ArticleBlog | Case Study Honoured Singles: dating dilemmas
Case Study Honoured Singles: dating dilemmas
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 06.06.19
Whatever anyone says, in my humble opinion, dating as a single Christian is a nightmare.
You could date someone you know from your church but if it doesn’t work out, there’s the awkward aftermath of trying to worship together and make polite conversation at the coffee hatch. Or you could enter the terrifying world of internet dating, where you step into the unknown and risk the pitfalls of possible rejection or evenings spent in the company of a veritable stranger who wants to talk about the various dents in their car and how they acquired them (not hypothetical!).
In my own situation, I have the added complication of being a single mum in my early 30s – a more unusual status for a single Christian, very committed to my faith. I find many of the single people I meet are much older or much younger than I am, and it can feel very isolating as most of my friends are married with families.
This is why in 2017 I felt led to begin Honoured – a movement for single Christians. The aim was to both support and encourage Christians through the rollercoaster of dating and singleness as well as to provide relaxed, enjoyable events for people to attend where they could connect and make friends, as well as having the potential to make a romantic connection face-to-face.
So this is what we’ve done.
Honoured events
As we are run by singles (mainly between 25-35) we can consider which events we’d actually like to go to – making sure that they’re not ‘cringy’ or patronising. Having been to several awful single events, I was determined that people leaving our events would feel positive about their singleness; not like they wanted to run home, bury themselves in Netflix and forget the whole evening! I began hosting the events with a few faithful married friends who came to make up the numbers but slowly more people got involved until we had single hosting teams running events in Manchester, Nottingham and London.
We’ve run ping pong evenings, bowling, tapas, coffee-tasting, breakfast events: the list goes on. We target most of our events at different age groups, as historically Christian single groups are mostly attended by those over 40 which we found was off-putting for younger people. We are trying to run more events for age groups ranging over 40 and are recruiting more volunteers to host these. We also run events open to all ages, like our single leaders’ breakfasts, where we meet together with single Christians in any kind of leadership to encourage and inspire each other.
We find that all our followers enjoy these events being run by a movement outside of their own church – somewhere they can meet new people with whom to share the highs and lows of being single. We’re particularly passionate at reaching people in smaller churches who might be the only single person in their Christian community.
