Divorced Christians and the Church - Studying the Relationship, Part 1

My wife opened up the folder for our leadership retreat and stared at the names. She and I were counselors in the church as well as pastors and we knew every single person invited to this weekend’s events. I was putting the final touches on my first interactive lecture and she was bored. So she read the roster of names through several times. At the end she made a pithy observation.

“Dear, we and the Friesens are the only couples here this weekend that haven’t been divorced”. I scoffed at this and grabbed the paper to read it myself. As I scanned the list, I tried to find other exceptions besides the four of us.

I couldn’t.

The assembly of people we were a part of then was made up of relatively new Christians and I theorized that this is why there was such a high incidence of divorce among us. I continued to believe that until George Barna came out with his statistics on the subject a couple of years ago. Here is an excerpt from that study titled, “Christians Have the Same Incidence of Divorce”:

Although many Christian churches attempt to dissuade congregants from getting a divorce, the research confirmed a finding identified by Barna a decade ago (and further confirmed through tracking studies conducted each year since): born again Christians have the same likelihood of divorce as do non-Christians.
Among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce. That figure is identical to the outcome among married adults who are not born again: 35%.

The study goes on to say that Christians have the same rate of multiple-divorcees (those who have divorced more than once), and that the rate of divorce was almost the same before they became Christians as afterward. It also stated that Catholics have a lower rate of divorce than Protestants, and that conservative Christians (those who believe that divorce is a sin) have a higher rate of divorce than their liberal counterparts. Pentecostals have the highest divorce rate…and I am at a loss to explain that.

What does this tell us? The church is swarming with divorced people, and the more Evangelicals teach that people are sinning if they divorce, the more divorced people Evangelicals must minister to among them. That tells me that the way we are teaching and acting towards the divorced is not only inadequate; it also lacks the blessing of God.

We have no statistics of divorce before the late 1700s in society in general. But anecdotally, the news remains consistent. Ancient writings suggest that one out of every five Jewish marriages ended in divorce in the centuries leading up to the appearance of Jesus. In Greek homes, the number was one in three marriages, and Roman homes up to the time of Nero it was one in four. The early church therefore had to have many, many divorced people. What confuses me at times is the almost total lack of instruction in the New Testament concerning how the divorced were to be treated. I have a theory on that, but we’ll visit that issue in a moment.

Each of these societies (Hebrew, Greek and Roman) hit a peak of financial prosperity within 300 years of each other. It seems that when a society gets affluent, divorce increases. When financial crisis hits, divorce rates go down. Perhaps this is because people are afraid to go it “on their own” when they cannot predict the source of their next meal. America has had three significant periods of increase in relation to divorce. Each time (Late 1700s, late 1800s, late 1960s to early 70s) as the divorce rate increased significantly, the economy was also booming. At the same time, the National debt ballooned and illegitimacy went through the roof. There is something about prosperity that makes people do and say crazy things.

What is unusual about American Christianity is that until the last two decades, the divorce rate among Christians here has always been significantly lower than the population at large – no matter what was happening with the economy. Obviously, something has changed and the current church in America has yet to figure it out. This series I will be blogging on concerns how the church views and treats the divorced among us. The next entry will talk about how we ought to view those who have had divorces.

So why does the New Testament say so little about how we are to treat the divorced in our churches? No one really asks that question very much, but it is one of the most pertinent to our contemporary situation. The entire New Testament, with its 27 books, deals with the subject of divorce exactly three times (not including the parallel passages in each Gospel). Only one of those times was in the teachings of Paul where we would expect to find it the most (since he wrote to Greek and Roman Christians where the divorce rate was high). There are only three logical possibilities why this is:

1. We are not to treat divorce as a problem. I find this hard to believe, since it results in so much agony for so many people.


2. What has been written is so clear that we don’t need anything else on the subject. I cannot accept this since the little we do have on divorce has been debated for centuries without arriving at universally held conclusions.


3. We are to treat the divorced in our midst the same as anyone else. This seems to make the most sense and forms the basis for the rest of these blog entries.