The Expansive Christian Community

Every summer, Lynn showed up with her guitar.

She was my mother’s friend, a fervent believer and a talented musician and artist.  She lived out of state, in a far bigger city than the one I grew up in, and I was thusly in awe of her.  Whenever she pulled up in our driveway in her small truck, guitar case on her back and her black lab at her side, I would run to the door to greet her.

She regaled us with stories of her church—much bigger than ours—and the musicians and artists she knew in her city. She led Bible studies and worship.  She purchased an old log cabin on the outskirts of her city, then promptly taught herself how to renovate nearly the whole thing.  She always had a passel of friends, relatives, and company visiting or leaving.

Lynn was, and still remains, single.

This distinguished her from nearly every other Christian woman I knew, who was either a) too young to get married, b) dating, or c) already married.  At my church, singleness was a sort of transitory state, one that people found themselves and had to necessarily tolerate on their way to being married. 

Lynn dated, of course.  I knew this because she arrived to her visits with amusing stories of her experiences in the dating world.  One relationship with a man she knew well in particular held great meaning for her—but it ended, for a series of reasons, and Lynn eventually stopped dating altogether.  “I think God’s okay with me being single,” she told my mom.  “And you know what?  So am I.”

I was in awe of her.  Still am.  Because Lynns are, frankly, a rarity.  And it needn’t be so.

For a series of political, economic, and cultural reasons that I won’t go into here, modern Christianity—the Protestant tradition in particular—has elevated Family and Marriage against all other modes of Christian living.   To be married and then to have children is conceptualized as God’s desired ideal state for all humans.

I was already experiencing the effects of this as a child: as I mentioned earlier, singleness seemed to be mostly a thing you had to tolerate until God got you sorted out.  In college, all the women in my group Bible studies fretted anxiously about being led to the right potential mate, as though any other option would be unthinkable.  As I became an adult, I watched as those who chose singleness were subjected at times to awful rumors about their sexuality, their appeal to others, their habits, their histories—as though to be single was shameful.

This was not the case in the early church, which was composed of any number of people in any number of cultural and social situations.  We see this in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul writes: “Now to the unmarriedand the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

Later, he writes:

“Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.”

Paul always, of course, writes his letters from within a particular context to a particular audience.  But the message remains Scriptural: wherever you are relationally when you are called to Christ, it’s perfectly fine to remain there.  Marriage is fine, although it comes with its own set of troubles.  And not marrying is also fine.

This is particularly resonant to Paul’s period because not-marrying carried with it, particularly for women, a certain set of economic and social consequences.  Not marrying made you vulnerable.  But implicit here, at least to me, is the care of a Christian community meant to support and tend to all of its members.  The Christian community might include those who do not marry, but they belong to it, and they are not alone.

Lynn certainly never was.  She constructed around her a group of Christians who served, and serve, as family.  They drive each other to doctor’s appointments and pick each other up from surgeries and invite each other to Thanksgiving and Christmas.  They care for each other.  And in that community Lynn is viewed as a whole contributor and a full person.

This, in my experience, isn’t typical.  The truth is, the church is not always great at this.

And it’s not only about singles.  My husband and I are married, but we have no children and no family nearby, and thus live at the fringes of the “married with children” ideal that comprises many churches in our area.  We simply don’t fit, and our situation is often treated with surprise and confusion.  We find ourselves frequently left out of a congregational life that can’t imagine anything other than the nuclear family, even though that model of Christian community is not as expansive as what Scripture offers us.

I wish as believers we were more practiced at thinking bigger, and better, about Christian community.  Although the Catholic tradition also elevates the nuclear family, the presence of religious within that tradition offers at least one way to elevate those whom God might call to a different path.  In my own area, I wish we had exemplars of more people who lived out God’s call in different modes: never-married singles, widowers and widows, married couples without children, multi-generational families.

The church is vast and made up of believers of every social and cultural condition.  It would be a shame to exclude from our imagination, and our care, those who can contribute mightily to the body of Christ.