What motivates congregational leaders to invest the time and effort required to prepare a five-year or seven-year ministry plan?

A common motivation is to respond to the problems created by an inadequate or deteriorating or functionally obsolete meeting place. The architect may require a ministry plan in order to be able to design a new physical plant.

The motivation may be the approaching end of a long pastorate. That future-driven ministry plan is needed to be able to conduct informed discussions with potential successors.

A third motivation may be the aging and numerical shrinkage of the membership. This motivation often generates a high priority on answering the question, "Identify the points of commonality among the people who will constitute the majority of the next 100 adult new members who will join this congregation and explain why they will choose this congregation as their new church home." A common response is, "We hope they will be married couples with young children at home. We need them to replace our older members who are moving away or dying."

A completely different perspective is offered by one never-married woman born in the 1960s who is a committed Christian and has been an active churchgoer for decades, but a new job has forced her to change her place of residence. A few months later she reflects, "I've worshiped with 11 different congregations since I moved here. Three were sufficiently attractive that I have made a second or third visit. In every one, however, the focus is clearly on families. In several, older married couples dominate the scene. The combination of my age and the fact I'm single made it clear that it was not the place for me. In others, the focus clearly was on younger couples with children at home. In one church, the minister, who I learned later is the father of two teenagers, referred to the difficulties of rearing teenagers in four of the five stories he told to illustrate the theme."

What Do the Numbers Tell Us?
A brief side trip down Demographic Lane will help explain the relevance of that question. In 1960 the American population included 29 million women age 30 through 54. A total of 24.5 million, or 85 percent, were married, while 1.9 million, or 6.5 percent, were single, never-married women. The remaining 8.6 percent were either widowed or divorced. That population cohort represented the living survivors of women born in the 1906-1930 era.

We compare that group with American women born in the 1950-1974 era who constituted the age 30-54 cohort in 2004. The number of single, never-married women in that age group had grown to slightly more than 9 million, or four and a half times the 1960 number. Their proportion of the female population in that age 30-54 cohort in America doubled to 13 percent. In that same 44-year period, the number of divorced or widowed women age 30-45 nearly quadrupled to 9.4 million and to 17 percent of the 55 million age 30-54 in 2004.

In other words, three out of 10 women in 2004 in that age group were never married, or were divorced, or widowed. Does that proportion resemble the pattern among the adults who gather on Sunday morning to praise and worship God in your congregation?

As you complete the ministry plan for your congregation for the next three or four or five years, what do you project for your ministry with single women?

How Do Congregations Respond?
When asked how their ministry plan addresses the religious needs of never-married women born in the 1950-1974 era, we hear a variety of responses. The range is illustrated by these examples.

1. We welcome everyone, regardless of age or marital status! Our doors are always open to anyone who wants to join us as we gather to worship God.

2. That's who we are! Well over one half of the adults in church here on Sunday morning are women. Some are married, though most are widowed, divorced or never married, but we don't segregate by marital status. We wish we had more men and more younger adults, but we seem to attract older adults.

3. Our No. 1 priority is to help parents transmit the Christian faith to their children. That explains why we are trying to reach young married couples with children at home.

4. We have two big adult Sunday school classes composed largely of older people. One is coed and focused on both men and women, most of whom are in their 60s or older. The other is for women only and welcomes women of all ages, but only two of them are women in their 30s.

5. One of our strengths is our ministry with senior citizens. That includes a lunch every Tuesday plus a bus trip every month. We have a part-time Parish Nurse on the staff who is in charge of that ministry. Most of the teachers in our Sunday School also are women of all ages.

6. Three years ago, we began to offer a new divorce recovery mutual support group every September. That is open to both men and women. About a third of the members of our governing board also are women, but we don't discriminate by age or marital status.

7. Our ministries with women rank up there with worship and the Sunday School as our three strongest programs. We have a women's missionary society with four circles, a Wednesday morning combination worship service and Bible study that concludes with lunch and is composed largely of women who live alone. We also have two adult classes for women in the Sunday School, and a knitting group that meets here at the church every Thursday for three or four hours including lunch. And, about half of our committees are chaired by women.

8. About five years ago, we discovered that none of the Protestant congregations serving this community were reaching younger never-married women. We made that a high priority. Our first step was to respond to the question often asked by first-time visitors. "Is there anyone here who looks like me?" Three years later, the typical Sunday morning had at least 12 never-married younger women serving as volunteers. One or two are greeters, three are ushers, three are in our worship team, two are in the handbell choir, and a few help staff the information table in the narthex. Today we have a total of at least 20 never-married women serving as Sunday morning volunteers in the typical month. That does not include those in the chancel choir or teaching in the Sunday School. A number of our new members are younger single women who told us the reason they returned after that first visit was the number of women they saw who were not wearing wedding bands on the third finger of their left hand.

9. Six years ago, our minister retired after a 20-year pastorate. Two of the members on the search committee were single, never-married women in their 40s--one is a physician and the other is a lawyer. They persuaded the committee to look first for a second-career single woman. They found a woman who at age 33 had resigned as an assistant city manger to enter seminary. When we found her, she was in her fifth year as the pastor of a church in a county seat town. During her tenure, their worship attendance doubled from 70 to 145. The year before she arrived here, we were averaging 135 at worship, so we thought it would be a good match. After she arrived, one of our members arranged for interviews with her in the two largest newspapers in the state plus our local paper. During these six years, our worship attendance has more than doubled to close to 300. About half of our new members are single career women born after 1970.

10. Several years ago, we concluded that we were more effective at attracting new members than we were in assimilating them. At the time, we reported 341 confirmed members, and worship attendance averaged 132.We decided to expand the group life of our congregation to help people gain a stronger sense of belonging. We also added a second worship service to the Sunday morning schedule. That meant organizing a new worship team, adding more ushers, and creating a second vocal choir. We also entered teams in three church softball leagues--one for men, one for coed teams, and one for women. Later we built a relationship with two sister churches--one in Poland, and one in Paraguay. Every year we send a team of short-term lay volunteer missionaries to work with fellow Christians for about 10 days in each of our two sister churches. We also created three hobby groups for women--one is a knitting circle, a second is scrapbooking, and the third makes quilts. Most of their quilts are designed as customized wedding gifts with photographs on the cloth patches that represent the two family trees. These sell for $500 to $1,000 each, and the money goes to help alleviate world hunger. Last year they cleared about $8,000. We also have organized two new Bible study/prayer groups for women every year. Some disregard age and marital status, but currently, one is for recently widowed women, three are for never-married women, one is for divorced women, and one is for women in their second or third marriage. To make a long story short, our membership is now slightly more than 400, but church attendance averages about 385 for the two services. Three months ago, we added a half-time minister of missions to the staff to organize more mission-driven teams.

11. Back in 1999, our pastor appointed a special task force. He was concerned that the era when people met their future spouse in school was coming to an end and that singles bars were now being described as the place to meet your future mate. The task force recognized (a) an increasing proportion of adults choose not to marry, (b) the age at first marriage is rising, (c) nearly half of all marriages are terminated before the 10th anniversary, (d) we now know how to improve the chances a marriage will be a healthy, happy, and enduring relationship, and (e) there is an unmet need to increase the opportunities for single adults to meet a potential spouse. The task force recommended that 1) our church create opportunities for single adults to meet that potential future spouse and 2) organize a new class every year designed to help engaged couples discover how to create a happy, healthy and enduring marriage. One outcome has been to create a variety of short-term shared experiences that will be attractive to single adults. These range from enlisting teams of volunteers twice a year to help build a Habitat for Humanity house, to short-term mission trips, to six-week narrowly focused coed Bible study classes scattered through the week, to weekend bus trips to visit outstanding models of Protestant churches, to bus trips five times a year to a major league baseball game, to two teams in a church volleyball league for coed teams, to two coed teams that staff a shelter for the homeless two nights every month. A second outcome is we now organize a new seven-month class for engaged couples and newlyweds in February and another one that begins in late August. A third outcome is the number of weddings held in our church last year was five times the average for 1995-98.

12. Our current pastor arrived in 1996.A year later we agreed to raise the threshold into full membership from participation in an eight-week orientation class to five requirements: (a) one year of regular attendance at weekend worship here, (b) a commitment to tithe and to return at least half of that tithe to the Lord via this congregation's treasury, (c) participation in a small face-to-face group that meets weekly, such as an adult class or a mutual support group or a music group or a weeknight Bible study group, (d) complete the process for identifying your spiritual gifts for ministry, (d) be in the process of becoming equipped to use those gifts in ministry. One consequence is we no longer classify people by age, gender, marital status, tenure or participation. That has enabled us to welcome and assimilate never-married women as well as others by way of their involvement in doing ministry. We are a high-expectation Christian community organized to challenge and equip believers for doing ministry. Not everyone is ready to make that commitment, and that is one reason our worship attendance is nearly triple our membership, but two doors are always open. One is to come and worship God with us. The other is to accept the challenge to keep moving up in your personal spiritual pilgrimage.

Which of these 12 responses resembles how your ministry plan opens doors for never-married women born in the 1950-1975 era?

For more than four decades, Lyle E. Schaller has served as a parish consultant to hundreds of congregations and scores of denominational agencies. His recent books include From Geography to Affinity, The Ice Cube Is Melting, and A Mainline Turnaround.