4. A Place at the Table: Singleness, Loneliness, and the Family of God

What happens when the church builds its life around marriage and the family, and treats everyone else as a guest still waiting in line? A woman, faithful for eleven years, tells her pastor she still feels like a problem nobody has worked out how to solve. A widower watches the casseroles stop two weeks after the funeral. And a church that follows a single Saviour, and learned its faith from a single apostle, keeps treating singleness as a condition to be cured.

In this episode, Graham explores singleness, loneliness, and the church's obsession with marriage through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the Bible's surprisingly high view of the single life, from "it is not good for the man to be alone" in Genesis 2, to Paul calling both marriage and singleness a gift in 1 Corinthians 7, to Isaiah's promise of a name better than sons and daughters, to the God of Psalm 68 who sets the lonely in families. He engages with voices like Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Rodney Clapp, alongside the research of Vivek Murthy, Robert Putnam, and John Cacioppo on the loneliness epidemic. And he asks why a church that follows a single Lord treats marriage as the summit of a faithful life, how we can honour marriage and singleness together without making either one the measure of the other, and what it would take for the church to become the family God always meant it to be.

Book recommendations: "7 Myths About Singleness" by Sam Allberry, "Redeeming Singleness" by Barry Danylak, and "Spiritual Friendship" by Wesley Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode:

https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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