How the church lost the plot on singleness
In much of contemporary Christianity, singleness is treated as a waiting room — a temporary state to endure until marriage arrives. Youth groups prepare teenagers for future spouses. Sermons on relationships assume a married audience. The rhythms of church life — family services, couples' retreats, parenting programmes — quietly communicate that the married, nuclear family is the normative Christian life.
This is a significant departure from the witness of the New Testament. Jesus himself was single. Paul was single, and wrote at length about the particular freedoms and dignities of that state. The early church honoured celibacy as a high calling, not a consolation prize. Somewhere along the way, especially in reaction to Catholic traditions, much of Protestant Christianity overcorrected — and in doing so, left an enormous number of people feeling that their lives were somehow incomplete.
What Scripture actually says
Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 7 are striking precisely because they are so counter-cultural, both in his own time and in ours. "I wish that all of you were as I am," he writes — meaning single. He is careful to acknowledge that this is not a command, and that marriage is a genuine good. But his point is clear: singleness is not merely tolerable. It is, in certain respects, advantageous. The unmarried person is "free from concern" and able to give themselves to the Lord's work in ways that the married person, rightly occupied with their spouse and family, cannot.
Jesus, in Matthew 19, speaks of those who have "renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven" — and he calls this a calling that not everyone can receive, but a genuine and honourable one nonetheless. These are not obscure proof texts. They are central to the New Testament's vision of the Christian life, and they have been largely lost in contemporary church culture.
Singleness as vocation, not absence
The key shift is moving from understanding singleness as the absence of marriage to understanding it as a calling in its own right. A vocation is not defined by what it lacks but by what it is oriented toward. The single person's life, lived faithfully, is oriented toward undivided devotion to God and neighbour. It points toward the coming kingdom, where, as Jesus himself noted, there will be no marriage. In this sense, celibate Christians are living signs — imperfect ones, like all Christian witness — of a reality that is coming.
This is not abstract theology. It has practical implications for how we structure our churches, how we preach, how we form community, and how we honour and support those who are called to singleness. A church that treats singleness as a problem to be solved will produce single people who feel like problems. A church that treats it as a vocation will produce single people who feel like the image-bearers of God that they are.
For SSA Christians specifically
For those who experience same-sex attraction and hold to traditional biblical ethics, celibacy is not simply a season of waiting for the right person. It may be a lifelong vocation. This is a hard thing, and we do not wish to minimise it. Grief is an appropriate and honest response to the things we do not get to have.
But grief and vocation are not mutually exclusive. Many SSA Christians have found, over time, that the life they are called to — though not the life they would have chosen — is genuinely fruitful, genuinely meaningful, and genuinely inhabited by the grace of God. Their witness to the rest of the church is precisely this: that a life can be whole without being what the culture, or even the church, tells us a whole life must look like.
The church's responsibility
If we are going to invite SSA Christians into a life of celibacy, the church must take seriously its corresponding obligation. Celibacy, in the New Testament, was never meant to be lived in isolation. The early church was a network of households, of deep and committed friendships, of people who shared meals and resources and lives. The single person was embedded in genuine community.
We cannot call people to celibacy and then leave them to live it alone. That is not faithfulness — it is cruelty dressed up as orthodoxy. The recovery of singleness as a vocation must go hand in hand with the recovery of the kind of community that makes that vocation liveable. This is one of the things Reclaim Ministries exists to support.