Books for Single Folks

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Recently I came across a tweet that read: “Books in church library for single people: 10. Of those, 9 are about dating, sex or marriage preparation. There’s something wrong here.” This really got me thinking. First of all, I wondered how many single people do we have in our church? So I had a look through the church directory and counted up all the potential single individuals. (Not exactly scientific, but I wanted a general idea) There were 21. That’s in comparison to the approximate 370 people in our church. After ten long minutes of agonizing calculations – math is not my strong suit – I arrived at the conclusion that single people make up almost 6% of the population of our church. Not enormous, since we have a high population of young families in our church right now, but definitely significant. With those numbers, surely we would have an adequate number of books in our collection to meet the needs of that percentage. Right?

So on to part two: what books do we have in our church library for single people? I had a look. 

Here’s what I found:

Singles at the Crossroads, a devotional by Albert Hsu from 1997.

Guys like girls named Jennie and If I’m waiting on God then what am I doing in a Christian chat room? both by Kerri Pomarolli from 2008 and 2006.

Let’s just be friends by Norman H. Wright from 2002. (This is more for the person who has recently returned to singleness after a relationship)

Three words: Shameful, shocking and inexcusable.

The fact that we have over 2200 items in our church library and only four of them are dedicated to a single person’s faith life is, in a word, deplorable. So I hit the Internet with a vengeance and found a number of excellent books to add to our collection:

10 Best Decisions a Single Can Make: Embracing All God Has for You by Bill and Pam Farrel

Be Radiant: Become who God meant you to be by Lee Cummings

Beyond Waiting: Redefining the Purpose of Singleness by Rebekah Snyder

Party of One: Living Single with Faith, Purpose and Passion by Beth Knobbe

Redeeming Singleness: How the Storyline of Scripture Affirms the Single Life by Barry Danylak

This experience taught me that I cannot be blinded by general categories such as men/women or different age groups while doing collection development. It’s also important to consider other matters such as relationship status (widowed, divorced, single parent, married, single etc.), areas of profession (student, stay-at-home mom/dad, empty nesters, retirees etc) and even reading levels (graphic novels, large print, audiobooks etc.).

*Here’s the next question though. What category could these books be shelved under?