Missionary Dating in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Opinion Journal had an article Friday by Naomi Schaeffer Riley on Christians who date outisde the faith.  There's not much new here for those who have been a part of the evangelical subculture for some time, but the article is good for a number of reasons. 

First of all, that the Opinion Journal would consider a topic like this is significantly.  Secondly, they treated the subject respectfully and sympathetically.  This is a subject that lends itself to ill treatment in the media - I could see many media outlets drumming up suggestions of narrowness, bigotry and intolerance on a subject like this to the effect that those Christians are so narrow and intolerant they can't accept anyone outside their own faith.  But Riley just lets her subjects speaks for themselves and let's their own explanations stand.

I said there is nothing really new here, but it is still good to read the stories and explanations of why those Christians who date outside their faith do so.  One reason is that they just get tired of sitting home alone.

Margaret Nagib, a 35-year-old single psychologist who lives outside of Chicago, sympathizes. "Sometimes it's just nice to go out on a date." Ms. Nagib was seeing a non-Christian for three months earlier this year. She talked with him very early on about her faith and even told him that she would "never consider being serious with someone who wasn't Christian." Ms. Nagib says that when he told her he was agnostic, she could have ended it right then, but the two "clicked really well." He went to church with her and read a book on Christianity that she recommended, but ultimately the two broke up. He asked how her faith would affect their relationship if they got married. "When I think of our wedding ceremony, I want it to glorify God. And when I think of marriage and obviously children, they should glorify God."

She wants to be faithful to God in her relationships but she also wants to go out and have fun. Can't say I blame her.  Maybe the Christian brothers out there ought to take this as a call to go and ask someone out ;-)