Fellowship Archives - Sassy Single Saved

Category: Fellowship

In church, connection to others is incredible and helps us grow–so developing single women fellowship is important. However, it is often overlooked. We need to develop connection through messages, prayers, and devotionals. Here is where you can also find connection to other Christian single women who think like you.

How Our Friendships Change as We Age

One day in either our 30s or 40s we look around at our friend circle and it’s completely different than it was a decade or two prior–and we just don’t know how it happened. Just like us, our careers, and everything else…our friendships change as we age.

Why is does that happen, and should we be concerned that our friendships aren’t the same as they were in our teens and 20s? I would say for the most part it’s a natural thing that friendships evolve, so we shouldn’t be overly concerned that our friendships are a little different than they were before.

Why Friendships Evolve

Let’s look at the reasons friendships evolve. That might help ease some of the fears of how our friendships change as we age:

God moves us forward. When God moves us forward, He sometimes has us leave some things behind. Those “things” we leave behind might be friends that aren’t helping us in our relationship with Him. So who we were friends with in our 20s, going clubbing with in college, crashing with on weekends–that might not be the crowd we want in our lives right now.
Women get married and pregnant in their mid-20s. Yes, I know, I’m talking to single women. However, I’m not talking about YOU getting pregnant (though some of you may be single moms). I’m talking about when your friends couple up, have kids, and then they suddenly forget how to include you in their lives. It’s a phenomenon almost every single women over 30 has experienced. It’s also part of the issue with how we experience our singlehood in church, too. Our relationships with our friends change just because of their marital and family status.
Priorities change. Priorities are also a big reason why our friendships change as we age. It plays into why our married friends with kids may not see us as often. However, it’s not just on their side. We’re single women building our own lives and our own careers. We’re managers and business owners. We have our own priorities going on, and we need people who will support us. As our priorities change, how we relate to those around us changes.
We go through some major stuff. As we age, things start to happen in our lives that are both really really good and amazingly bad. Some of us grow our companies and climb corporate ladders. Others may be raising amazing children on our own. There are single women who may be caring for elderly family. Some may have lost family members, homes, jobs…the list goes on. We go through some big things that we couldn’t imagine in our 20s, because we were both naive and self absorbed at that point. So we surround ourselves with a smaller circle of people we can trust with these major milestones in our lives.
You choose better investments. Friendships take time. As we age, time seems to shrink. It goes by so quickly, and we have to invest our time wisely. One thing we do gain as we grow older (hopefully!) is wisdom. We can, and should, use that wisdom to invest in the right people and have our circle of friends be one of support and love. They should encourage us to grow in our lives and in our faith.

Change in Friendships is Encouraging

Looking at the reasons friendships change as we age, it’s actually encouraging. While we may mourn the loss of some of our “fun” friends who made us laugh way back when, we now have a group of people we really need. And honestly ask yourself, could you still do that stuff you did in your 20s? I know I can’t. Last time I pulled an almost all-nighter, I paid the price of it for a week! I love my close group of friends now, who are still fun, still amazing, and maybe a little crazy, too. But I’ll take nights with a little wine, singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs in the living room after some deep philosophical discussion any time! I look on those nights with as much fondness as sorority madness and last-minute road trips to nowhere.

God Puts Us Where He Wants Us

We need to keep in mind that God will move us to where we need to be in our lives. He puts us in the right place at the right time, and he will push us to move on. In Exodus, He pushed the Israelites to keep moving forward.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. – Exodus 14:15

It might not always be as obvious to us that we’re moving forward. Sometimes we’ll just look around and say, “What happened?” However, God just has His hand in there, pushing, moving, acting in our lives. He moves our friends around, and so do we. It’s natural and ever evolving. So hold your friends close today, and remember that the real friends, the ones who will support you always, will be with you because God placed them in your life. Appreciate the time your have with those you love.

Featured / March 26, 2021April 29, 2021

Creating Boundaries in Church: Single Women are Servants, Not Slaves

I keep reading in well-meaning articles about how the Church relies so much on singles, because it was built on it–especially single women. After all, single women are servants to the church, and the most reliable of servants. Churches teach us to have Mary’s heart, but expected to work like Martha. Which brings me to my objection…single women are servants to the church, not slaves to it., and it creates a situation where we have to learn about creating boundaries in church.

So why this Mary-Martha conundrum? It’s a bit of a twisted thinking, really. First, when most churches say that singles built the church, they really want to say that they believe single MEN built the church. If you read through the New Testament, women don’t really have prominent roles after Jesus’ ascension. I get it. Men assembled the Bible and wrote the epistles. For centuries, patriarchal societies allowed only men to tell the stories from pulpits. We can analyze that one all day and for years…so let’s no go down that rabbit hole right now, because we’ve got enough to deal with.

The resulting consequence of the erasure of women from these prominent roles in Biblical stories (and from history as a whole, let’s be honest), is that men start to get this idea that THEY are the ones who did all the work. Never mind the good old saying, “teamwork makes the dream work,” eh? However, there were plenty of women involved in building the church, and building the churches we know and love. We may not know all their names and faces, but they were there.

Therein lies one of the problems in this patriarchal and outdated viewpoint. Too many single women are expected to do the work that keeps the church moving, but they must do so in an invisible manner. Sure, we are all called to servanthood. That’s just an expectation of our faith. No one should be expecting gold medals or call-outs from the pulpit.

However, we cannot keep going to churches were we are expected to do work, work, and more work to keep the church operating while we are not being spoken to from the pulpit. Again, single women are servants to the church, not slaves to it.

Excuses, Excuses…

The excuses for this over emphasis on single women giving all of themselves to the church has its roots in so many fallacies. The biggest one? No family obligations. Oh, really? Some of us are single moms or have older parents that we care for at home. There are those of us with pets (and they do take work). Many single women are the only breadwinners in our household, and we have to work full time hours.

Another excuse is that it gives us a chance to meet single men. Oh really? Because so many single men our age are volunteering in the nursery where you’ve placed us? Or cooking in the kitchen for the church barbecue? Oh, wait…they’re also volunteering to send out invitations for the church auction? Nope. Women are much much more involved in these activities. Plus, there are far more women attending church than men anyhow. After a certain age, men really aren’t doing these things, either.

I’ve also heard horribly rude excuses, too. Sometimes we’re asked to do this background work for the church because it will keep us away from the married men. Oh yes, I said it. We’re just too much of a temptation for those married men, and the wives are fearful of us Jezebel-like single women. If you can’t hear my eyes rolling, they are. As if we’ve just been holding out our whole lives for a married man.

Boundaries in Church Mean Asks Not Expectations

Sometimes the work is just expected of us. No one even asks if it’s okay. This is where the harsh reality sets in, and we have to really learn about creating boundaries in church. If we say no to volunteering, suddenly we’re made to feel so guilty. Like our singleness means we have no life outside of the church, so why can’t we do the work? As if we are nuns who took a vow to live our lives for the church itself.

I’m tired of reading articles that tell me how important I am to keeping the church running because my singleness is a gift to the church. It’s not a gift to the church. It is a gift God gave me. My story behind my singleness is mine, but it doesn’t belong to any church. It belongs to me and God. No church owns my singleness or my time. It doesn’t own yours either. Boundaries!

Now, I don’t want to discourage anyone from getting in some Martha time. I loved my time in youth ministry, and I wouldn’t have given it up for the world. I just want everyone to know they can say no. They don’t have to be slaves to their church, because the church doesn’t own them. There is a difference between faith and the church, and a difference between giving yourself to Jesus and giving yourself to the church.

We are busy single women. We have jobs. Our single lives are just as full and fulfilling as our married churchgoers have. Just because we want to help doesn’t mean we have to help, which is what creating boundaries in church is all about. It’s about us setting the rules that we have set with God, not rules that the church arbitrarily sets. Single women are servants to the church, not slaves to it. We need to remind people of that.