Can we agree that dating is often miserable and messed up, but necessary and unavoidable? 
If you look to Barnes and Noble, you'll find endless books targeting women's challenging quest for the perfect man and more rarified books targeting men's search for sex with beautiful women (only to discover, as one author of such a book famously did, that-hard as it is to imagine up front-even that has debilitating limitations). 

Churches operate with a different and even more-complex set of rules.  On the one hand, churches provide an enviable and unique service in that those churches which attract a younger crowd are one of the few places society offers where one might meet a spouse of a certain character.  And yet were it only so simple as that.

The key problem facing those who date within a church context is that, if the dating goes badly, the person you've dated is still in the same room every Sunday.  A casual trip to the movies that doesn't lead to a follow-up date turns awkward when you see that person every week and know a fair amount of their friends.  And that doesn't quite cover the serious relationship gone seriously awry.  The strengths the church brings to the table of a rich and safe social context also turn out to be its difficulties.

And so one common response is frozen fear.  Men-already, in most cases, coming to terms with a deeper-than-previously-understood fundamental passivity-aren't prepared to risk ostracism by becoming the jerk who invited Jane out but then didn't have the decency to call her again.  And so many men wait for an unmistakable sign that that beautiful stranger across the room is The One before making a move.  Unmistakable Signs being in the short supply that they are, that can mean lots of Saturday nights with the guys.  And we haven't even addressed the garden variety fear of rejection.

Women, of course, could take initiative themselves.  But this brings its own set of complexities in the average church and so is customarily untried. 

Books, of course, have been written on the church side of things.  A big-seller from a few years back, Joshua Harris' I Kissed Dating Goodbye, addressed these fears by legitimating them, suggesting that dating was a secular concept anyway and therefore one begging for pain, abuse and ungodliness.  The alternative was the earlier concept of courtship.  In my experience, the outcome of taking Harris to heart was that the few men who might have asked out a woman in their church now opted against it. 

And so we're back with the mess, which might not be the worst thing.

I do know a few churches which have taken this on directly and liked the result.  One pastor I know asked his young congregation from the pulpit why they weren't dating each other and then encouraged them to get past their fears, grow up, and take some chances.  (Some months later, when slammed with more marriages than any one pastor could reasonably perform, I'm told that he-one hopes good-naturedly-complained on that front.)

There are some agreed-upon safety tips to this approach.  We do our best to honor the other person in all respects.  We don't go into hiding with our new love and shun our friends (and their opinions on our new love).  We agree up front that the object of dating is to discover if this person is someone we'd like to marry.  We concede that godliness as we date is a good idea, and worth the challenges of sticking to it. 

But then we embrace the thought that awkwardness is not the worst thing and that, hard as it might be to picture, there may well be irreplaceable opportunities for growth that this kind of dating might offer us. 

Maybe if we run across that person we dated only once, we smile, chat briefly and keep moving, recognizing that there are worse things.  If we-perish the thought-go through a painful breakup, we embrace the reality that part of our way through that breakup will be negotiating how we hope to handle the awkwardness of remaining in the same church.  If the church offers multiple services, perhaps we agree to go to different ones.  If not, perhaps we talk about where we might sit and how neither expects the other to engage in deep conversation when our paths cross in the lobby.  And it's assumed that there will be some agreement on the twin tensions of (a) finding a place where we can honestly process our emotions about the relationship and (b) avoiding widespread slander of the other person. 

But, in the cold light of day, don't those things seem like reasonable steps towards adulthood?  And adulthood has a lot of freedoms to offer that we can never experience until we get there.

So, with all that in mind, to paraphrase my pastor friend (presuming-I'm hoping we agree on this-that you're unmarried): Ready, set, date!