How should we think about singleness?

I did not particularly plan to write anything about singleness, but I was asked to lead a seminar on it at church recently. A number of people remarked that helpful things had come up that they hadn’t heard before, so I’m putting the material online in the hope that it might be useful to others.

Singleness is a topic on which our culture is hopelessly confused, and bang out of step with the Bible. So you might expect that Christians would think and talk about it a lot – as we do, for example, with marriage. But my experience is that, while I’ve heard a fair bit of practical advice for singleness, I haven’t heard much by way of underlying theory. With marriage, we talk a lot about the practical stuff. We also talk a lot about the theory: what marriage is, how we should think about it, why it’s important. With singleness, we don’t seem to do so much of the work on “what is it? How should we think about it?” Perhaps the assumption is that once you’ve thought about marriage, you’ve done all the work you need to do.