You’re going to be single forever!

When I heard that Japan Harvest was doing an issue on singleness, I just knew that I needed to interview my friend Dani Treweek. Dani is single herself and has studied singleness as a pastoral and theological issue. Through her studies, she has rediscovered that the world to come, heaven, gives great meaning to the state of singleness. That’s because of what Jesus says in Matthew 22:23–33, an incredible passage and one of the most specific revelations of what the new creation reality will be, according to Dani: “Jesus reveals this massive spoiler about eternity, which is that there won’t be human marriage. We will be like the angels, that is, unmarried and celibate.” Singleness is a foretaste of what we will experience in relating to each other for all eternity, and “it is the single Christian’s privilege to actually be able to live that out now.”

This helped address a concern Dani had as she thought about her own singleness and ministered to other single women. She felt that many churches focus on the undivided attention, or usefulness, that a single person’s life allows in God’s service. This seemed inadequate to Dani. But if there was something more to say to single men and women, she wanted that to be firmly rooted in the Bible.

“How do I make sure my pastoral heart is being informed by theological truth?” she asked.

Why study singleness?

Dani herself is single and has never been married. She grew up in Sydney in a Christian home with the “boring” but wonderful testimony of always knowing Jesus and growing to maturity in him. It was in her late twenties that it began to dawn on her that maybe marriage was not going to be around the corner. “I needed to grapple with this reality that it hasn’t happened and may not happen and what does that mean for me,” Dani said. “Not just how do I survive, but what do I think about singleness, and is that aligned with what God thinks about my singleness?”

In an ethics class at theological college, she was excited to hear for the first time that there is a relationship between singleness and the new creation, and she was eager to pursue the prospect of “exploring how the future informs the present.” After several years of pastoral ministry, particularly as a women’s worker at an Anglican church in Sydney, she was keen to write a book about the theology of singleness. She commented, “Within a month of thinking I was going to write a book on singleness, I had somehow signed up to do a PhD on singleness. . . . but I did a PhD to write the best book I could, something that would be useful.”

So what is the meaning of singleness?

Dani wanted to grapple with what God says “the purpose, the meaning, the definition, the significance of singleness, of not being married, is.” When teaching about singleness, the church is very good at focusing on 1 Corinthians 7:29–35 and its emphasis on undivided devotion, that meaning is found in how you use your singleness. “What I wanted to ask was is there something intrinsically meaningful about singleness, regardless of how we experience it?” Dani said. “We do that with marriage . . . messy marriages don’t mean that marriage is ever less meaningful. But we say singleness can only ever be meaningful as it is unmessy.” She wanted to explore whether or not this was true.

She is very excited about how the Bible and especially Matthew 22 answers her question: “God has a good and right purpose for the unmarried Christian life, regardless of what the context and circumstance is. It gives us a little glimpse of the life we are waiting for as members of the church together in Christ. The more I think about it, the more it baffles me that we have so downplayed verse 30.”

Dani points out that what Jesus reveals about the world to come, where we will all be unmarried, shows that marriage is not essential to human flourishing or to be fully human. “Instead [we will be] rejoicing in our brother and sister relationship with each other,” Dani said. “This reality ought to inform our understanding of the meaning of not being married in this world.”

Dani says that sometimes we think that if we value marriage, we have to see singleness as the opposite and as not good. She is adamant that we need to uphold both and that marriage and singleness need each other. They are not in competition but complementary. In different ways, both are reminders and a foretaste of the realities of the world to come.

What surprised you most from your study?

Dani had an idea that eschatology, a study of the end times, was key to understanding singleness but that she was possibly going to have to discover the connection. But if she was going to have to discover it, “then how true could it be?” To her amazement, what she found was not a new idea but consistent with over 1000 years of church history.

Many contemporary Christians are aware that the early and medieval church had a high view of the unmarried life, particularly focused on chastity, though they don’t have an awareness of the reasoning behind it. So much of early church thinking actually focused on eschatology, that “marriage is of this age, and we are living in light of the age to come,” Dani said.

What really surprised her was how consistent and “un-novel” that concept was until the Reformation. Now, she says, “we have forgotten that it even existed. The Reformation was so successful at rehabilitating marriage in some important ways that we have completely forgotten . . . the reason behind why singleness was seen as valuable and meaningful.”

Today’s church has the opportunity to remember this teaching, which contains a challenge, Dani says: “The unmarried life is deeply linked with the life to come. As Christians, we are longing for the life to come. So why would we desperately hold onto things of this life rather than embrace the foretaste of the next?”

What would you like to say to the Japan Harvest readers?

“Christian theology is necessary for us to get our pastoral care right,” Dani said. That’s because if we only focus on practical solutions for ministering to single people, we may miss the purpose God has for all people, single or married. “The way we bring long-term change and relational beauty between marrieds and singles in the church is by aligning our vision for marriage and singleness with God’s vision for it,” she says. We should be committed to “seeing practical change happen but making sure it is informed by solid biblical understanding.”

One of the ways that Dani has done this is by starting Single Minded Ministry. Their website contains some great resources that can help us think through many of the issues involved and how we can serve one another, both married and single, as we seek to serve our great God together.

Photo of Dani submitted by author