Remember the story of Hagar, the mother who had been thrown out into the desert by Abraham and Sarah to fend for herself and her son the best she could? Remember how she didn’t think she and her son were going to survive? In this story from Genesis 21, Hagar provides us a powerful picture of the loneliness, struggle, and feelings of hopelessness that some single parents may experience.
Some of my recent study has reinforced a long-held conviction about ministry: Churches should intentionally, aggressively, and consistently shape their ministries to target the needs of single parent families.
Statistically, somewhere between 70% and 95% of single parents and their children are not connected to any church family. We are failing to reach these adults and children whose needs, struggles, and stresses are crying out for the love, support, encouragement, and assistance that a truly caring church family could offer in abundance.
The single parent household is a growing segment of our population. A recent news story reported that 80% of the households in Richmond, Virginia were single parent households. The number of single parent households has basically tripled over the last three decades. Some might think this is just a problem among racial minorities, but in North Carolina, 30% of “Non-Hispanic White” children are being raised in single parent homes. I hesitate to bring race into the discussion, but I know we have a tendency to say, “Yes, but that’s ‘those other people.’” This is everyone’s issue, and, regardless of the ethnicity of the children, this is every Christian’s concern.
Think about the needs a caring church family could meet:
- Providing a single parent with some “emergency contacts” to get a child home from some activity or to take them somewhere when the single parent is double-booked or held up at work or by an unexpected crisis.
- Giving them opportunities to be with other adults for conversation and to talk through problems in a place where their children are being cared for and are having fun.
- Providing them with love, acceptance, and encouragement in a world where they may feel judged or looked down upon by others for their family circumstances.
- Supplying them with home-grown vegetables in the summer, or buying a few extra items for them on your regular food shopping run, to stretch their grocery money.
- Showing them that, while they may feel forgotten and alone with their burdens, God remembers them and God’s people remember them and are eager to reach out in love.
- Planning and scheduling our ministries so that we don’t make it harder for them to participate -- making sure we consistently provide childcare or ministry groups for their children, and that we don’t expect them to be at the church building so much that they don’t have time to take care of the household tasks they are carrying alone.
So how do we do this? A good beginning point would be to examine every activity we offer and every ministry we plan by asking, “How easy would it be for a single parent with a toddler and a 3rd grader (or 7th grader) to participate in this?” And if the answer is “not very easy,” then we scrap it and go back to the drawing board.
And, if anyone should say, “Why are you leaving out the two parent families in your strategy?” the easy answer is: these parents are over-booked, too. If we plan events with the stresses of single parents in mind, our two parent families will also benefit from that new approach. It’s a win-win.
We are in the "win" business, right?
