On being single when the church values marriage: My own experience

(This article was originally written in February for another blog with much higher traffic than mine. But it appears that the blog does not plan to use it, so I publish it here.)

It is Mothers’ Day. At the front door of my church, two ladies are giving out a little card to each mother passing to enter. I approach the door. Loudly, the one tells the other: “Don’t give one to her. She’s not a mother.”

On face value, that is just another true statement. But her intonation and facial expression said: “… and I am deeply suspicious of someone like her.” Perhaps it even meant: “How could a woman not want to be a mother?”

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Why complementarians need to answer the single women question

Complementarians say that Christian husbands need to be the spiritual leaders of their wives.

Here is how that works, presented in diagrams.

1) There are more women than men in church, of varied levels of spiritual understanding. It is humanly impossible to accurately measure spirituality, but for the sake of this point, I will call a level of understanding that only get “Give your life to Jesus, he saves” and acted on that, a 4. (A level of spiritual understanding that do not get that part is not Christianity.) 10 represented a spiritual understanding as deep as is possible on this earth. The levels of understanding will not be distributed as evenly as below, but I draw them that way for the sake of simplicity.

Blue represent church men, and pink church women:

2) A spiritual leader cannot lead anyone ahead of him, so any given man has to marry only a woman that is less spiritual than him. The man marked as 4,