FamilyLife Today®

Ron Deal: Here's the thing that I think we need to ponder and maybe shift in how we do church. For years we sort of said, "Let's put the married young couples over here, let's put the married with teenagers over here, let's put the single parents over here, let's put the singles in a singles group." And so we divided everybody up.

I think the strategy needs to shift. I think we ought to give people opportunities, for example in small groups or Sunday school classes, to be with lots of different kinds of people.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. It’s a fun day.

Ann Wilson: It’s a fun day, you know why?

Dave Wilson: I want to know what you think a fun day is.

Ann Wilson: It’s having Ron Deal and Gayla Grace with us. That makes a really good day.

Dave Wilson: Were you? That’s what I was thinking, too. I wonder if they’re thinking it’s a fun day. What do you guys think, Ron and Gayla?

Ron Deal: Absolutely, it's a fun day, Dave.

Gayla Grace: It will be interesting for sure.

Dave Wilson: Interesting, that’s a good word. Yeah, well, for those of you that don’t know, which means, I don’t know where you’ve been hiding because everybody knows that Ron and Gayla lead our blended ministry here at FamilyLife. And we love having you guys on.

But again, I don't know if you love having us on, but it doesn't matter because we're hosting you today. Honestly, I really we want to get your feedback on a show, a broadcast we did recently with Anna Mead Harris, who wrote a book about being a single mom and how that is sort of received by the local church. Her book was called *God’s Grace for Every Family: Biblical Encouragement for Single Parent Families and the Churches That Seek to Love Them Well*. First of all, when you hear that, what are your first thoughts about churches and single parents or blended families?

Ann Wilson: Or singles?

Ron Deal: My first thought is absolutely, I'm so glad she wrote that book. For a long time, I've said single parent ministry and stepfamily ministry are cousins. We are close cousins because it's one phase that leads to another phase in people's worlds and lives. Blended families often have children who move between their home and a single parent home.

And the gap between what the church is able to do and how it responds to singles, single parents, divorced, widowed, never married, whatever the backstory is, there's a big gap there. As evidenced by the Barna State of the Family report that came out last fall that FamilyLife was a co-sponsor on, that major study that basically affirmed, Dave and Ann, what Gayla and I have been saying for a decade now. And that is the non-traditional family is the new traditional family and the church is way behind in terms of how it connects to, supports, and involves ministry on behalf of families in a variety of contexts. It's a very important matter.

Gayla Grace: You know what I keyed on? It was the title had the word grace in it. And when we talk about singles, single parents, blended families, and with the church, grace needs to be a part of that. And oftentimes it's not. And it's easy to feel marginalized within the church when you're in a non-traditional family. And we need to feel that grace.

Ron Deal: Instead of judgment?

Gayla Grace: Yeah.

Ann Wilson: Let me ask you, Gayla, because you were a single mom for a while and now blended. When you went to church after you became a single mom, did you feel a little different or ostracized at all?

Gayla Grace: Absolutely. And some of it we bring on ourselves because we know, particularly for me, I had walked through divorce. I know what the Bible says about divorce. So you begin to speculate as to what other people around you are thinking, maybe even what they're saying about you. And automatically you go into a place of feeling a little perhaps ostracized or at least marginalized, yeah.

Ann Wilson: Maybe as we as individuals don't feel that or haven't gone through that, we definitely have friends and family that have faced that. And it's relatable.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, so let's play a little bit of a clip and I'd really love to hear your thoughts. You work every day with people living a similar life to what Anna experienced. So let's hear this clip and then I'd love to hear your feedback.

Ann Wilson (Clip): So I'm just thinking of you walking into church the first time whenever that was after Jeff had passed away. You're sitting there without him. What’d that feel like?

Anna Mead Harris (Clip): Terrible. I mean, I was also the only single mother in the church.

Ann Wilson (Clip): Oh. Did you feel that?

Anna Mead Harris (Clip): Oh, yes. Our pastor was so attuned to it and they really, really looked out for me. But I tried the Sunday school classes and it’s just hard. You go in a class and everybody’s talking, the topic is marriage. So you're like, "Okay, I'll go to a different class." I go to that class and everybody’s 25 years older than I am.

So I often found myself going to sit in the church library by myself. Which I would have a wonderful time and was interesting because other people who didn't feel comfortable in classes started navigating and we ended up with a class of our own that I privately thought of as the misfits.

Dave Wilson (Clip): They weren't all single parents. They were just...

Anna Mead Harris (Clip): A lot of them were single adults. But people that didn't feel like they had a place to go during the Sunday school hour. So we had our own class. That was wonderful fellowship. But sitting in the actual service, it just hurts. And when things sometimes the announcements, someone would get up to make the announcements. And I remember this one so clearly.

"The family retreat is coming up in a couple of weeks and we've had 37 couples sign up." And I had been considering going to the family retreat. I was a little bit of "where am I going to sleep versus my kids, opposite sex," all that kind of thing. But I heard 37 couples sign up and I probably shouldn't have reacted this way but I thought, "No. I'm not going to be the misfit again. Where am I going to sit at mealtime?"

And it's not that going and sitting at a table, I'm an adult, I can go sit at a table with a bunch of couples. But it's frankly tiring. Everything is a struggle. Everything is hard. You're doing everything alone and it would be really nice if church was more aware that everything is a struggle and everything is hard.

Dave Wilson (Clip): Do you think it's better now than when you were sitting there?

Anna Mead Harris (Clip): The answer's no.

Dave Wilson (Clip): I'm a pastor, I know. I mean, that's why I apologize. It's like, oh my goodness, I think I had a blind spot.

Ron Deal: Dave and Ann, as I listen to that, my first response is just my heart aches. And I can relate to it, which in I think a lot of listeners or viewers can relate to, something in their life, a time in their life, a season perhaps, a circumstance where you felt alone in your experience sitting in church with a whole bunch of other people.

For me, it was going back to church after my 12-year-old son passed away and just feeling completely isolated and not knowing who to talk to or how to engage other people and not really connecting to what was happening around me. And that whole misfit experience I think is really, really real.

Ann Wilson: And it’s just very isolating. It’s so easy to all of a sudden feel like I don’t belong here. And that’s the most dangerous thing, that’s not the message a church wants to send, but that’s where we go.

Ron Deal: What we tell people in our ministry is you've got to go the extra mile to build a bridge that says to people who might, not everybody feels this way, but they might feel like an outsider, "I don't know where I fit, I'm not sure if I'm welcomed here," all those kind of self-doubt questions that people have. You go the extra mile to make it really clear that they are welcome, they belong, they're part of this.

Ann Wilson: What does that look like, Ron?

Ron Deal: Well, let me give you a very concrete example. She was talking about the experience of, "Okay, look who signed up for the family retreat." So, 37 couples. Couples equals family. Clearly that's the clear message. And she heard it loud and clear, it’s like, "Oh, then me as a single parent, I guess that's not for me, I'm not going." Well, that may not be what they intended to say, but that's what came out.

20 years ago, when I left full-time church work, the last family retreat that we did, I was the marriage and family pastor. We did a family retreat in which we specifically said, "This is family as in all singles, never married, you are welcome to come on this retreat. We want all our single parents to come and we've made provision if there's any cost, we want to help cover that for you. We want all of our married couples and families. If you got teenagers, if you're empty nest, you know what? This is really a church retreat. If you're breathing, you're part of a family and we want you to come to this retreat."

And then oh, by the way, we orchestrated the time not broken up into, "Okay, single parents, you're over here in this room, first-time married couples with children under the age of five, you're in this room." We didn't do that at all. We put people together in their class discussions. We put them together in their activities. We made sure we orchestrated togetherness because that's what the church is intended to do. We have to be intentional about orchestrating those sorts of bridges of grace to one another so people know they belong, feel welcomed, and want to be a part.

Dave Wilson: Some churches don't say things like that from the stage. Why do you think that's true?

Gayla Grace: Well, I think it's just simply that they don't know. But here's where the reality is, Dave, is those of us who are in non-traditional families then we need to be the one to speak up. I've gone to my pastor after Mother's Day and said, "Please don't ask mothers to stand up on Mother's Day because stepmoms don't know what to do." We have to take initiative to go to those in leadership and say, "Please start talking language that can relate to everyone." My pastor was happy to change their language. It's just a matter of they needed help being educated.

Ron Deal: Back to your question, I don't know exactly. I think it depends church to church, pastor to pastor what the reasons are. But I do think sometimes we're so cautious about not offending people that we end up doing nothing and I think have the opposite intended effect. We inadvertently alienate when we really want to try to create openness.

But really, I mean, pastors have big hearts. We're not knocking pastors, right? You want to be the church, you want to be reaching out, but you have to go the extra mile. Let me give you an example. So recently I've run into a situation consulting with some churches about marriage and family ministry where they say, "Oh no, we don't bring up things like we don't do couples events, we don't do special things on Mother's Day or Father's Day because not everybody's a mother, because not everybody's married and we don't want the singles to feel left out so we don't do marriage events at all."

And I'm like, "Whoa, okay, hold on. Everybody's thinking about relationships, whether they're married or not married and someday they might be one or maybe they were in one and they're still trying to process where they were." I think what you do is you just go out of your way to say to people, "You're welcome to be a part of this. This thing might not pertain to your family, but in two months we're doing a thing that for you that does pertain." Instead of being afraid and doing nothing, I think we need to be proactive and invite and welcome everyone.

Ann Wilson: Gayla, let me ask you, could you coach us, and you too, Ron, because I know that Dave has had people approach him as a pastor of saying, "Hey, I feel like you're missing us." And so coach people on how they could say something, because I know so many have felt that label of being a misfit or not sure. Maybe you're thinking, "I'm just attending, I'm nobody, I'm not going to go bother the pastor." But how would you approach a pastor if you feel like, "Yeah, I feel like we're missing this in the church"?

Dave Wilson: And this wouldn't just be for pastors. This advice would be for anybody. We can miss it in our neighborhood or in our small groups. You don't have to be a pastor to not know how to include.

Gayla Grace: Yeah, I think you always want to start with some kind of gratitude so to make sure that they don't feel like we're just dogging on them. So for instance with my pastor I said, "Thank you for your wanting to recognize moms. And can we extend it a little bit and also realize that we've got adoptive moms, we've got foster moms, we've got stepmoms, we've got grieving moms, we've got all kinds of moms and let's just extend our language to a larger audience."

And that speaks volumes, but we just need to be careful that they don't feel like, "Well, I'm never going to get it right so I'm just going to avoid it altogether," which is what Ron is saying. And it's a matter of yes, giving them some language that can help.

Ron Deal: Guys, let me jump in here. I think sometimes pastors just don't realize the numbers. So one of the things we found in the Barna study, we know blended families are a large percentage, but did you know that in the Christian community today, listen to these numbers from the recent study that we helped co-sponsor. More than a quarter, 28% of all parents are single parents. 28%! That has more than doubled since 1950.

The family has changed. The typical structure is very different in the average church than it was today. But listen to this. If you drill down and you go, "Okay, of parents who have children under the age of 18," so they're really in the child-rearing years, the number goes up to 41% are single parents.

We cannot ignore that. If I've used this example before, but if somebody walked into your church and said, "Well, we don't know what just happened, but half your church has gone blind. You can't just hand out regular Bibles anymore, you're going to have to figure out an..." We would go way out of our way to get Braille Bibles available for everybody who needs the Word of God. 41% is a big number when you're talking about parents raising children. That's just reality.

And again, I always say to people, if that's not the composition of your church, it is the composition of your community around your church. So if you have any sort of outreach mentality, which I hope you do, you're going to go, "We need to be relevant, fast. We need to figure out ways of saying you're not a misfit, this is your home, this is where you belong. Or rather, we're all spiritual misfits, we're all bathing in the blood of Christ and enjoying His grace. Come join the party. You belong here." That message is so important and powerful.

Dave Wilson: You’re listening to FamilyLife Today. I’m Ann Wilson, and before we continue with our conversation, I just want to remind listeners, we know life is full of challenges, and families today need biblical truth more than ever. Isn’t that true?

Dave Wilson: That is true.

Ann Wilson: And as a FamilyLife partner, your monthly gift helps bring the truth into homes every single day through podcasts, events, and resources.

Dave Wilson: So let’s make a lasting difference together. Become a partner today, just go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click the "Donate" button.

Ann Wilson: Ron, help us too, and you too Gayla. How can we as a church, what could this look like? Like in that library, suddenly you have a lot of blended, single, you've got like should there be classes? What can we be doing that would be different?

Ron Deal: Guys, I got so many thoughts about that. Let me just hit a couple of them. First of all, I think think over your entire church calendar year. You're not saying we'll never do a marriage thing and drill down into the grind of marriage because it doesn't include everybody. No, no, no. Couples need that, they absolutely need that.

But then so do single parents need somebody to drill down into that experience of being an alone parent in your home and everything's on your shoulders, like finances and decision making and all that kind of stuff. They need that. So it's over the course of the year, we're going to try to minister to this group and this group and this group.

But here's the thing that I think we need to ponder and maybe shift in how we do church. For years we sort of said affinity groups. Let's put the married young couples over here, let's put the married with teenagers over here, let's put the single parents over here, let's put the singles in a singles group and well, if you're college age, that's different than a 20-something or early 30-something sing. And so we divided everybody up.

And that sort of worked, I think, in church life. But I think maybe it worked because we had a larger group of married couples raising kids and then everybody else was sort of a smaller little I don't think that's the composition of churches anymore. I think the strategy needs to shift. I think we ought to give people opportunities, for example in small groups or Sunday school classes, to be with lots of different kinds of people.

Let me tell you, single parents have something to say to married couples. Like you couples complain a lot about each other. Like you need to learn some gratitude for the person that you get to lay in bed with every night and talk about life and make decisions because I don't get that. There's a perspective that everybody has to share where iron sharpens iron. And you got single adults sitting in a room with couples and everybody's learning how to put on self-control about single sexuality, about married sexuality. Like there's a commonality there. We don't need to avoid. I think we need to learn from each other and be in relationship with each other. I actually think that will help close the gap for single parents who maybe have financial issues and they feel unseen or they don't feel like they belong. So mixing, no more affinity division, but more of a collaboration, maybe is a way to say it.

Ann Wilson: So Ron, are you saying don't hide out in the library?

Ron Deal: That is what I'm saying. Well, and I want to say something about that. Like here's what I would say about that. You know, if your church is not doing anything to minister to where you are, go rogue just like Anna did. She went rogue, they created their own thing. Guess what? You can get it done. You don't have to always wait on permission to become a church on the move, if you will, a group of people on the move. So hopefully you could work within your church structure, that would be the most ideal thing because more people will be blessed by it then.

Gayla Grace: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. There's not a one-size-fits-all because every church has a different structure. And I do think that we need to be sensitive to do you have small groups that meet at a certain time. We've always said for blended family couples and single parents, you need childcare if at all possible. If you want these people to attend and it's a Wednesday night but there's no childcare, you might have missed the mark right there.

Ron Deal: Guys, and let me just add this to our conversation today. I think this needs to be said. Let's jump around the other side. There may be somebody listening with a little hesitation, "I don't know about the single parent thing or the we help people in that situation, we might end up with a whole lot more single parents because somehow we're giving permission to that." No, no, no, no, no.

What you're we're doing in the church is redeeming the transitions that are hard for people that make or break their spiritual walk with the Lord. We all know single parent families attend church at a far lower rate than anybody else. Why? Because you're hurting, you're struggling, it's hard, you're wrestling through stuff, you're not sure you belong anyway, you feel like a misfit, you're exhausted. It's just easier not to go. Exactly, all of those things.

So instead of that dynamic, we're making room for people and we're saying, we're not blessing sin. Never, ever, ever. See if all of this stuff we're talking about today is coupled with good biblical teaching on following God in obedience and "Here's what He has in store for us, here's the ideal, here's what we're moving towards." And yet the real is life is hard and difficult and we're going to get in the trenches with one another. That's church. And I think within a generation we're reversing the trends. Instead of having more of this or that or the other thing, we're having more and more people who are walking with God and children who are growing up in homes where they feel like they are loved in the body of Christ. That's how lives get changed.

Ann Wilson: I’m wondering you guys if you could just close by exactly what you’re saying, Ron. I think there’s a lot of shame involved if you’ve been through a divorce, if you’ve... there’s just feelings of feeling inadequate or maybe I feel like I failed or I’ve been betrayed. Can you just talk to those individuals as we close of just reminding them of how God sees them?

Gayla Grace: I think about what you have often said is there are no second-class citizens. We're all first-class citizens in need of a cross. And we are all full of sin. We all are striving for living life as God would call us to, but we're not going to get it right. And the more that we allow others to see that part of our heart that is broken, the more that we can minister and come together in the body of Christ. And I think a lot of it is just transparency, vulnerability, letting your guard down. It's okay that you're broken because somebody else is broken too in a different way and just don't hide it.

Ron Deal: That's it. At the foot of the cross, the ground is level. Nobody is elevated up towards Jesus more than somebody else. We're all the same. And that perspective is very important for people who from the outside look really good. They need to remember a humility about their world and their life and that they need the blood of Jesus just like anybody else.

Your sin may not be that person's sin, but it's sin. And that's me, that's you, that's all of us. And as long as we keep that perspective, then we're going to be open to people. We're going to we're going to say, "You're in a time of need, you belong here. Come join us. God loves you, He sees you, He’s with you."

Dave Wilson: Yeah, and I think as you’ve already said, I think we need to always remember they’re going to feel that mostly from us. The people in the pews, not just the pastor or the church, but the people of the church. What do they feel? Like Gayla said it earlier, the title of the book is Grace. Are they feeling judgment? Or are they feeling grace? If we want them to know what Jesus thinks, it’s got to be resembled in how we look and say and treat them.

Speaking of extending grace to blended families, do you have anything going on ministry-wise for blendeds?

Ron Deal: Oh yeah, Gayla and I will both be a part of our next Blended and Blessed. It happens every spring. It'll be April 18th this year. We'll be in Oklahoma City and get this punchline, it's free. If you're in person, you got a little fee so you can buy lunch, 10 bucks. But if you're online, the virtual version of Blended and Blessed, which means a livestream worldwide, anybody can participate anywhere and churches can host it and put a bunch of people in the room for free. This is the best it's ever been and we're so excited to be able to offer that to churches and to couples.

Dave Wilson: So you can get the link for Blended and Blessed, just click the show notes and it'll get you connected. And that’s at FamilyLifeToday.com. FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported ministry of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.