About
I spent close to a decade in church leadership working directly with singles — not as a researcher, just as someone sitting across the table, week after week, hearing the same quiet frustration in different words.
The advice everyone had been given wasn't landing anymore, and nobody seemed to know why.
I wanted to understand what changed. That question is what eventually pulled me into media. I started writing and producing films — mostly romantic dramas and comedies, made for and about Christian audiences. I liked the work, but the more of it I made, the more I noticed how far the stories we were telling had drifted from the lives people were actually living.
"Faithful people were doing everything they'd been told to do, and the ending still wasn't arriving."
So I started writing about it directly. That's how Yoked began — essays working through the gap between the script and the reality, in public, with readers.
The writing kept growing past essays. It became State of Christian Singleness, a Listening Report built from thousands of those conversations. It became a TEDx talk. And it became Coming Up Short, my debut novel about a woman who starts church hopping to find a husband, convinced her own congregation has run out of eligible men. Some things are better lived through a story than argued in an essay.
I'm not trying to tell people what to do.
I'm trying to understand what
they're going through.
I'm also a husband and a dad.
Somewhere down the road, my daughter will inherit the same world I'm writing about today.
I'd like to leave her a better map than the one we inherited.
— Kou Browne