Leading out of Healthy Singleness
Pete Scazzero's thoughts for single women in youth ministry
Previously, I mentioned that a pastor shared with me an insight for single leaders from Pete Scazzero’s The Emotionally Healthy Leader. After he did so, I picked up the book and read the whole section on singleness he referred to. Because it was helpful, I want to pass on the wisdom to single women in youth ministry.
In the book, Scazzero offers practices for leaders’ inward and outward lives, which help us move toward greater emotional health and therefore greater spiritual health and healthier spiritual leadership. One chapter focuses on leading out of your marriage or your singleness. I found it refreshing that Scazzero chose to address both married and single leaders and offered wisdom on what it looks like to lead out of what he calls “healthy singleness.” Because this topic is so often neglected or barely touched on, I was grateful he spent just as much time discussing singleness as marriage.
The thrust of his instruction to single leaders is this: Both married and single leaders need to “lead out of an overflow of love.” In the same way that married people in ministry need to prioritize and tend to their marriages, single people need to invest in and tend to a healthy singleness. After your relationship with God, this is your next highest priority as a single person. He suggests that pursuing healthy singleness involves devoting yourself to excellent self-care, cultivating community, and practicing hospitality. These are the things that will keep singles’ buckets filled and their lives full of loving, life-giving relationships and companionship.
Some of the stories he shares made me realize that we don’t tend to consider the importance of friendships for single ministry leaders. He relates a story of a single leader who, along with other single leaders, was asked to stay later after a retreat to clean up, while her married peers were instructed to go home to spend time with their spouses. Afterward, she shared with her supervisor that she felt he was overlooking and taking for granted just how important her community and friendships were to her. Just as married leaders need time for their spouses, single leaders need time for their close relationships — and that actually takes more effort for them, not less!
It occurred to me that I’ve heard supervisors and pastors instruct the younger married people I’ve worked with to make decisions about ministry commitments in light of how it will affect their marriage. When considering new commitments, they would instruct these married leaders to consider if it would negatively affect their marriage and to ask their spouse for input on the decision.
However, I don’t recall any of these same people asking me as a single person to think through how my ministry commitments would affect my friendships. Would I have enough time for community if I said “yes” to this new thing? What did my friends think about me taking on more commitments?
Perhaps they didn’t think to ask these questions because they’ve never been a single ministry leader, and so it didn’t really occur to them. At the same time, the priority of personal relationships seems like an obvious value in the kingdom of God. God made us for relationships, and we don’t thrive when we lack rich, life-giving community and relationships with God’s people. When we are not first experiencing and receiving love, it is hard for us to love others. We cannot pour from an empty cup.
In some ways, I’d like to think that maybe these supervisors didn’t ask me the same questions because they thought I was doing a better job of saying “no” when needed and not taking on more than I could handle. However, I really don’t think that’s the full story. I think there’s a wider neglect of this conversation within Christian circles. In many circles, you’ll hear plenty of conversations about prioritizing the health of one’s marriage and family above ministry. But there’s a wider conversation about the importance of friendships and community that needs to include singles (and needs to not just offer marriage as the solution to a single person’s loneliness — but that’s another topic altogether!). In that regard, it seems Scazzero is pointing us in good direction, one that recognizes that everyone needs a storehouse of love and relationships they are drawing from.1
In the church, we all need to be taught and equipped to pursue and prioritize healthy relationships and community which fuel us for our callings.
So, single women in youth ministry, what are the relationships that are fueling you, and how can you prioritize them?
However, I wish he would go further in that, and also tell married people that they need to pursue life-giving friendships and not put the full weight of their need for love onto their spouse. (To be fair, I haven’t finished the whole book, so maybe he addresses this somewhere else… but it seems like it should’ve been included in this chapter in some form.)