Most single and celibate Christians already know the answer on paper. Scripture keeps sexual union for marriage, and it does not keep love there. The harder question is what to do on an ordinary weeknight, believing that, and still eating dinner alone. This guide moves from the first question to the second. It reads a few passages closely, then asks you to spend one ordinary week practicing friendship and community on purpose.
It draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and David Bennett, an evangelist, preacher and academic who describes himself as a gay Christian who is now celibate. You can work through it alone over seven days. A small group can use it across two meetings: one to read and talk, and one a week later to compare what happened. Nothing here requires you to tell your story to anyone. Every question can be answered privately.
Two ways a narrow idea of intimacy hurts people
The first risk is hopelessness. Lisa Fields has been telling church leaders that their illustrations matter. If every sermon picture of closeness is a marriage picture, single people hear a quiet message about their own future. She argues that churches have to show that “intimacy in relationship is not just sex, but also you could have deep intimacy in friendship.” If they don’t, she says, “then you leave them hopeless.” She also asks the question many single people carry: “What about singles persons that wanna experience love, that want the embrace of a person, a hug that’s not sexualized?”
The second risk is misreading. Fields is careful to say it does not happen in every case. Some younger people feel a deep love for a friend, the kind David had for Jonathan. Because no one has shown them a healthy way to live that love in friendship, she says, “they think the next jump is sexual.” The feeling itself is not the confusion. The confusion comes from having only one category to put it in.
David Bennett names the pressure behind both. “We’ve become so reductively obsessed with sex and these questions that we have to really not lose the personal reality that we’re walking personally with God and we’re walking personally with each other.” When sex becomes the only lens, a person who is not married seems to have nowhere to put the longing for closeness. They either suppress it or mislabel it.
A first observation, before you read on: Think back over the past month. When did you feel most at ease with another person who is not a romantic partner? Write down where you were and what you were doing. Do not interpret it yet. You will come back to this note at the end of the week.
Read one friendship slowly
Open to 1 Samuel 18:1-4. The scene comes right after David’s victory over Goliath. The writer reports that “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:1). Then read 1 Samuel 20, especially verses 41-42, where the two part in tears and bind themselves by an oath before the LORD.
This is narrative. It describes what happened; it does not command you to make a covenant ceremony with your best friend. Description still teaches. As you read, write three things in the margin or on a card:
- What does Jonathan give away, and what did those things mean for a king’s son?
- What does the friendship cost him with his own father?
- Where does the text show loyalty acted out, rather than feeling described?
Lisa Fields reads the wider story of David as a contrast. His early marriages, as the text tells them, are not romances: Saul gives him a daughter, and Abigail becomes his wife after Nabal dies. Fields argues that the trust, love and respect in David’s life show up most clearly with Jonathan, in a bond that was not sexual. Notice how this friendship is built. It rests less on constant emotional intensity than on promises kept under pressure. Most friendships grow the same way, from small acts of loyalty repeated until someone can count on them.
Test a competing reading
Some modern readers argue that David and Jonathan were lovers. Their strongest evidence is David’s lament after Jonathan’s death: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). Fields thinks that reading reveals our assumptions more than the story’s. Those who sexualize the friendship, she says, “you actually fall into the trap of making all intimacy sexual.”
Don’t settle this by taking anyone’s word. Reread 1 Samuel 18-20 and 2 Samuel 1. List every word the writer uses for the relationship, and every action the two men take. Then ask which reading accounts for more of what is actually on the page. Is there anything in the narrative that describes a sexual relationship? What do covenant, protection and grief suggest about the kind of love being described?
Friends is the word Jesus chose
Now read John 15:12-17. Jesus speaks to his disciples the night before his death. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Two verses later he changes what he calls them: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John 15:15).
Look at the reason Jesus gives. Friends are the ones he has told what he knows. In this passage, friendship includes disclosure: letting someone in on what is actually going on.
Lisa Fields connects this to God’s purpose for ordinary relationships: “it’s God’s design for us to love a friend so much that we would lay down our lives for.” She then points to the commands Paul gives whole churches. “All of these one anothers are not just confined to marriage, they’re just how we should treat people in general.” Two of those commands make the point plainly. “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another” (Romans 12:10).
A quick exercise: find three more “one another” commands in the New Testament letters. For each, note who the letter is addressed to. You will find congregations, mixed groups of married and unmarried people, slaves and free, Jews and Gentiles. The closeness these commands assume belongs to the church as a family.
What to do with the desire itself
A common assumption among Christians is that wanting to be held, known or missed is a desire a single person should simply shut down. That raises a fair question: is the desire the problem, or only certain ways of meeting it?
Bennett argues for the second. He draws on an older Christian vocabulary of love, in which desire for union with what is good is not the same thing as sexual desire. He knows the vocabulary can feel strange, and he offers an exit: “Take my point and remove the language.” His point is that desire for closeness is good when it is rightly ordered, and that “celibates have tons of other relationships that they can experience intimacy in.”
What does rightly ordered look like on a Tuesday? It looks like closeness that can happen in the open, without secrecy. It looks like several friendships rather than one person carrying everything. It looks like affection that serves the other person’s good, which includes their other relationships and their walk with God. It looks like the David and Jonathan pattern: a bond made before God and kept through costly loyalty.
Bennett speaks from his own life. “I don’t think I would ever imagine myself as a celibate that had any joy.” He found that joy anyway. Then he grounds the claim in Christ rather than in his own experience: “Jesus didn’t ever marry, and he was the greatest picture of human flourishing.” For Bennett, the measure is not relationship status. “It’s whether we’re like Jesus and if we’re like him, we will experience deep intimacy.”
The objection worth taking seriously
Many single people would answer that friendship does not fill the gap. Friends get married and move away. Plans get cancelled. Church schedules are built around families. The joy Bennett describes is his testimony, and someone else may have tried for years without finding it. That objection deserves a straight answer. None of these passages promises that loneliness lifts on a schedule. What they change is the verdict on the single life: it is not a life outside the love Jesus called greatest. They also put responsibility on the church, not only on the lonely person. If the “one another” commands are meant for whole congregations, then a church where unmarried people cannot be known is failing at something Scripture assigns to all of it.
Weigh both sides honestly. Where has friendship actually met your need for closeness? Where has it fallen short? Is the shortfall about friendship itself, or about the kind of community you have had access to?
Two cautions before you start
Friendship takes two people, and you control only one of them. You cannot schedule a Jonathan. Some of what you try this week will be met warmly, and some with a polite “maybe another time.” That says nothing final about your worth. The practice lies in offering.
Loneliness and depression can feel alike, and sometimes they travel together. Seeking a counselor or doctor is not a failure of faith. God works through trained clinicians. If loneliness has turned into thoughts that you do not want to live, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, today.
Seven days of ordinary practice
Each day asks for one small act, most taking under an hour.
- Day one: draw the map. List the people you see at least every couple of weeks: church, work, neighbors, family. Put a mark beside anyone who knows one true thing about how your week is actually going. Just look at the result.
- Day two: make one specific invitation. Choose one person from your list. Instead of “we should hang out sometime,” name a time and a simple plan: soup on Thursday, a walk Saturday morning. Specific invitations are easier to accept.
- Day three: show up and stay. Go to something already happening in your church or neighborhood, such as a service, a meal or a work day. When it ends, stay fifteen minutes longer than you normally would. Ask one person a question you actually want answered.
- Day four: carry something. Reread Galatians 6:2. Ask a friend what is heavy for them this week, then do one practical thing about it: a ride, a meal, an errand, a check-in text the next day.
- Day five: let one person in. If there is someone safe, tell them one true thing about your life right now that you would normally smooth over. Choose something small and real. If no one feels safe yet, write down what would need to be true of a person before you could. That tells you what to look for.
- Day six: receive. Accept an invitation you would normally decline, or ask for help with something you could manage alone. Friendship needs receiving as much as giving.
- Day seven: rest and review. Read John 15:12-17 again. Go back to the note you wrote at the start. Compare it with what happened this week. Where did closeness actually show up? Was it where you expected?
Questions for the end of the week
Use these alone or with your group. Some may have no answer yet.
- Where did you first absorb the idea that marriage is the only real closeness? Is it something the Bible actually says?
- In David and Jonathan’s story, which mattered more: the feelings or the promises? What would a promise look like in one of your friendships?
- Jesus links friendship with being told what is really going on (John 15:15). Who are you a friend to in that sense, and who is that kind of friend to you?
- Bennett says the measure of a life is likeness to Jesus, not marital status. Does that sound like freedom to you, or like an answer that skips the ache? What makes it one or the other?
- Which day of the practice was hardest, and what does that difficulty tell you?
- Bennett speaks of looking behind “the Sunday morning face of the church” to see what is really going on. What would have to change in your church for an unmarried person to be known there, and not just greeted?
If you are leading a group through this, pay attention to the room. Don’t assume who is married, who wants to be, or why someone is single. Don’t use the week to match people up. No one needs to report on day five; ask only who wants to share. Married members can take part by opening their homes and tables to people who usually see them only on holidays. If someone describes real pain, respond with attention before ideas, and follow up privately. If a conversation turns up something heavier than a group can hold, help the person connect with a pastor or counselor. That is part of caring for them.
Jesus once looked at the people sitting around him and said, “For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35). Carry this question into next week: if that is true of your church, whose brother or sister will you decide to be?