We’ve blogged here about the Single Young Male – the guy who’s somewhere between 18 and 30 – and his interminable addiction to his own adolescence. He’s in college, in graduate school, trying to pay off school loans, but throwing his income at video games, booze, clothes, women, himself, and he’s rarely in any kind of church fellowship.

Indeed, this new phase of social development portends major shifts in church life. Spoken or not, many churches have practiced an evangelistic strategy that doesn’t expect to reach young men until they return with wife and kid in tow.

I’ve never been to a church that has any discernible strategy to reach out to this demographic, which is a real problem. Young men are future married men, and that’s a necessary figure for the family. The number of 25- and 30-year old men who are married has pretty much been cut in half in the last 35 years.

Between 2000 and 2006 alone, the median age of marriage for men climbed nearly one year, from 26.8 to 27.5. Can our churches afford to wait at least 12 years, between ages 18 and 30, for men to return? Maybe this is a better question: Are young men doomed to self-centered pursuits so long as they haven’t tied the knot?

As the article points out, “it is marriage and children that turns boys into men.” Isn’t that what the church needs?