Singlehood: a Calling to Be Stewarded

Strength to Strength welcomed Bill Shiley to share about Christian singlehood.

Is singlehood a season to be endured? Does God, in fact, place a premium on marriage?

Is the common perception that singles need to “find their fulfillment in God” an adequate response? In this presentation, Bill shares about where the New Testament teaches fulfillment is to be found.

An interactive question-and-answer period follows.

This poem, shared during the presentation, captures an important reminder to all:

As the King Passed By

As the king passed by, thro’ the narrow street,
With a thousand menials in his train,
Ready to catch the downcast rein,
Or lie in the dust at his princely feet,
A peasant sat in his lowly door,
And the sunshine lay on his cottage floor,
As the king passed by.

And unto himself the peasant said,
As he caught the shimmer of purple and gold,
And saw the menials young and old
Attend each turn of the royal head:
“How enviable a man is he —
A life of ease and minstrelsy!”
As the king passed by.

As the king passed by, his eyes beheld
The peasant sitting by his door,
And the golden sunlight on his floor.
And beneath the purple his weary heart swelled,
And he sighed: “What were it worth to be
Like yonder peasant, trammell free”
As the king passed by.

Charles Stebbins

My name is Bill Shiley. I am currently single and live in Chambersburg, PA. The last ten years of my life, I’ve been working closely with people in mission work, teaching, and now in sales/customer service.

I was nearly eight years old when my parents left the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists and joined an Eastern Mennonite Church. The ensuing years were filled with a lot of turmoil in church and home providing the battlefields for many of the subjects I am passionate about today. My journey of growth and wholeness has been brought about by learning to know God as a good Father.

Journeying through three Baptist and twelve Anabaptist communities, and facing a lot of modern Christian pressure, I have found my grounding in a loving, obedient faith through a holistic view of Scripture influenced by the pre-Nicene interpretation of Scripture as a unified story leading us to Jesus and His physical kingdom of spiritually renewed humans living as Jesus taught.

I am blessed to be part of Chambersburg Christian Fellowship and learning as a group to pursue the faith and life once delivered by Jesus and the apostles, practiced and testified to by the pre-Nicene church and early Anabaptist tradition.