One of my Aunties back home, like many elders in Africa, has a way of steering the most innocent of (Sunday evening) conversations to weighty social matters.

Matters that often leave many of my unmarried relatives on the edge of their seats, or in this case, the edge of her couch. 

She basically often has a word for every people-category along the not-yet-married spectrum. 

Her recent thesis when I recently checked in, went something like this. 

Young men are committing less, yet are sticking in relationships anyway and indulging casual sex. Many are dreaming unrealistically as if there is a level of perfection you need to in order to get married. 

Fathers are no longer talking to their sons about when to decide it is the right time, how to be intentional and long-term with a girl you like. Let alone where to buy and how to deliver the finest engagement ring — (okay, the “ring” bit is my addition) 

Her other point is that younger women are generally getting desperate and deciding too fast on marriage, partly as a result of the above mentioned “reluctant prophets”. 

She says girls are then consequently stumbling into all sorts of emergency situations including single motherhood, arranged and hurried marriages, abortion, multiple materialistic attitudes, along with many complex health situations. 

Now, 

In the past, I’ve been the kind of guy you’d say is kind of guilty for “pressurizing peoples” to get married, but along the way, life has shown me that actually, the best people to marry or get married are often not those “dying” to get married. 

Those whose identity is nolonger fragile, but in Christ, first as their treasure, and second as a model of their future marriage. 

What I didn’t expect though was the possible downside of my well-meaning little thesis above. 

Unlike my Auntie, I had not pondered long enough the increasing social cost of reluctant men getting into their late thirties, with unrealistic expectations, and postponing legal commitment for the sake of widely available, yet consequential, sexual experiences. 

At what cost? 

The chat with my Auntie made me wonder, many churches in the past, (at least one I was privileged to be part of as a twenty something in the late 2000s) often responded to the breakdown of family values by providing mentoring for our then “butterfly” relationships that still aspired to please the Lord anyway through intentionality, sexual purity, and marital faithfulness. 

But seeing many churches today have exchanged true worship for emotional experiences and prosperity motivations, why should we assume relational wisdom will spring out of corrupted worship? 

Proverbs, which is clear about where wisdom begins (in the ..”fear of the Lord” (1:7) never lets us rest in such assumptions. 

Thus, wisdom, a by-product of the fear of the Lord, has flown out of many church windows, eventually turning our houses of worship into almost incompetent guides on all matters love, sex and marriage. 

As a result, our young men and women seem to have traded the wisdom of the sages for ( I told my Auntie this) highly influential “inner circle group advice” that hides in slogans like “all men are the same/cheats”  “I will marry when I know I am ready” “as long as he gives me what I want, why commit etc etc.

The social chaos arising out of this is not only a hindrance to Christian witness in our day, I argue, but also cannot be resolved by the same methods that sank us this low. Only a return to true worship is likely to set us on the path of wisdom, let alone, relational wisdom. 

Jeremiah asked the restless souls of his day to “stand at the cross roads and ask for the ancient paths.” (Jer 6:16) Maybe we too may. 

See, wherever God’s people have featured, whether in Deuteronomy or Ephesians, the requirement to maintain sexual and relational integrity as part of their redeemed identity was clear. 

Now of course to clear up things a bit, marriage is not ultimate, God is. Not all should (and will) get married. (Jesus, the most perfect man in history never) But what if the moral chaos of our day (some engineered inside church by the way) is partly an overflow of worship-gone-corrupt? 

What if our older women held onto sound doctrine sufficient enough to instruct younger girls embroiled in back-to-back sleazy date nights? 

What if males in our churches also followed suit and built thicker gospel-centered “guy communities”, where no man falls through to the bottoms of ambiguous romance, pornography, and lust? 

Maybe we would have a much better world, and church, maybe, maybe we would have a more effective body of Christ! 

And who knows, maybe I would have a less-direct Auntie too, an Auntie many singles back home would be comfortable hanging around, you see?