this you are free. You may still, if you choose, turn to the aims and desires of the world. But if you receive this order it will no longer be lawful to turn back from your purpose. You will be required to continue in the service of God, and with His assistance to observe chastity and to be bound forever in the ministrations of the Altar, to serve who is to reign."
Celibacy Today
The terms offered by such a formal vow of celibacy are as frightening as they are appealing—and strangely, they are no different from the terms posed by marriage. While chastity binds married couples to a shared intimacy and singles to refrain from sex, both callings are self-sacrificing as well as self-giving, and both rise from an engagement of love and of faith.
This said, celibacy is not necessarily a terminal vocation. God could certainly call a single adult into a new way of being in the world. But that presumes that he or she was first in full possession of a previous identity. In other words, our attentiveness to marriage as a holy calling—a calling "not to be entered into lightly," as the Anglican service book puts it—proclaims itself most strongly when it is assumed by two people who have first known themselves to be celibate.
Though some churches may flinch from ordaining a celibate vow, we might still use the word celibacy to rightly honor and rightly name the countercultural life to which singles are called. In doing so, we encourage more than just abstinence from sex. We bless the single vocation. We recall the church's history and remember our true family. We christen singles as called-out ones, with familial gifts that amplify the church and her outward-looking mission.
A return to a culture that welcomes celibacy might happen simply through a rise in the number of Christian singles who display a winsome picture of celibacy's communal appeal. Anyone who has read Donald Miller's spiritual memoir Blue Like Jazz will hear in his narrative of pubs and coffeehouses, college campuses and Volkswagen vans the story of a celibate man who, like Francis of Assisi, is barefoot and mobile to meet the face of Jesus in everyone.
Joining Donald Miller are others like Shane Claiborne, the young man whose Simple Way community in Philadelphia has joined married couples and singles in a community committed to poverty, chastity, and obedience—a pattern first modeled by the early church and later ordered by Saint Benedict.
Singleness is no social anomaly; celibacy shouldn't seem that way to us, either. Postmodern life, Mother Teresa, and the new monastic movement have brought the holy challenge of celibacy before the church.
The church's opportunity in this is simply to name what it sees: an explosion in the number of young adults who are highly educated, creative, entrepreneurial, spiritually intuitive, and apt to invest in a calling that has some roots—like the monastics who illuminated the Book of Kells and effectively saved the transmitted text of Scripture. Or the early church fathers like Athanasius and church mothers like Macrina, theologians like Aquinas, seers like Teresa of Avila, and sages like the desert monastic Synclectica.
"Single" does not do justice to the vital intelligence that spurred these saints to wed their affection to the forward-moving family of the church. "Celibate," on the other hand, is a word that tells me they knew exactly what they were doing. Theirs was a way of life purposely chosen with their community wholly in mind.
We are a community of interpreters, continually mirroring for one another our role in the story of God's kingdom. In restoring the language of celibacy to the lexicon of the church, we'll also restore a tradition that has historically produced much life. More importantly, we'll restore a Christological story of family, in which celibacy is a viable choice, a worthy commitment, and a sacred relationship.
Marcy Hintz is a member of Church of the Resurrection in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and a recent graduate of the Christian Formation & Ministry Program at Wheaton College Graduate School.
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