Single people (not) at church

There's an interesting stat from a recent Barna report entitled, Who is Active in “Group” Expressions of Faith? Whether similar figures apply to NZ, I don't know, but it's a possibility.

• Religious activities are typically missing single adults, especially those who have never been married. Just less than half of Americans are unmarried. [see below] However, the Barna study found that two-thirds of those who attend church, participate in a small group and attend Sunday school are married.
Further, 69 percent of church volunteers are married.
Fewer than one-fifth of single adults who have never been married are involved in "group" faith experiences, with worship and volunteering the least likely to attract them.
Those participating in house churches, however, reflect a 50-50 split of married and unmarried.

The NZ Stats relating to marital status from the 2006 Census are as follows:

• 34.1 percent of people aged 15 years and over living in New Zealand have never married
• 48.6 percent are married,
  
• 17.4 percent are separated, divorced or widowed
  
  The other important stat in this are is that:
• 27.2 percent of people aged 15 years and over in New Zealand who have never been married live with a partner.

This last is a subgroup of the 'never married' category above. In effect, it says that more than a quarter of the people who have never married are not single, but living in a relationship. However, this still leaves just over 70% of the first group as single people.

To make it a little easier to grasp:
If 34 people out of a hundred have never been married, 9 will be living in a relationship, and 25 will be 'officially' single. Add these 25 to the 17 or so who are separated, divorced or widowed, and you have 42 people in a hundred who are effectively single.

Please tell me if I've got my maths wrong! :)

How do we find ways of encouraging single adults into the church scene without making them feel uncomfortable because of all the married people around them?

The abuse has to stop

Muriel Newman writes in her weekly NZ Centre for Political Research newsletter:
For years, governments have shied away from getting to the heart of the child abuse crisis because that means tackling the incentives in legislation that is leading to increasingly higher rates of family breakdown - especially amongst Maori families which feature disproportionately in the child abuse statistics. If marriage leads to a safer family environment for children, then the census data on the rates of marriage amongst Maori and non-Maori shows a very worrying trend: in 2001, while 79.5 percent of partnered non-Maori couples were married only 58.8 percent of Maori couples were married. And by 2006 the rates of marriage had fallen to 78.6 percent for non-Maori and 54 percent for Maori.

Unless the incentives in the domestic purposes benefit are changed to stop encouraging single parenting, all the good intentions in the world will not halt the rise in child abuse. And with the problem being an intergenerational one, whereby children raised in fragmented families and abusive homes will tend to repeat that behaviour on their own children, addressing this problem must surely rank at the highest end of the new government’s priority list.

And John Sax adds, in an article called, Redefining Compassion:

Drugs, alcohol and poverty are generally purported to be the breeding ground for child abuse but the statistics also hold another common element. Global social scientists tell us that on average there is a 1400 percent increase in child abuse and a 1600 percent increase in child murder when children are brought up in a relationship other than marriage – live-in boyfriends, stepdads, de facto relationships and so on.
Unfortunately we find ourselves now in a society where social policy - as compassionate and heartfelt as it is - not only discourages the very unions that could provide the safest environment for children, but, by its very nature, encourages a cycle of generational poverty, and drug and alcohol abuse.