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I didn't want to be part of a singles ministry because the majority of my needs don't have anything to do with being single. I need prayer. I need to serve others. I need to be held accountable for my sins. And I figure married people need those things, too. I don't want to be segregated with people who, superficially, are just like me. The eye cannot say to the hand, after all, "I don't need you."

Lots of single Christians don't agree with me. Indeed, a lot of my Christian friends, who go to different churches, say they chose their church precisely because it offers a vital singles ministry. Singleness, they say, does come with special needs, and thank God the church is recognizing that more than it did 20 years ago and is responding.

Sue Nilson, singles ministry pastor at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church, a large seeker-sensitive congregation just north of Dayton, Ohio, has worked with single Christians for almost 15 years. Good singles ministry isn't a holding tank where single Christians wallow in those issues, she says; it is "a place to process them so that singles can then go on to be great leaders for Christ, in the church and the world." Those issues include "defining success in one's life." Sometimes the world defines success as marriage, children, and a time-share in Florida. Single Christians have to think about retooling their dreams in a way that doesn't leave them "bitter," says Nilson, and the church can, should, and in many congregations is helping them do that.

Nilson, a single parent of a teenager, has become popular nationally as a seminar and conference speaker. She is not so much interested in helping people celebrate their singleness as discovering their gifts. She believes that all people can be a "Michael Jordan" at something, and it's just a matter of providing them a stage for their talents to emerge. Nilson was hired in 1998 to start a singles ministry at St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. (She recently left there to take the Ginghamsburg position.) She says the ministry "grew like wildfire" in the 4,000-member church and, within a few years, the singles ministry had an outreach to the entire southeastern region of Nebraska.

"Eventually the church statistician notified me that our overall church membership had become 50 percent single adults," she recalls. "Singles were chairing the administration board, filling the churchwide committees for missions, music, education, everything—as well as leading the many facets of the single adult ministry itself."

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about singles ministry as Nilson. Terry Hershey was once one of the country's leading singles ministers. In 1981 he joined the staff of Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in southern California, and he cofounded the now defunct National Association of Single Adult Leaders. His books and seminars established him as an authoritative voice. But in the last 20 years, he's done some rethinking on the singles issue. "Churches should never be divided along gender or marital or generational lines," he now says. "As soon as we ghettoize people—Oh I'm glad you're in our church today; are you single? Then go to room 207—then we've done something wrong. The mistake we made 25 years ago, when churches were first getting into singles ministry, was to assume that every church had to have a singles minister and a singles program."

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8