Kristen

Mark, I’m very surprised that you wrote this:
“I guess the obvious point is that singleness in women was not an issue in the New Tetament era, so it’s hardly surprising that no instruction is given on the issue. That is why we must do our best to try and grasp and understanding from other areas in the Bible and apply them today. Again it is not helpful to criticise pastors or churches who attempt to give some instruction on this issue. We must not import our 21st century society back into the Bible and demand answers as we wish. It is not a flaw in the comp position, in as much as it is not a flaw in the egal pos. Neither can offer direct biblical teaching on the issue.”
It seems to me that it is in ignoring single women that we are importing our 21st-century church society back onto the Bible! Paul specifically wrote in 1 Cor. 7 how a woman who chose not to get married was blessed, how she had chosen single-minded devotion to the Lord. Around these and similar words of Paul’s, the early church quickly came to honor virginity more than marriage. Within 50 years after Paul’s letters, Christians were aspiring to virginity as the “best” way to serve God. Out of this rose the “virgin martyrs” — women who resisted the Roman law that women had to marry, choosing to remain virgins for Christ and losing their lives for it. These women were honored up till the time of Martin Luther, who rightly corrected the over-emphasis on virginity, affirming marriage as just as blessed a state.
But recently, starting about 1990, there has been reaction in the church against perceived feminist influences, resulting in an insistence that a woman’s proper role is to be a wife and mother. There has been a devaluing of the blessed state of singleness, particularly in women, as a state in which she is uniquely empowered to serve the Lord in special ways that marriage will curtail in her life. Young women are taught that they are “brides in training” and encouraged to focus their energies on learning the skills to one day be a good wife and mother.
This, I really have to say in support of Paul and his much-needed, balancing passages on the blessings of being single, is an over-emphasis on marriage just as potentially destructive as the early church’s emphasis on virginity.
But the New Testament most assuredly does address single women! It our 21st-century evangelical churches who are making them feel like second-class citizens.