Why SolaSingles?

SolaSingles is a place for Calvinistic Christians to find a husband or a wife. Underneath everything we built are one observation and one precaution. The observation is about how people actually come to know each other. The precaution is about what it takes for a room full of strangers on the internet to remain good company.

The observation

Nobody falls in love with a search result.

In real life you come to know a person over something — a meal, a book, a game of chess, somebody's garden. You learn the person sideways, while you are both looking at the thing: what she finds funny, what she is patient about, how she treats the fellow who knows less than she does. By the time a serious conversation arrives, it lands on top of an acquaintance instead of being asked to create one.

The sites that serve this world run it backwards. They hand you a catalog. You search, you filter, you write to a stranger, and the first conversation is a doctrinal job interview — positions first, before you have any idea of the person holding them. Nobody meets anybody that way anywhere else. Not at church, not at a conference, not at a friend's table. It is how you buy an appliance, and it is why so much of what happens on those sites feels like shopping and so little of it feels like meeting someone.

So we built the rooms first and hung the profiles off them, rather than the other way around. Rooms for books, for cooking, for gardening, for film and music, for games and chess, for the outdoors, for travel, for animals, for making things — and for theology, where the arguing belongs. Twenty-one of them. You join the ones you would have joined regardless, and you get to know people the way you would anywhere else: naturally, over the things you already care about, with marriage in open view the whole way.

A profile shows you a person's positions on paper. A room shows you the person. We will not pretend a website is a fellowship hall — nothing on a screen is. But this is the nearest thing to one that can honestly be built out of a website, and no one has built it for Calvinistic singles before. And unlike the fellowship hall, it does not care that the two of you live four states apart, or an ocean.

The precaution

We spent about five years inside the sites that already do this. Every one of them has one main chat room, and you can set your watch by what happens in it. A big personality arrives with more to say than everyone else, and for a few weeks the room is his. Some of it is good — the best conversations we ever had there started with something one of those men said. Some of it turns into a fight. Then he goes quiet, or he leaves, and there is nothing for months, because nobody quite knows how to talk to each other without him. Then the next one turns up, and the cycle starts over.

Underneath that cycle runs a second, quieter cycle that does the real damage. A loose statement of faith shuts nobody out — a site that asks no more than whether you are a Christian has admitted every error that word can be made to cover — so sooner or later the room is not talking about books or baptism. It is conducting a trial: whether the member who arrived last month holds the gospel at all. Those are the arguments that exhaust a community. Not the family arguments — the first-things arguments, held in public, with no written standard to appeal to, again and again, with each new arrival, forever.

One room, behind an open door. This site is those two mistakes, fixed.

The rooms here sit behind a doctrinal statement that is precise by design. It affirms the gospel in detail — the floor every member stands on, signed in full before joining, no exceptions. It rejects particular errors by name, because a man can affirm every positive sentence in a statement and still hold something that empties it, and naming the errors leaves nobody guessing where the edges are. And it is silent, deliberately, about the things faithful believers differ on — baptism, the covenants, church government, the Lord's Day, the millennium. The silences are not gaps. They are the conversations we want — and the arguments, when it comes to that — held by the people we want to have them with.

None of this reads a heart. A man can sign falsely, or sign sincerely and be wrong about himself; no document can tell the difference, and neither can any church. What a precise door does is narrower, and it is the thing that makes the rooms work: it settles the first-things arguments in advance, once, in writing, before anyone walks in. When you sit down in a room here, you already know the man across the table affirmed — in full, with his own hand — the same gospel you did. You are free to like him. The energy other communities spend finding out whether the newcomer is a brother gets spent here on the conversation, which is what it was for.

The company

Who walks through that door? Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists. Dutch and German Reformed. Congregationalists. Men and women who came up through dispensational churches and read their way to the doctrines of grace. They differ on real things, and some of the differences matter enormously. And out there, most of the time, they keep to their own conferences, their own pulpits, their own corners of the internet — some of them will not share a meal.

It does not have to be that way, and the proof is on the record.

R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur agreed about the gospel — who God is, who Christ is, what Scripture is, how a sinner is justified — and disagreed about baptism and the millennium for the whole of their lives. They debated infant baptism in front of thousands and neither man moved an inch — and the debate landed on top of a friendship rather than being asked to build one, because by then they had stood on the same side of the real fights for years. And when Sproul died, MacArthur stood in his friend's own chapel and delivered one of the eulogies. We have written about them separately, because the shape of this whole place came from watching how they did it.

Reach further back and the specimen is sharper still. George Whitefield and John Wesley divided over the doctrines of grace themselves — the very ground this place is named for — and said so in print, at length, without softening a word. Yet asked once whether he expected to see Wesley in heaven, Whitefield reportedly said he feared not: Wesley would be so near the throne, and he himself at such a distance, that he should hardly catch sight of him. And when Whitefield died, the man who preached his funeral sermon, at Whitefield's own request, was John Wesley. If a friendship could survive that divide, then the differences inside this house — between people who signed the same statement of the same gospel — are small by comparison, and treating each other as strangers over them is a choice, not a necessity.

So argue. Press hard, bring the texts, tell somebody plainly that you think they are mistaken and why — and stay friends, because being contradicted is not an injury and hurt feelings are not evidence of sin (Proverbs 27:17). We wrote both of those into the code of conduct, and we meant them. The whole standard fits in a sentence: argue as hard as you like, and never with contempt (Romans 14:10).

And to make the arguments worth having, every position that divides our members gets a full paper here, written so that the people who hold it would own it — because it is entirely possible to grow up in one of these traditions and never once hear the others stated accurately by someone who actually believes them. What you hear instead is the caricature. The papers exist so that you argue with what a person actually holds — and so that when you decide someone is wrong, it is the real position you have judged and found wanting, not the caricature of it.

Your pride does not need to be on the table. Leave it at the door with everything else the door catches, and let the truth be the only thing at stake — then the worst an argument here can cost you is an error, and losing one of those is profit. MacArthur, on a stage beside Sproul, said it as plainly as it has ever been said: "I know there are errors in my theology. I'm not under any illusions. I know that. And I said that one time and somebody said, 'Well, why don't you change them?' And my response was, 'I just don't know where they are. I know they're there, but I don't know where they are. If you show me where they are, I'll change them.'" That is a man with his pride off the table — and it is the posture this whole place asks of you. Enjoy the conversation. The room is full of people who hold the gospel you hold. Enjoying them is allowed.

What it is all for

The goal of this place in one sentence: that the people who share the gospel would stop being strangers to each other.

Some of what begins in these rooms will end in a marriage — that is the destination, and everything on the site is built to serve it. Much of it will be friendship, and arguments worth having, and finally hearing what the other side actually says from somebody who says it well. All of that is worth building. And none of it depends on the loudest man in the room staying.