To heck with a singles ministry, or social groups for singles…how would you like it if everyone at your church was single (for my married friends, try to think back) – and that it was architected by the church? Interesting.
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It’s Tuesday night Bible study, which at this Crystal City Mormon chapel looks a bit like a mixer. Pews are filled with people in jeans and flip-flops, many texting. The night begins with a prayer before segueing quickly into an ice-breaker trivia game and a pizza social.
Not surprising for a church made up exclusively of singles — 800 of them.
The newly opened “23rd Street chapel” is unique in the American Mormon church: It is the only worship space in the country devoted solely to unmarried people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. It serves the biggest population of single Mormons outside Utah in a neighborhood so thick with church members that it is nicknamed “Little Provo.”
The chapel represents Mormonism’s exalted view of marriage and its particular strategy for getting singles wed as quickly as possible: by separating them from people who are married.
“It’s a paradoxical existence,” said Andrew Jensen, a 30-year-old, single Defense Department employee who worships at the boxy office-building-turned chapel. “We come here with the end goal of making ourselves obsolete.”
In a faith that calls getting married “graduating with honors” and believes that after death you live with your family forever, finding a spouse is central to being a Mormon.
That creates an interesting dynamic at the church, made up of three individual singles congregations, or “wards.”
To read the rest of the article, visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/church-for-single-mormons-in-crystal-city-comes-with-pressure-to-marry/2011/05/25/AGILSeDH_story.html
Originally posted on The Washington Post – online
By Michelle Boorstein, Published May 28
Photo credit: Marvin Joseph/ WASHINGTON POST -
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