“This is something I’m always very keen to say, is that I think a lot of people expect my book on singleness to be an anti-marriage book, and those who’ve read it will know that’s not the case at all.”
“Marriage and singleness need each other to make sense of each other.”
“One of the incredible joys of eternity that I suspect we don’t think about quite as much is that we as the church will actually have interpersonal relationships with each other for eternity.”
“There are depths to plumb [from Matthew 22] on the dignity and significance of singleness here and now in the way that it also [in addition to marriage] foreshadows or points towards or gives us some glimpse of actually another aspect of the world to come.”
“My singleness itself inherently, intrinsically has theological dignity and significance for the sake of the church here and now.”
“I want to encourage married pastors to actually see this as a ministry that they’re called to exercise, which also means I want to encourage single Christians to not be resentful when they hear married pastors teaching about singleness.”
“I suspect that a lot of married pastors are just unaware of perhaps how many people in their church communities aren’t married, what the variety of situations and contexts and circumstances for those people are, and how many people in their communities that they’re seeking to evangelize with the gospel are not married.”
“We as a church, the contemporary church do need to have a bit of a reckoning with the way that we have idolized and idealized marriage and family.”
“We have so often seen singleness and marriage as a zero sum game where if you are speaking highly of one, you are seen to automatically be diminishing the other.”
“[Marriage and singleness] are meant to hang next to each other so that when you look at them together, you can see the beauty in the detail of one in contrast to the other. If you turn the light off on one, if you shroud one of them over, then actually the other one gets diminished.”
“We can honor marriage by honoring singleness and we can honor singleness by honoring marriage. And that, again, I think comes back to us being willing to think the best of each other in these conversations.”
“I think pastors can be really good at encouraging families to open their lives to single people. Where I think the challenge can be is we don’t want single people to feel like they belong to the church because they get to be adopted into some sort of nuclear family. Actually, the church is a family together. Singles belong in the church just as much as married people do.”
