This post is part of a series entitled “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Single Moms“.
Walk into any church in America and you will immediately notice one thing: it is all about nuclear families (i.e., a husband and a wife who are married and raise their own children to adulthood), usually to the exclusion of other ministries such as widows, single mothers, and the disabled.
You will see smiling couples walking through the front door with their well mannered children trailing behind. Inside there is a nursery for infants and toddlers and Sunday School classes for children up through middle school and high school.
Open the bulletin and you will notice that besides the senior pastor and support staff, there is also a youth pastor and a director of Christian Education.
All of this is designed for one thing: to attract young couples who want the church to help them raise a perfect family.
Now let me stop here and say that this is great! It is a good thing that young couples want to raise healthy and godly children who know and love Jesus Christ. It is also a good thing that churches hire staff and program ministries to help them do this.
However, there are a couple of problems with this exclusive and idealistic nuclear family emphasis, the first being that there are no perfect nuclear families.
Some of those couples you see walking through the front door of that church are in their second or third marriage, that is if they are married at all. Other couples are struggling and thinking about divorce. Some of the husbands — in fact, a good percentage of them according to statistics — are consuming porn online and maybe even acting it out with an affair or two. And a significant number of the children following those couples through the door of the church will fall away from the Lord once they reach adulthood.
A second problem with this exclusive and ideal nuclear family emphasis is that it is off-putting for people who are not a part of a nuclear family, especially for single moms.
Assume for a moment the perspective of a single mom visiting your church for the first time. When she sees all of those nuclear families in your church, she doesn’t know about their issues that lie just below the surface. All she sees is what she assumes to be her ideal: perfect couples with their perfect children. Her conclusion, “I am a failure and I don’t belong here.”
Now take a minute and assume the perspective of a couple with their young children who see that single mom with her children visiting their church. With regard to the nuclear family observing her, the single mom is immediately at a disadvantage.
The single mom is at a disadvantage because she cannot hide her issues behind the façade of a perfect marriage and family. The absence of her husband and the father of her children puts her issues right out there in the open.
The single mom, then, represents a threat to the church’s nuclear family ideal. She represents failure. Though the married couple would not dare say it out loud, by their actions they telegraph to that single mom, “We don’t want to be like you. You don’t belong here.”
That is the message of rejection single moms get from churches across America and it explains two important statistics relating to the church and single moms: more than two-thirds of single moms do not attend church and less than 1% of churches have any kind of single moms ministry.
This means that the church has failed miserably in obeying all of the Scripture that applies to single moms and their fatherless children.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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