Already half an hour over our minute interview, I was once again at a loss for an answer. In a church culture where marriage to another Christian is seen as the best and often only option, but with a ratio of single women to men, the situation for women like Rebecca can be problematic. But while our solutions have typically been to ignore this conundrum, or to bury ourselves in the latest dating self-help books, we have yet to look at this issue objectively. It was for this reason amongst others that I started up Eido Research, conducting impact evaluations and needs analysis for churches, and it was for this reason that I found myself researching Christian dating culture. Focusing on a large UK church with over 1, members, and collecting surveys from singles aged , I wanted to learn what this culture looks like from a statistical point of view, and what were the reasons behind these trends. Over the subsequent weeks of analysis, the scenarios of single women like Rebecca appeared to be the norm. Over a two-year period, the normal experience of a single Christian woman was to be asked out by two non-Christians, one Christian in general and no Christians from her own congregation. The more I read through the open answers, the more the frustration became palpable.
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