Meeting new Christians
Does the idea of church-surfing, speed-dating, ceroc or dating online fill you with dread? Are you an out-doorsy type? Well, the thing you’ve been looking for is the Christian Rambling Club! It’s a national organisation with groups all over the country.
The national group itself organises pretty impressive walks and even weekend and week-long rambles. If you’re not Ranulph Fiennes, don’t worry, they organise walks for all capabilities.
This is how their website describes what they do:
The Christian Rambling Club (CRC) arranges walks of various grades for Christians throughout the country.
This is an excellent way of meeting other Christian walkers, seeing other parts of the country, making new friends, and having Christian fellowship. Each event includes worship together either at a local church or informally.
If you’re looking for something that might be a little closer to home, then try one of their local groups. They’ve currently got groups in the following places:
Bristol, Derbyshire, Dorset, East Anglia, Hampshire, London, North East, North West, North Midlands, Reading, Shropshire, South East (mainly Kent & Sussex), South Midlands, South Wales, Surrey, West Midlands, Wiltshire and Yorkshire.
Happy walking.
Not all Christian Dating Sites are the same
What do you look for when deciding which Christian dating website to use? Perhaps you simply go for the one that looks the best; has the best “user interface” or the most features. Perhaps you try to figure out how big the site is or how many people use the site. Perhaps you’ve been recommended a site by a friend.
These are all useful criteria to help decide, but have you thought about who might be operating the websites? Is it a safe assumption to make that a Christian website is run by and for Christians? Well, apparently, it’s not a safe assumption.
I was rather surprised to learn that BigChurch.com is actually run by Penthouse. Yep! Perveyors of adult magazines. And many of the other big “Christian” sites are run by large companies that run a whole host of dating sites for special interest groups such as Christians and even Gardeners over 50.
For many dating companies it’s not necessary to have the same beliefs as their users. As long as they can categorise your special interest correctly – put the right questions in your profile form – they think that’s enough to satisfy the market.
Does it matter? Well, in the end, only you can make that decision. But it does highlight the need for Christians not just to be taken in by the Christian tag. When you look at a dating site, try to find out who runs it. Look for the “About us” section. Find out if there are sister dating websites – if there are, there’s a fair chance they’re covering the demographic bases.
Are social networks the place to find love?
It used to be that websites were fairly static places: you look up a company and they present to you their product and services. Many still are static, but interaction is now the thing on the internet. That’s what the so-called Web 2.0 is all about – user interaction through websites.
In a limited way, this is what dating websites are all about too – they allow you to interact, not with the website owners but with other users of the site. But you can do that on Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and Twitter (and a plethora of others – there’s even a site where you are set up with an online chat session with another random user).
Can you use these social network sites for dating? Do you use these sites for dating? I was talking to a dating expert yesterday, and she says that Facebook is definitely being used by some to find a partner – she said that even she was hit on on Facebook. I tend to use Facebook for friends only, so accepting “friend” status with a stranger on Facebook seems a little wierd to me. But the expert tells me that many Facebook users want to have a huge friend list because it positively confirms that they are liked, and taking it one step further, receiving approaches from strangers online also confirms your attractiveness.
Twitter also is a very interesting place. Unlike Facebook you can “follow” someone, but it doesn’t need to be reciprocated, so there is no presupposition that you know each other, or even have anything particularly in common, other than perhaps that you might be interested in similar topics. I started writing about linguistical things on Twitter and suddenly found that I had a handful of followers, complete strangers, purely on the basis of one or two “tweets”.
So with all the social possibilities that these sites bring, do Dating websites still have a place?
All the benefits of anonymity are there – you don’t have to reveal your real name on sites like Twitter, and you don’t have to reveal your email address or even your location. So you can make “friends” with someone and let a relationship develop naturally, pretty much as you would meeting with people for real, but without the worry of bumping into them if it goes pear-shaped.
I wonder though, if the same rules for real life meeting also apply to these sites? i.e. if you’re shy, will it still be as difficult to take a friendship to romantic relationship? If you’re socially confident online/offline it’s probably all the same; you’ll easily develop romantic relationships.
One of the things I like about dating websites, is that it’s unambiguous. You know that you and others are there for the same reason. Perhaps you feel like you have enough friends, but you want a partner. A dating site lets you do that.
In the end, it’s all about niche. The reason you’re interesting in a Christian dating website, is because you don’t want to wade through profiles you have no interest at all. By using a niche site you make your search simpler, and it gives you more confidence because you know you’ll identify at some level with most if not all the people on the site.
So for me, I think there is still a place for dating websites, and especially Christian dating websites – they meet the need.
Will subscription-based dating websites survive?
Just last month an Economist article said that dating websites OkCupid and eHarmony were bucking the economic trend and were seeing more people using their services than ever before.
eHarmony told the Economist that the number of visitors to its site was greater when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by over 100 points! OKCupid says that back in September it was averaging 6,000 messages sent through its system per day, now it’s about 18,000.
Both companies say they link site usage with the recession. Perhaps it’s true, when there are problems in life, having someone to share it with can be a great help.
For me though, there’s a more interesting question: will subscription-based dating sites continue to grow in the long run?
eHarmony, like Match.com and some of the Christian sites, is a subscription based site. But with the availability of free online dating sites like OKCupid (and free Christian dating sites) will its business model continue to work? Perhaps for the time being, but clearly even the big companies are starting to wonder.
In January Match.com launched DownToEarth.com which is totally free (and only available in America at the moment). Clearly it is testing the waters. Perhaps it is hoping that users of DownToEarth will upgrade to Match.com.
I’m sure that despite the current market growth, all subscription-based sites are actually feeling the pinch. It’s not just the economy that’s putting pressure on subscription services, it’s the competition from free services, both free online dating sites, and free social networks that for some are replacing dating websites.
FriendsReunited started out charging people to use its service, but with the massive growth of Facebook, it had to make it free a year or so ago.
The big problem with providing a free service is making enough money to keep going and turn over a modest profit. Newspapers are suffering from readers migrating to free online sources, and subscription-based dating sites will see the same happen to them too.
The man who created perhaps the largest free online dating site, PlentyOfFish.com, has even started to wonder if he should create or buy a subscription-based site – so are free sites commercially viable? It’s a tough one – the bigger the site, the more expensive it is to run, but if no-one wants to pay for it, and advertisers aren’t advertising so much, how will they survive?
Conclusion
Free dating and social network sites will kill subscription-based sites. Free dating and social network sites are commerical suicide. Discuss.
Events Calendar
We’ve started adding events to our events calendar. If you want to join in any of the events, you should contact the event’s organiser. Just click on the event in the calendar, and you will be taken to the appropriate website.
Many events book up quickly, and some of them try to balance the male/female ratio – women’s places often fill the quickest.
If you’re an event organiser, please contact us to submit your event.
Online Dating Survey
The recent survey Christian121 undertook wanted to find out what information people wanted to be able to find (and filter for) in a dating website.
We listed a few attributes that we thought people would like to be able to search for. In particular, we were interested to see if there were any differences between what men and women wanted to see the most. For example, just over 60% of men thought that searching by denomination was either very important or important whereas, just under 40% of women thought so, most women were indifferent to denomination, and about the same percentage thought it was not important or not important at all.
We also wanted to know what kind of geographic space folk wanted to be able to filter for, so we asked whether people wanted to be able to search by miles, city, or region. Roughly 60% of women said that all three options were very important or important. Men were more interested in being able to filter by region, with nearly 90% saying it was very important or important.
When it came to the social attributes of income and work status we found some interesting differences: 16% of women wanted to be able to filter by income, but not one male respondent said it was very important or important, with 81% saying it was not important or not important at all, compared with 40% of women. We see a similar divergence with work status where 13% of men thought it was very important or important, but 37% of women thought it was important or very important.
We noted that in some of the comments respondents left, women also wanted to be able to know about daters’ church status – leadership roles within church. One male respondent said that instead of income he wanted to filter by intellect.
Survey Data
Conclusions
I don’t have any statistics for it, but I think it’s probably fair to say that most websites are designed by men. For me it was interesting to be reminded that men and women want different things from a website, especially, it would seem, from a dating site. I rather suspect that as far as income goes, it isn’t so much that men aren’t interested in filtering by income and status than they don’t want to be filtered by income and status – or is that just me!?
The questions we asked only skimmed the surface, some of the comments people wrote highlighted some other things daters are interested to see in a dating site. We’d love to hear what you think.
Test Event
Title: Test
Location: London, England
Link out: Click here
Description: This is a test event – if you have an event you want to publish – drop us a line.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-03-28
New blog
Hello folks. This is the first entry for a new blog on online dating for Christians.
Online dating has really taken off in a big way over the past few years, so it’s only natural that Christians also start using dating websites. But it’s a big step for most people to start using them. Does it mean that you are a loser, desperate, Billy or Billie no mates? No, I don’t think so. On the whole people who use dating websites are people who lead busy lives and simply don’t have the time, or perhaps in the inclination, to hang out in bars or church-surf on the off-chance of meeting someone.
For Christians the difficulties of meeting someone special can be even more acute – especially if you are committed to a small church – because we just may not be meeting other single Christians frequently enough to build a relationship. So dating websites can be a key to meeting the right person, and if you use a website that other Christians use, then it can be even easier to meet someone.
Over the coming days and weeks I will be posting the results of some research into dating websites Christian121 did last year. I’ve decided to close the survey down for now, but may carry out some other surveys as time goes on.
That’s all for now.
