FamilyLife Today®

Speaker 1

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, but 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.

Speaker 2

Welcome to family life today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Speaker 3

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us@familylifetoday.com this is Family life today.

Speaker 2

All right.

Speaker 3

It's a fun day.

Speaker 2

It's a fun day. You know why?

Speaker 3

Well, I want to know what you think a fun day is.

Speaker 2

It's having Ron Deal and Gayla Grace with us. That makes a really good day.

Speaker 3

That's what I was thinking, too.

Speaker 4

Were you?

Speaker 3

Yeah. I wonder if they're thinking it's a fun day. What do you guys think? Ron and Gayla?

Speaker 5

Absolutely. It's a fun day.

Speaker 3

Dave, what else?

Speaker 1

It will be interesting, for sure.

Speaker 2

Interesting. That's a good word.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Well, for those of you that don't know, which means, you know, I don't know where you've been hiding because everybody knows that Ron and Gayla lead our blended ministry here at Family Life. And we love having you guys on. And 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 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 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 or singles?

Speaker 1

Yeah, my first thought is, absolutely, I'm so glad she wrote that book. For a long time I've said single parent ministry and step family 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. This is evidenced by the Barna State of the Family report that came out last fall, which Family Life co-sponsored.

That major study basically affirmed what David, Ann, Gayla, and I have been saying for a decade now: 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.

Speaker 5

You know, what I keyed on 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. It's easy to feel marginalized within the church when you're in a non-traditional family. We need to feel that grace instead of judgment.

Speaker 2

Yeah. 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?

Speaker 5

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 began 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.

Speaker 2

Yeah, maybe. As we as individuals don't feel that or haven't gone through that, we definitely have friends and family that have faced.

Speaker 5

That and it's relatable, right?

Speaker 3

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.

Speaker 2

So I'm just thinking of you walking in to church the first time, whenever that was after Jeff had passed away, you're sitting there without him.

Speaker 4

Right.

Speaker 2

What'd that feel like?

Speaker 4

Terrible. I mean, I was also the only single mother in the church.

Speaker 2

Oh, did you feel that?

Speaker 4

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 taught, you know, the topic is marriage. So you're like, okay, I'll often go to a different class. I go to that class, and, you know, 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. It 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.

Speaker 3

They weren't all single parents.

Speaker 4

A lot of them were single adults.

Speaker 2

But they just didn't fit the people.

Speaker 4

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, you know, someone would get up to make the announcements. 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. I had been considering going to the family retreat. I was a little bit concerned about where I was going to sleep versus my kids, you know, opposite sex, all that kind of thing.

But I heard 37 couples sign up, and I probably, I know I shouldn't have reacted this way, but I thought, uh, I'm not, you're not going to.

Speaker 2

Be the one that's, I'm the misfit again.

Speaker 4

The misfit again. Where am I going to sit at mealtime? And it's not that going and sitting. 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.

Speaker 3

Do you think it's better now than when you were sitting there? The answer's no. I'm a pastor. I know.

Speaker 1

I just got to sigh.

Speaker 3

I mean, that's why I apologize. It's like, oh my goodness. I think I had a blind spot.

Speaker 1

Dave and Ann, as I listened to that, my first response is, my heart just aches. And I can relate to it. 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. I didn't know who to talk to or how to engage with other people, and I wasn't really connecting to what was happening around me. That whole misfit experience, I think, resonates deeply.

Speaker 5

Is really Real 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 sen. But that's where we go.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

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 they're 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 ask, you go the extra mile to make it really clear that they are welcome, they belong, they're part of this.

Speaker 2

What does that look like, Ron?

Speaker 1

Well, let me give you a very concrete example. As she was talking about the experience of, okay, look who signed up for the family retreat. So 37 couples. Couples equals family clear. That's the clear message. And she heard it loud and clear. It's like, oh, within 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. Twenty 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. You know, if you're breathing, you're a 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 and first-time married couples with children under the age of five, you're in this room, and we didn't do that at all. We put people together in their class discussions, we put them together in their activities. Like 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.

Speaker 3

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

Speaker 5

Well, I think it's just simply that they don't know. But here's where the reality is, Dave: those of us who are in non-traditional families need to be the ones 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 the initiative to go to those in leadership and say, "Please start talking in a language that can relate to everyone."

My pastor was happy to change their language. It's just a matter of them needing help being educated.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Back to your question. I don't know exactly. I think it depends, you know, church to church, pastor to pastor, what the reasons are. But I do think sometimes we're so cautious about not offending people.

Speaker 5

Right.

Speaker 1

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? Like, you know, 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.

Instead of being afraid and doing nothing, I think we need to be proactive and invite and welcome everyone.

Speaker 2

Gayla, let me ask you, could you coach us? Because I know that Dave has had people approach him as a pastor, saying, "Hey, I feel like you're missing us."

So, could you coach people on how they could say something? I guarantee so many have felt that label of being a misfit or not sure. You know, they might be 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"?

Speaker 3

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

Speaker 5

Yeah. I think you always want to start with some kind of gratitude, though, 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.

Speaker 1

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 is that 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. 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% who are single parents. We cannot ignore that. We cannot ignore that. Like 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 just went blind," you can't just hand out regular Bibles anymore. You're going to figure out we would go 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.

Speaker 2

You're listening to Family Life 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?

Speaker 3

That is true.

Speaker 2

And as a family life partner, your monthly gift helps bring the truth into homes every single day through podcasts, events and resources.

Speaker 3

So let's make a lasting difference together. Become a partner today. Just go toFamily Life Today.com and click the donate button.

Speaker 2

Ron, help us too. And you too, Gayla.

How can we as a church, like, what could this look like?

Like, in that library, suddenly you have a lot of, you know, blended single. You've got, like, should there be classes?

What can we be doing that would be different?

Speaker 1

Guys, I got so many thoughts about that. Let me just hit a couple of them. First of all, I 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. 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, 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 teenagers over here. Let's put the single parents over here. Let's put the singles in a singles group. Well, if you're college age, that's different than a 20-something or early 30-something. 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 group. 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. Couples complain a lot about each other. Like, you need to learn some gratitude for the person that you get to, you know, lie in bed with every night and talk about life and make decisions. I don't get that. There's a perspective that everybody has to share where iron sharpens iron, and you’ve got single adults sitting in a room with couples, and everybody's learning how to put on self-control about single sexuality and 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

That is what I'm thinking. 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.

Speaker 5

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, guys.

Speaker 1

And let me just add this to our conversation today. I think this needs to be said. Let's jump around to the other side. There may be somebody listening with a little hesitation. I don't know about the single parent thing or the fact that 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, no.

What 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. 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 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 that life is hard and difficult, and we're going to get in the trenches with one another. That's church.

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.

Speaker 2

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, you know, 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?

Speaker 5

I think about what you have often said: 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 gonna get it right.

The more that we allow others to see that part of our heart that is broke, the more that we can minister and come together in the body of Christ. 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. Just don't hide it.

Speaker 1

Yeah, 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 in 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 say, you're in a time of need, you belong here.

Speaker 2

God loves you, he's with you.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

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 Gailey said it earlier, the title of the book is Grace. Are they feeling judgment? 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.

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

Speaker 1

Oh yeah. Gayla and I will both be a part of our next Blended and Blessed. 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 get 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 live stream 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. So you can get the link for Blended and Blessed, just click the show notes and it'll get you connected.

Speaker 3

And that's at familylifetoday. Com.

Speaker 2

Family Life today is a donor supported ministry, a family life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.