that you need to be flexible, ladies.
There are men who are saved who attend non-evangelical churches. There are men who once dedicated their lives to Jesus, but now don’t attend any church. Consider introducing a guy that falls into either of these 2 categories to a man of mature faith at your (preferably multi-ethnic) church who can dialog with him or even mentor him spiritually. How about introducing the guy to 888-Need-HIM, one of Bible Study Fellowship’s men’s groups and/or Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship? How about praying and reading the Bible daily with the guy to help him establish a daily devotion time? Of course, ladies shouldn’t date this type of man until they feel he’s serious about his faith—you can just be friends until then. However, if you meet a guy (online or wherever) and he doesn’t show any interest in dedicating or re-dedicating his life to Christ after you’ve brought it up a few times, don’t beat your head against a stone. Remove him from your list of dating prospects and if you feel there’s a danger you may develop a crush on him, don’t even do the just-friends thing.
Keep in mind that there are relatively few men who will be responsive to your bring-him-back-to-the-fold approach, so go into this with reasonable expectations. (All you want is one great husband though, not 10 million.) I would also add that these 3 paragraphs really only apply to women who feel they are strong enough in their faith to do this. You don’t want a situation where a back-sliding guy influences you to abandon your faith instead of you influencing him to become stronger in his faith. Consider asking someone to be your spiritual accountability partner. You would talk to the person regularly about your walk with Jesus, the guys you are screening/dating and your relationships with these men. Your accountability partner should lovingly call you out when you’re going down the wrong path and give you kudos when you’re making the right decisions.
Many of the people who will tell you not to adopt this cast-a-wider-net approach have their spouses at home and are happily married, so they typically can’t relate to what you’re going through. “Don’t enter a missionary relationship,” they will say. What are the reasonable, concrete alternatives they are offering you? There are a host of typical sayings evangelical women hear when they indicate concern about their single status. Do the people making these statements have any real solutions for you or are they just trying to anesthetize your pain and avoid the problem with spiritual words that don’t quite apply to your situation? Plenty of evangelicals have been indoctrinated into thinking that if we just tell ourselves enough times that the singleness problem in evangelical churches isn’t really a problem, then maybe we’ll be okay. YOU know it’s not OKAY though, so it’s time to be bold.
Yes, single Christian women should pray for a husband, but you should also take direct action. Yes, single Christian women shouldn’t make the desire for marriage an idol, but it is possible to take direct action to increase your likelihood of meeting your husband without turning into an idolater. In so many areas of our lives, from evangelism to helping the poor, we pray AND take direct action. Why is it in the realm of dating and courtship that all of a sudden you’re not supposed to take direct action? Perhaps because these good, well-meaning people who are giving you bad advice can see that they’re too few single men at evangelical churches and they simply have no idea what you should do—or the ideas they have are repulsive to them. Being still before God about your singleness means that you’re being patient in this area; it doesn’t mean that you have no part to play in addition to prayer. You definitely need patience because there is no guarantee you’re going to get engaged 6 months or a year or even 2 years after you decide to take the steps I’m writing about.
I think it’s good for women to take direct action by joining dating websites, asking friends to fix them up, etc, but the most important thing is to first have a truly intimate relationship with Jesus. I’m not saying everyone who is single is unmarried because they don’t have an intimate relationship with Jesus. It’s just that I think we do often need to go through a preparation phase (I know I certainly did). We won’t be perfect at the end of the phase, but we can start dealing with the mightiest strongholds of the enemy in our lives. Fast and pray to overcome the stronghold. Try fasting for 3 days. It doesn’t necessarily have to even be a full-day fast. For each of the 3 days, you can do a partial day fast which you break at 12 noon or 1pm. You can drink liquids if you want, like diluted fruit juice (50% juice and 50% water). Remember to pray before ending the fast each day. Keep praying about the issue until you get your victory and keep praying about it after victory too.
It is important to pray regularly about finding a good husband. I used to pray regularly (once a week) about finding a good husband; one and a half years after I started the prayers, I got engaged to a gem of a guy and we’ve been happily married for several years now. Consider doing these prayers with a friend, as there’s spiritual power in numbers.
When you join a dating website, don’t just complete a profile. Be proactive and email guys you find interesting. It’s not unseemly since the guys posted their profile. In your profile, indicate that you are looking for someone who is a dedicated Christian or someone who wants to be one. (Maybe you’ll turn out to be a catalyst to bring a guy back to the fold if he’s strayed.)
There are men who are saved who attend non-evangelical churches. There are men who once dedicated their lives to Jesus, but now don’t attend any church. Consider introducing a guy that falls into either of these 2 categories to a man of mature faith at your (preferably multi-ethnic) church who can dialog with him or even mentor him spiritually. How about introducing the guy to 888-Need-HIM, one of Bible Study Fellowship’s men’s groups and/or Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship? How about praying and reading the Bible daily with the guy to help him establish a daily devotion time? Of course, ladies shouldn’t date this type of man until they feel he’s serious about his faith—you can just be friends until then. However, if you meet a guy (online or wherever) and he doesn’t show any interest in dedicating or re-dedicating his life to Christ after you’ve brought it up a few times, don’t beat your head against a stone. Remove him from your list of dating prospects and if you feel there’s a danger you may develop a crush on him, don’t even do the just-friends thing.
Keep in mind that there are relatively few men who will be responsive to your bring-him-back-to-the-fold approach, so go into this with reasonable expectations. (All you want is one great husband though, not 10 million.) I would also add that these 3 paragraphs really only apply to women who feel they are strong enough in their faith to do this. You don’t want a situation where a back-sliding guy influences you to abandon your faith instead of you influencing him to become stronger in his faith. Consider asking someone to be your spiritual accountability partner. You would talk to the person regularly about your walk with Jesus, the guys you are screening/dating and your relationships with these men. Your accountability partner should lovingly call you out when you’re going down the wrong path and give you kudos when you’re making the right decisions.
Many of the people who will tell you not to adopt this cast-a-wider-net approach have their spouses at home and are happily married, so they typically can’t relate to what you’re going through. “Don’t enter a missionary relationship,” they will say. What are the reasonable, concrete alternatives they are offering you? There are a host of typical sayings evangelical women hear when they indicate concern about their single status. Do the people making these statements have any real solutions for you or are they just trying to anesthetize your pain and avoid the problem with spiritual words that don’t quite apply to your situation? Plenty of evangelicals have been indoctrinated into thinking that if we just tell ourselves enough times that the singleness problem in evangelical churches isn’t really a problem, then maybe we’ll be okay. YOU know it’s not OKAY though, so it’s time to be bold.
Yes, single Christian women should pray for a husband, but you should also take direct action. Yes, single Christian women shouldn’t make the desire for marriage an idol, but it is possible to take direct action to increase your likelihood of meeting your husband without turning into an idolater. In so many areas of our lives, from evangelism to helping the poor, we pray AND take direct action. Why is it in the realm of dating and courtship that all of a sudden you’re not supposed to take direct action? Perhaps because these good, well-meaning people who are giving you bad advice can see that they’re too few single men at evangelical churches and they simply have no idea what you should do—or the ideas they have are repulsive to them. Being still before God about your singleness means that you’re being patient in this area; it doesn’t mean that you have no part to play in addition to prayer. You definitely need patience because there is no guarantee you’re going to get engaged 6 months or a year or even 2 years after you decide to take the steps I’m writing about.
I think it’s good for women to take direct action by joining dating websites, asking friends to fix them up, etc, but the most important thing is to first have a truly intimate relationship with Jesus. I’m not saying everyone who is single is unmarried because they don’t have an intimate relationship with Jesus. It’s just that I think we do often need to go through a preparation phase (I know I certainly did). We won’t be perfect at the end of the phase, but we can start dealing with the mightiest strongholds of the enemy in our lives. Fast and pray to overcome the stronghold. Try fasting for 3 days. It doesn’t necessarily have to even be a full-day fast. For each of the 3 days, you can do a partial day fast which you break at 12 noon or 1pm. You can drink liquids if you want, like diluted fruit juice (50% juice and 50% water). Remember to pray before ending the fast each day. Keep praying about the issue until you get your victory and keep praying about it after victory too.
It is important to pray regularly about finding a good husband. I used to pray regularly (once a week) about finding a good husband; one and a half years after I started the prayers, I got engaged to a gem of a guy and we’ve been happily married for several years now. Consider doing these prayers with a friend, as there’s spiritual power in numbers.
When you join a dating website, don’t just complete a profile. Be proactive and email guys you find interesting. It’s not unseemly since the guys posted their profile. In your profile, indicate that you are looking for someone who is a dedicated Christian or someone who wants to be one. (Maybe you’ll turn out to be a catalyst to bring a guy back to the fold if he’s strayed.)
Btw, a couple of black ev. Christian woman said they’ve met some guys with general sites like PlentyOfFish.com—one of these ladies is married now, actually. Another black ev. woman who is now married to a committed Christian said she met men via interracial dating sites. A few of the interracial dating sites are InterracialMatch, AfromRomance, InterracialDatingCentral and PokadotGarden; Pokadotgarden.com is actually an interracial, Christian dating site. There are religious dating sites like SingleC. com (Singles Christian Network), ChristianMingle.com and Soul Match.com that ask people for their racial preferences, so you don’t have to waste time on non-black men who don’t want to date bw. ChristianMingle and Soul Match have a mutual match feature where you can see guys who meet your criteria while, at the same time, you meet their criteria. ChristianMingle will email the mutual matches to you, while Soul Match will show them to you when you do a search.
Ladies, don’t fret that there are some guys who aren’t interested in dating bw. Don’t let these men’s dating preferences undermine your confidence. Focus on the men who want to date bw. If you are saved, you are a daughter of the King of kings and Lord of lords, a highly-favored princess; the Sovereign Lord of the Universe lives inside of you. Keep your head up like the blue blood that you are. If you have any thoughts causing you to doubt your worth, those are the evil whispers of the Devil, the enemy of your soul. Rebuke him in the name of Jesus. You are the King’s kid and Satan is your defeated foe.
Okay, back to discussing dating sites now. When you’re on the non-Christian dating sites, one way to find committed Christian men is to do a keyword search on the profiles on the site. This will show you the profiles of all men that typed specific words in their profile. Search on keywords like: Jesus, Christ, Christian, God, Christianity, Christ-follower, godly, faith, devout, religion, religious, Bible, church, saved, born-again, believer, gospel, Good News and ministry. You get the picture. I wouldn’t rely solely on a keyword search to ferret out the committed Christians; this is because the person may use words to indicate his dedication to his faith that are not on your keyword list; or he could have made a typo when writing the word or in he have may been raised in a country where the spelling of the word is different than the American spelling, etc, etc. So, instead of only relying on a keyword search, you should also do the nitty-gritty work of browsing through profiles to identify dedicated believers. Yes, it may be a bit inconvenient, but just keep your eyes on your goal: a happy marriage to a committed Christian man. On a non-Christian dating site, there probably won’t be that many “targets,” especially if you’re looking at profiles of European men (Europe has a smaller proportion of devout Chritians than the U.S. does). However, I still think it’s a good idea to not just limit yourself to Christian dating sites because they are dominated by evangelicals; you should “expand your coast” beyond evangelical men for the reason I discussed earlier. Even if you just have a few “targets” on a non-Christian dating site, one of them may be your future husband and you only need ONE.
There are some Christian dating sites that are specific to a non-evangelical Christian denomination, and clearly, those won’t be dominated by evangelicals. I recommend you join one or more of these Christian dating sites for non-evangelicals, if they’ll let you. There may be born-again Christian men on those sites that could be good husband material, perhaps with some “gardening” on your part. I think the key is that the guy believes (not just knows) the Apostolic Creed, believes Jesus to be his Savior, has dedicated his life to following Jesus and believes the Bible to be God’s Word. (FYI: In some marriages where the husband and wife are from different Christian denominations, they each go a church of their own denomination and some couples decide that the kids go to church with mom.) Don’t cross the line though; it’s a bad idea to date or marry anyone who practices a religion that has aspects of Christianity in it mixed with other beliefs—that would be being unequally yoked with non-Christian, which the Bible tells us not to do. Here are a few Christian non-evangelical singles dating services I found online (I’m sure there are a lot more out there):
http://www.catholicmates.com/ (free).
Here’s a little anecdote from a commenter on The Gift of Singleness blog: She said most of the single evangelical Christian men she dated before she got married were either not serious about marriage or demanded pre-marital sex. Her husband is a Christian who is non-evangelical and was willing to wait before marriage before they had sex. She also says he reads his Bible and prays daily and has been an inspiration to her in this area. Aside: Some mainstream Christian denominations have evangelical or evangelical-type sub-denominations ex. evangelical Methodists, charismatic Catholics.
Check your email messages daily to see if guys on dating sites have initiated contact/responded to your emails/winks and reply emails the day you receive them, if you can. However, don’t search for/browse profiles and initiate contact with guys (emails/winks) daily. Read profiles and send emails/winks at most 3 times a week; I say this because you still need to have a full, Jesus-centered life beyond cyber dating.
FYI: There are a lot of single non-black evangelical (ev.) Christian women complaining that many of the single ev. Christian men behave in an ungentlemanly way towards them because of the gender imbalance in evangelical churches. Sound familiar? Anytime you have a severe shortage of guys in a community and the women of that group decide not to date out, you will have a lot of men of the group taking advantage of the situation. Black women face this in the larger black community. Non-black women are facing this in the evangelical (ev.) Christian community. On the Christian dating sites, you’ll even find that some of the ev. guys are incredibly arrogant; I told my husband some of the stuff these guys are putting single ev. women through and he was in total shock. You see, he spent most of his single adult years outside of the evangelical church, so he was not aware of the I-am-a-tin-god syndrome that seems to have taken over too many single men in evangelical churches. A Christian singer (a man) released a song called “Gone” that I believe is in response to this shameful behavior we are seeing among some single ev. men.
Anyway, if a non-black ev. man on a Christian dating site treats you disrespectfully, don’t assume it’s because you’re a black woman; he probably treats non-bw on the dating site the same way. Don’t write off the ev. guys though because there are gentlemanly ones out there. Just be willing to expand your territory beyond evangelical circles too (if you feel strong enough in your Christian walk to do so), as I’ve discussed earlier in this post.
If you’re a non-Christian, please don’t say you’ll stay away from Christianity because you’ve heard that many single evangelical guys don’t treat the single evangelical women well. Being a Christian means that you are a follower of Jesus, not that you are a follower of Christians. Jesus is perfect, but Christians are not, so when you’re making the eternity-impacting decision of whether to dedicate your life to Jesus or not, focus on Him, not us, His feet-of-clay followers. If you want to find out more about what it means to dedicate (or re-dedicate) your life to Jesus, call 888-NEED-HIM or visit http://needhim.org/.
Candice Watters, the author of “Get Married: What Women Can Do To Help It Happen,” is promoting a new Christian dating website called “Marry Well.” MarryWell.org is being billed as an “alternative to the online dating superstore” and “a better path to marriage.” The website plans to “focus on intentionality and Christian compatibility,” allow you to “invite support from friends, family and mentors” and provide “coaching at keys steps along the way.” Be sure to have a look at this new dating site and read Candice Watters’ book. Also check out Candice’s helpful blog for ev. Christian women who want to marry, HelpGetMarried.org. There are also some FREE Christian dating sites that you may want to consider like RealChristianSingles.com and ChristianDatingforFree.com. My understanding is that these two free dating sites give you access to all their features at no charge, unlike some others where a free membership is a limited-feature membership. NOTE: Some Christian dating sites have a membership option in which you pay a one-time fee to be a member until you get married. ex. MarryWell.org and SinglesOfFaith.com.
Here are a couple of other books you should read:
(1) "Getting Serious About Getting Married: Rethinking the Gift of Singleness" by Debbie Maken. You may find the author a bit harsh at times in this book, but still read it because it has good information.
(2) "Before You Do: Making Great Decisions That You Won't Regret" by T. D. Jakes. You may think this book is primarily for engaged couples, but all singles who want to marry (even if you're not in a serious relationship yet) can benefit from this book; in fact, there are some sections of this book that can be of help to most adults, regardless of marital status.
As I have written in my posts on black woman dating men from Europe, black women are highly sought-after in some western and northern European countries. Don't forget to exercise your European options, ladies. For dating non-bm who are abroad, check out AfroIntroductions, Interracial Dating Central and, if you speak a European language, one of Match.com's European websites. Have a look at the following link and you will see that Match.com has 17 European dating websites—for example, Match.com Germany and Match.com Sweden: http://www.match.com/matchus/international/index.aspx. Don’t turn up your nose at international long-distance relationships because some of them do work. Read my series of posts titled “Black Women Dating Men from Europe” for some international long-distance success stories. If you don’t speak a European language, you can always learn –try Rosetta Stone software, which the U.S. Army uses for language training.
When you’re on the Christian dating sites, don’t forget to also browse the profiles of guys in Europe and Canada. ChristianCafe (CC) has a ton of Canadian and European guys – I believe CC has the largest database of Christian singles of all Christian cyberdating services. If you speak a European language, you can also search google in that language for Christian dating sites in a European country. Here are a few other international dating sites where you can meet Canadian and/or European men (some are free):
(i) http://BlackAmericanBrides.com/ – It is an introduction service for those who are marriage-ready and it will link black women with men overseas or with military men in the U.S.
(ii) http://BlackFemaleScandinavianMarriage.com/ (for black women and Scandinavian men)
(iii) http://www.wdating.com/
(iv) http://www.internationalcupid.com/
(v) http://www.lavaplace.com/
(vi) http://www.LuvFree.com/
(vii) http://www.BlackBridesInternational.com/ (notice this is different from BlackAmericanBrides.com)
(ii) http://BlackFemaleScandinavianMarriage.com/ (for black women and Scandinavian men)
(iii) http://www.wdating.com/
(iv) http://www.internationalcupid.com/
(v) http://www.lavaplace.com/
(vi) http://www.LuvFree.com/
(vii) http://www.BlackBridesInternational.com/ (notice this is different from BlackAmericanBrides.com)
(viii) http://www.europeankiss.com/
Also, though Plenty Of Fish doesn’t market itself as an international dating site per se, it does have members from all over the world.
Also, though Plenty Of Fish doesn’t market itself as an international dating site per se, it does have members from all over the world.
MeetChristianSingles.com is not a dating website, but it has user reviews of dating websites (the Christian Dating Directory) and good advice for Christian dating. Also check out the Gift of Singleness (GoS) blog --see side bar for link; it challenges the concept of the gift of singleness that some in the church are promoting--a concept that is causing many single people to feel guilty for wanting to marry and is discouraging them from taking direct action to find a spouse. The GoS blog also has posts on how evangelical churches can ramp up outreach to men.
- Delight yourself in the Lord and He will grant you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4)
Check out my other posts too: http://forthesistas.blogspot.com/.
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