Churches should strengthen their welcome for single Christians and ensure they feel fully valued in the life of their congregations, speakers at the inaugural Single Friendly Church Network conference have said.
The conference, titled ‘Belonging’, was held to initiate Single Friendly Church Week, a campaign by the Single Friendly Church Network seeking to inspire a culture shift in churches across denominations so that people can feel valued regardless of their relationship status.
Sorcha Connell, executive director of the Single Friendly Church Network, said churches across different denominations were often failing to recognise the social, emotional, spiritual and financial realities experienced by single Christians.
She suggested the problem was primarily “relational rather than doctrinal”, and warned against a model of church life in which Christian maturity can appear to be measured against expected relationship milestones.
“When we treat faith like a ladder we start believing that whoever is climbing fastest, whoever is hitting the expected milestones, is doing it right and whoever isn’t must be doing it wrong,” she said.
She continued: “The church was never meant to be a ladder, it was meant to be a table, wide enough and low enough for everyone in the room to feel included, to feel like they belong.”
Connell highlighted that singleness encompasses a wide variety of experiences, including people who have never married, those who are divorced or widowed, single parents, people actively dating, and Christians married to someone who does not share their faith.
She pointed to figures from the Office for National Statistics which show around 8.6 million people in the UK living alone. She also cited a 2012 Christian Connection survey of more than 3,000 single Christians, in which 43 per cent agreed that their churches “don’t know what to do with them”.
More recent research by the Single Friendly Church Network in 2026 underlined the importance of friendship. According to Connell, over 95 per cent of respondents said having Christian friends “mattered enormously to them”.
“Friendship is the chosen family. As a single person, that’s critical,” one participant told the organisation.
Connell said many churches have a strong family focus, with talks and courses for different groups but few specifically addressing single people, while church celebrations frequently centre on occasions like Mother’s and Father’s Day, weddings, engagements and births.
She also highlighted research by the network into single people’s experiences of Christmas. More than half of those surveyed said they would not attend their own church on Christmas Day. According to Connell, this was not because they had lost their faith, but because a day so strongly associated with family and togetherness could be painful for those experiencing it alone. Some said they would prefer to attend a carol service during Advent instead.
“I don’t say this to shame anyone’s Christmas dinner rota. Many churches do this beautifully,” she said. “But how single people actually feel in our congregations does not always seem to reach the people who are leading the worship, writing sermons, planning the year, organising events.”
She challenged churches to ask: “How do single people feel in your community?”
Connell said it was telling that when the network’s church engagement manager wears a “Jesus was Single” T-shirt at events, it causes people to “stop and consider this” and “sparks conversations”.
“We often subconsciously think ‘single’ means ‘alone’,” she said.
Jesus, she said, “was not single while waiting for another stage of life to begin, but throughout his adult life”. His example challenges the idea that having no spouse means having an incomplete life.
“When people hear the word ‘single’ they sometimes think it means isolated,” she said, pointing instead to the friendships and community surrounding Jesus throughout his ministry.
“Jesus was indeed single; his life was not incomplete,” she added.
The Single Friendly Church Network is seeking to bring about a culture shift in churches so that single Christians are welcomed and valued through every stage of life. The charity works ecumenically across denominations and traces its beginnings to concerns raised by single Christians in 2012 before its launch as a charity in 2023.
Jackie Elton, founder and trustee of Single Friendly Church, described how her own experience of singleness eventually contributed to the movement.
In her late twenties, she recalled speaking to her vicar about why she did not appear to be heading towards marriage. Instead of offering clichés about waiting and praying for the right person, she said he encouraged her to ask deeper questions about who she was and where her life was going.
Elton later launched the dating website Christian Connection in 2000. Initially, she believed online dating could effectively “solve the problem of singleness” by helping Christians marry. However, the experiences of people using the site complicated that assumption.
Elton said traditional approaches to singles ministry had also often reinforced the assumption that marriage was the ultimate destination.
“There’s been a lot of singles ministries, where a lot of them were for young people before they got married and telling them what to do before they got married and how to get married,” she said.
She continued: “They were very marriage focused, and were often led by married people.”
She recalled that Christian Connection itself initially approached singleness primarily through the lens of dating, but the experiences of people using the site began to challenge that assumption.
“It wasn’t just about dating,” she said. In her experience, some users were looking for community, events and an opportunity to talk about their experiences of church.
Those experiences eventually contributed to a major survey of single Christians. Around 3,000 people responded within a week, many using the opportunity to write at length about their experiences of church.
Elton said the response was “overwhelming”, with 42 per cent saying they felt their churches did not see them.
The answer, she concluded, could not simply be another programme for singles.
“We need to change culture, we need to change all those attitudes of people saying, ‘well we don’t really have any single people in the church’,” she said.
Rev Kate Wharton, a trustee of Single Friendly Church, turned the conference’s attention to mission and argued that becoming more welcoming to single people could strengthen the whole Church’s witness.
“Being single-friendly as a church isn’t just good news for single people. In fact it makes the whole church do better at community and that is good for mission,” she said.
Drawing on Acts 2, Wharton said the biblical picture of the Church was of believers sharing life, food, possessions, worship and mutual care.
She cautioned that churches can unintentionally organise themselves around an ideal of marriage, family and children rather than around Christ.
“When churches are built that way, almost certainly not on purpose, they create a hierarchy that says that some people’s lifestyles and relationships have more value than others, that marriage is the expected life destination, that singleness is just a waiting room,” she said.
Single-friendly churches could offer a compelling alternative by cultivating intergenerational friendships, hospitality, generosity and shared life, she suggested.
Churches also needed to think about which milestones they celebrate, Wharton said. Engagements, weddings and births are routinely marked, but significant moments in single people’s lives, such as moving home, starting a new job, graduating or receiving an award, may receive less attention.
Against a culture that still measures adulthood and success through a linear series of relationship and family milestones, Wharton said the Church has a different account of human flourishing to offer.
“Success in life is following Jesus, it’s our life being hidden with Christ,” she said.
She continued: “This is not just missionally relevant, it’s missionally imperative, we have a different story to tell and it is a far better story than the one our culture is trying to write.”
She concluded that singleness should perhaps not be regarded as a problem for churches to fix but as a challenge to rediscover what Christian community really means.
“We sometimes talk about singleness like it’s a problem the church needs to solve, but perhaps singleness is actually giving the church a question it needs to answer,” she said.
“What does it mean to belong to one another, because we belong to Christ?
“If we can become that kind of church, for people who arrive on their own we might discover that we are becoming much more like the church Jesus always intended for everyone.”
