The United States seems to have turned a corner. Working with U.S. Census data, this week the New York Times reported that probably for the first time most American women (51 percent) now live without a husband.
A few commentators quickly pointed out the findings are dubious since they include females aged 15 and older. Point taken: counting high-school girls would inflate numbers.
Even so, the study does compare head-to-head with previous studies, and the trends, if not the actual numbers, are indisputable: In 2000, 49 percent of women lived without a spouse; in 1950, the figure was 35 percent. Likewise, married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time in 2005.
Taken together, the surveys say the American household is changing and the traditional model American household – husband, wife, kids – is not the majority. We have reached “a clear tipping point,” William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, told the Times.
It’s hard to predict what changes this trend will bring. The Times speculated that it could “shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.”
What’s clear is that congregations will be affected along with everyone else. Religious communities, after all, focus keenly on the home: premarital counseling, children’s programs, care for the elderly and more. Many even organize their schedules around the family. So what happens when the shape or even the definition of “family” changes?
Celebration Church in Blountville has been dealing with such questions since 1998 – since it began, that is. The interdenominational church started with 28 members but now attracts about 2,500 worshipers to weekend services, many of them from nontraditional homes, according to Associate Pastor Robert Russell, whose duties include overseeing ministries to families.
“I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I would say this region is not significantly different from the rest of the country. We’re not isolated,” he said. “We have to deal with family issues in very different ways from what a church might have done 40 years ago.”
For example, three years ago the church hired Leigh Sexton – like Russell, a member of Celebration since it started – as a part-time staff member to coordinate its single-adults programs. Her job grew to full time last January.
“Celebration has tried to address the trends,” said Sexton, who’s 33 and recently married. “That (single-adult) demographic was growing, and the church leaders saw the need.”
Thus, besides the children’s and youth programs typical in many churches, Celebration organizes ongoing groups and activities for single adults, everything from Bible studies and worship services to a New Year’s party that drew more than 400 people. A new 12-step program, Celebrate Recovery, is designed to help adults and children who have come through divorces. The backbone of the ministry is its small groups, organized by age, that involve about 150 people every week.
“A lot of those who come are not members here but attend other churches,” according to Sexton. “Many of them feel like they’re looked down upon, especially those in their 40s who are divorced. They’re lonely inside their own church walls.”
Even the pastor’s messages, she said, aims to include single adults.
“There isn’t a preconceived notion of what we should be,” she said. “You’re still a soul, still valid, still have gifts.”
Russell echoes that message of acceptance. Being single is “a legitimate choice,” he said, and held up as an example a “godly” friend of his – almost 80, never married and, he believes, “called to a life of singleness.”
But he also sees a shadow in the decline of the “traditional family,” which he takes more as a sign of instability than of positive choices.
“I think there are pressures in our society not to marry – pressure to achieve in careers, pressures or maybe even fears what that kind of commitment would involve,” Russell said. “I think marriage is the hardest thing a person can do, but when done well, it’s one of the best things a person can do. Marriage is not easy, but to avoid it out of fear is not healthy.”
First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 20 January 2007.
