About Barry Danylak

theological training to be more equipped to understand and live out my faith on a deeper level. Taking a year leave of absence from my career at AT&T in 1993, I pursued an M.A. in Christian Thought at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. I completed my degree in 1998 taking a few more years to complete my master’s thesis. The thesis examined how Isaac Newton’s theology was portrayed by various contemporary authors, who translated and explained his break-through work, Mathmatica Principia, to make it accessible to the wider reading public of the day. Not surprisingly, each author describes Newton’s perspective of God through their own particular theological lens.

After returning to AT&T that soon became Lucent Technologies (the manufacturing piece) in 1996, I continued teaching in the single adults ministry at College Church as a lay-leader. In 2001 I became a ministry intern in single adult ministry and decided to pursue further graduate studies in biblical exegesis at nearby Wheaton College. Though I enjoyed taking on challenging problems in industry for Lucent Technologies, my prayer partner at the time challenged me to consider directing my problem solving energies in a more theological direction, and invited me to consider giving some theological reflection to the practicalities of singleness and singles in the church. Though I wasn’t sure I was interested in committing myself to this area of theology, my time as a graduate student at Wheaton did give me time to dig more deeply into the ancient context of Paul’s discussion of singleness in 1 Corinthians 7. The next year I was introduced to the Warden of Tyndale House Biblical Studies Library in Cambridge, U.K., Dr. Bruce Winter. Bruce was a great encouragement to me in pursuing further study in the area understanding singleness in the context of ancient Corinth and Paul’s discussion to the Corinthians. The encounter with Dr. Winter opened the opportunity a few years later for me to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. In 2004, I began my Ph.D. with the Cambridge Divinity Faculty under the supervision of Dr. Winter. My research was focused on examining Paul’s discussion of singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 in light of its Greco-Roman context.

Just before I left for Cambridge, I was invited by the singles group at College Church to speak at the annual single adult retreat. I decided that it would be a good opportunity to explore the biblical perspective of singleness as the topic for the retreat. The retreat become an opportunity to reflect deeply on the question of marriage and singleness in light of the biblical covenants and the powerful theological motif of offspring (or “seed”) that runs through Scripture. The exploration was very well received by those at the retreat. The young interim singles pastor at the time was so excited by the themes we were seeing in Scripture that he encouraged me to write a paper that we could share with the pastoral team at College Church, which we did in August of 2004. Then when I shared the paper with pastor-scholars at Tyndale House in Cambridge, it was again very well received. With strong encouragement from Pastor (Dr.) John Piper that this theology needed to be preached to the church, I was encouraged to publish the paper with Grove books based in nearby Ridley Hall in Cambridge. Piper himself used material from the paper for a sermon he preached at his church in Minneapolis. The next year the paper was published as a booklet in the Grove Books series in Biblical Theology as: A Biblical Theology of Singleness, becoming one in a series of many theological booklets distributed to Anglican clergy members around the world.

The Ph.D. research with the Cambridge Divinity Faculty focused on exploring the question of why people chose to marry or often not to marry in the context of Roman Corinth, as a backdrop for gaining fresh insight on Paul’s discussion of singleness and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7. As part of the research, I enjoyed examining ancient census papyri from Roman Egypt to understand the differences in marriage patterns between people living urban contexts versus rural contexts. My statistical background from earlier days enabled me to demonstrate statistically significant differences in patterns of singleness and marriage between urban and rural populations. The data showed that males living in ancient urban contexts were significantly more disposed to singleness than males living in rural contexts. The research went on to show that there were demographic, economic and ideological factors that helped explain why singleness was a prominent feature in ancient cities in the Roman world. Not surprisingly, many of the same factors that affected people in ancient cities have affected people throughout all ages of history, and the findings help give clarity to the present correlation between increased urbanization and decreased rates of marriage around the world. The research demonstrated that it was primarily practical reasons rather than ascetic reasons that likely motivated the Corinthians to raise their questions with Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. The thesis was finally examined and approved in 2012 with the title, Secular Singleness and Paul’s Response in 1 Corinthians 7.

After Pastor John Piper preached the sermon on singleness some of the insights that had been gleaned got a bit more attention. Crossway Publishers called me soon afterwards and asked me to consider developing this theology of singleness into larger version that could be published as a book. At the time Pastor Piper had also agreed to write a book for Crossway on the theology of marriage, and the publisher was quite keen to have a comparable book on the theology of singleness. It was also time to return to North America and I opted to move to High River in Alberta, Canada in 2009 in part because my parents were there and I was eager to live closer to family. Alberta was also was (and still is) a place of great beauty and the lifestyle of the people is easy going and quite conducive to hibernating to write a book! So, I moved to southern Alberta to write book and never left. The book was published in 2010 with the title: Redeeming Singleness: How the Storyline of Scripture Affirms the Single Life. The theology outlined in the book was well received by people in different spheres of Christian service, including pastors, theologians and career missionaries. While I was still writing the book, a group of single missionaries had gotten a hold of my earlier paper and invited me to share this theology with them in a retreat centre in Guernsey one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel. It was a unique setting for theological reflection and together we saw the greater need to share this theology with the larger missions community. Our working together gave rise to a new missions partnership called Shoulder to Shoulder that became an initiative of One Another Ministries. Shoulder to Shoulder remains active today sponsoring seminars and workshops on topics related to empowering, equipping and encouraging singles on the mission field.