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.”
Ms. Nagib says that she has no regrets about the relationship. “God brought me into his life for a reason.” But she also offers advice for anyone going into such a situation. “You should know what your nonnegotiables are. You should talk about faith soon.” And she also suggests that if you find yourself “becoming defensive about it with your friends, there’s probably a problem.”
In fact, for older evangelicals it is less often their parents than their friends who steer them away from such relationships. Camerin Courtney, a columnist at ChristianSinglesToday.com, tells me that most Christian parents are just concerned that “their children find someone they love and who loves them back.”
But pastors regularly remind their flocks to avoid dating outside the faith. Lee Strobel, formerly a teaching pastor at Saddleback Church in Southern California and the author of “Surviving a Spiritual Mismatch in Marriage,” tells people that “conjugal evangelism” doesn’t work. “If you’re feeling like if I just marry this person, I’ll be able to influence him toward God, it’s self-deception.” He notes that “the nonbeliever is more likely to pull the Christian away from his faith.” This is a contention, by the way, that sociologists, like Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia, generally support. Mr. Wilcox explains: “Evangelicals who marry nonevangelicals are typically less likely to remain as or become as devout as those who marry within the fold.”
From what I’m given to understand, “missionary dating” is generally considered to be a Bad Idea(tm).
I’ve seen a graphic illustration from Paster Ben Young who had a lady stand on a chair and asked her to lift him up to her level (which she failed to do), next holding her hand told her to stay on the chair, walking away she step down as he pulled her. A quick ‘chastisement’ for not staying on the chair they repeat with her on standing on the chair he walks away holding her hand and again she steps off as she’s pulled.
The visual was for singles on why not to date an unbeliever for it’s almost impossible to pull someone up to the Scripture’s standard (we fail and we have the power of the Holy Spirit) but all too easy for us to be pull down to someone else’s level.
To have such a rare thing advertised as a success does violence to the truth of the other 100 soul-degrading failures.
I am so glad that I did not have such advise when I was dating – things were difficult enouph as it was.
Can a man heap fire in his lap and not get burned?
Sometimes the non-believer can blessed by the believe. Remember the Biblical narrative of Naomi and Ruth. For her faith Ruth was included in the earthly geneology of our Lord and Saviour.