When 18 single adults get together for their weekly Wednesday night meeting at Christ Church United in Lowell, Mass., they abide by one strict rule: thou shalt not date anyone in the group. "It's a place for working through your own issues," says the Rev. Virginia McDaniel, pastor of the church. "It's not a place to get matched up."

In other words, it's not a place to view singleness as a problem that the church needs to solve by encouraging marriage. Being single is increasingly seen as a condition to be accepted, whether as a temporary challenge or a lifelong blessing, in a religious landscape where singles groups in churches are being transformed.

Across the nation, religious communities of varied stripes are taking steps to welcome the growing the number adults who have chosen - at least for now - not to marry.

According to US Census projections, singles will constitute nearly one-third of American households by 2010. Already, the nation's 86 million unmarried adults make up 42 percent of the workforce and 35 percent of voters.

Conversely, the most recent Census numbers show that married-couple households have dropped from nearly 80 percent in the 1950s to just 50.7 percent today.

The demographic shift means a vast cultural challenge for family-centered

institutions to embrace everyone from young adults postponing nuptials, to divorcees choosing singleness, to widows and widowers who have lived with a partner for years.

As congregations adjust, singles ministries with a match-making undertone are giving way to new projects meant to weave individuals into the wider fabric of community life. But whether these single lifestyles are being blessed, tolerated, or gently criticized varies largely along regional and denominational lines.

"I will probably leave this church the day we announce we're having a singles ministry function," says the Rev. Marc Dickmann, pastor of Commitment at Warehouse 242, an evangelical church in Charlotte, N.C. "Our vision of community is not one of ostracizing or isolating single people as lost souls. The attitude of churches used to be: 'You aren't married. What's wrong with you?' But we know it doesn't work that way for everybody."

In Charlotte, where conservative megachurches flourish, virtually everyone wants to find a mate, and singles often wonder why God hasn't provided one, according to Mr. Dickmann's experience. Warehouse 242 responds by exhorting all singles to retain "sexual purity" until marriage, while urging them to ask, in small groups where married and single people come together discuss scripture, popular literature or movies, "What does God want to teach me at this stage of my life?"

But in Portland, Ore., and Tacoma, Wash., Reform Jews packed meeting halls in December to begin developing rituals for marking milestones in the lives and relationships of single people. Some voiced concern about "cheapening" the value of marriage by blessing other relationships, but Rabbi Richard Address instead expects a redefinition of a contemporary Jewish family.

"It's a real struggle to make divorced people feel welcome because congregations send out such a feeling of coupled-ness," says Mr. Address, director of Jewish Family Concerns for the Union of Reform Judaism. "But this project [of creating rituals for singles] represents the next 30 years of Reform Judaism."

Page: 1 | 2