Zeal For Truth

The author of Reaching Single Adults: An Essential Guide for Ministry is Dennis Franck, who is a long time Singles Pastor in the Assemblies of God denomination. He does manage to keep his denomination’s particularities out of view however. The book is aimed at helping Evangelical churches to retain their single adults and to reach out to unchurched singles. The need for this book stems from the fact that singles are less likely to attend church than married couples.

Franck does a good job in providing an overview of the diverse single adult demographic. He gives five categories (some of which can overlap):

1) Never-married
2) Divorced
3) Widowed
4) Single parent
5) Separated (they are living as a single even if they legally aren’t)

These groups can have widely different needs and outlooks, and thus the challenge facing singles leaders is immense. Older, windowed singles often don’t identify themselves by their singles status, and there’s quite a bit of difference between a divorced 45 year-old who has kids with a never married 25 year old who doesn’t have kids.

Another strong point of the book is Franck’s contention that singles need biblical teaching that addresses issues from the singles perspective. This often is not done during the Sunday morning sermon, and sometimes it’s not easy or perhaps even advisable to do so in that environment.

Criticism
Franck’s general philosophy appears to be “build it and they’ll come.” He notes that churches that have ministries for single adults have more single adults attending their church than churches that don’t have singles’ programs. It may be true that singles programs help attract singles to churches (an assumption Franck makes while offering little support for it), however it’s precisely churches that already have a significant number of singles that are likely to start singles programs. Churches with few singles are not very likely to see impressive growth in the group simply by starting a targeted ministry.

Furthermore, I’m a bit leery of this marketing type of approach of determining a sub-group and then launching programs for it. I do think some group meetings are good, but many churches need to do a better job of integrating singles in to the life of the church as a whole. Franck is not against singles participating in the whole life of the church of course, but it’s a very minor focus of the book.

The stat that 44% of American adults are single is proclaimed on the book’s back cover and is quoted throughout the book. This is quite a bit misleading however as it is arrived at by counting everyone over the age of 15 as an adult. The reason given for this definition is that some states allow marriage at 15.

Franck spends over half the book discussing various models of singles ministry and all the people and resources that are needed to run them. It becomes quite a bit repetitive at times, and the ideas are often not that useful for smaller churches. For instance, a church of 300 people is not likely to be able to support a Singles Pastor, nor be able to field a large team of volunteers to assist in such a ministry.

Final Opinion
How churches interact with singles (and the somewhat overlapping young adult group) is an issue that I’m interesting in. However, I didn’t find this book very useful or interesting, and would probably only recommend it to someone who was planning to start a singles ministry at their church and who had never lead anything before.