Hay And Love

Driving around yesterday where we live almost anywhere you went you could smell freshly mowed and raked hay fields. That is such a wonderful smell. With thousands of Amish in close proximity to our home, everywhere you looked there were farmers, Amish and English alike, cutting, raking and baling hay for the winter. Watching the English with their high tech equipment and then watching the Amish with the plodding but mighty draft horses is such a contrast but when you look at their houses it looks like the Amish are prospering more with less technology. What is especially awesome is when you are out of the car and can not only watch but listen. All you hear are the sounds of the horses doing what they love, leaning into the harness and pulling hay rakes and hay wagons. The soft jingle of their harness out in the open air while they do what man and beast have worked symbiotically together for centuries to accomplish in the never-ending change of the seasons reminds me that bigger and louder is not necessarily better. Farming the way the Amish do seems almost quaint but I don't think many of the Amish envy their English neighbors and the environmentally controlled cabs of their massive tractors with a commensurately massive loan payments.

How different the times and seasons are when you spend a lot of your summer preparing for fall and winter rather than looking ahead to the next vacation or the start of the Christmas shopping season. The rhythms of the seasons in the Midwest are very meaningful for those of us who grew up here and choose to live here and it always brings back memories. For me the smell of freshly mowed hay means more than feed for our livestock this winter, it takes me back to my younger days when I was an insufferable kid dating the woman who would be my wife.

Part of the process of courting my wife included helping with the hay when her dad cut it back when his health was better. That was not much fun because the bales were bound with wire making it possible to make them much heavier than hay bales bound with twine. Some of the bales weighed more than half of what I did back then. Plus I didn't really know what I was doing which made me feel awkward, something I hate. To top it off my wife's brother would toss bales like he was playing corn-hole, which is made easier by him being a giant who was immensely strong. I was pretty strong for a 125 pound kid but each bale was a major effort. Lifting weights in the gym is not quite the same as using your whole body to manhandle a bale of hay.

When I was living in those days of sweating, sore backs and arms that looked like a herd of cats had used them for a scratching post it wasn't much fun but looking back it was all well worth the effort and irritation. I am not sure her dad ever thought I would amount to much but I have to believe it earned me some grudging respect to go toe to toe with the hay bales.

Those days seem so long ago but I still remember the smell of hay and it reminds me of my wife. She would be out there with the men, working every bit as hard but smiling all the while. Hard work never bothered her and I tell skeptical Amish guys all the time that back in the day she could work every bit as hard as an Amish woman or even an Amish man. Stacking hay bales in the barn seems an odd thing to remind me of her but I recall those days and the smell of hay reminds me of how blessed I am to have a faithful wife of more than twenty years and eight children that we love. Our oldest son is out of the house every morning before 7 AM to go work on Amish farm and I see in him so much of what I respect about my wife. My other sons will head out later to care for our pigs, horses and cattle. My daughters are bright and beautiful and the two older girls spent part of their summer in Nicaragua and Nepal serving Christ.

My ungrateful and vain younger self would be shocked and disappointed at how we choose to live but I look around at my family and especially my wife when I see hay being made and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

The Family Economic Unit

I wrote a few weeks ago about the subject of debt and trying to avoid/get out of debt. In the meanwhile I have been thinking a lot about the economics of the home and family and how that relates to debt and financial stability. As I look at the world around me I see very little praiseworthy from an economic standpoint. The rich grow richer and more power too them I guess. The poor and the dependent class grow larger every year thanks to a mediocre economy and incentives that generationalize poverty and dependence. More and more families have two wage earners and yet those same families are barely making ends meet. I want something different than the rat race and debt/consumption model for my family. That requires a different look at how we approach economics at family level.

There are two main factors in the economy of a household, income and expenses. The expenses side is fairly self-explanatory, spend less and make do with less. Live more simply. That is easier said than done in our culture that worships the new, the better, the upgrade and the update while consumption is king and debt is always available. But we really can do with less, for example see John Mureiko's recent post More With Less: Clothing to look at just one area where we think we need more than we really do. We are a pretty frugal family in some ways, no smartphones, no cable/satellite TV, we don't go on expensive vacations (or vacations at all!) or buy lots of gadgets or clothes. We don't eat out a ton other than breakfast at the local greasy spoon for my wife and I and the occasional pizza. We don't throw a lot of food away because we feed it to our pig in return for bacon. We have a modest sized mortgage and one small car payment. So we are pretty bare-bones in a lot of ways compared to other families.

That doesn't mean we can't do more. We are looking at our livestock because that has gotten a bit out of control, we have too many horses that eat too much hay and do little in return. We are trying to be smarter about our meal planning, more basic food stuffs to make meals from rather than pre-packaged foods. We are being a bit more picky about driving our Amish neighbors around to make sure that we are get fairly compensated for time, gas and wear & tear.

The other side of the equation is income. We are an anomaly in modern America, a large family with a single bread winner. That is who we are and how we have rolled since 1995 when I graduated from college. I am not sure that is going to keep working. So we have to decide what to do in place of that model and in doing so take an inventory of our family. While we have is some extra space and we have lots of potential labor. With four able bodied adults in the home and plenty of other kids old enough to help we are looking at how we can leverage that to diversify our economic structure. That looks a little light this....

- Multiple income streams

As it stands right now, we are a single income family. We have been since the day I graduated from college and we like that. We are old fashioned perhaps but we think that the family is best served when one of the parents, usually mom, is home more or less full time to manage the household. For us that has always meant that I go to a job somewhere and my wife stays home. That has worked for almost twenty years although it has been very trying for us financially for much of that time. It was especially critical when we had a non-stop procession of babies and very small children in the home. Now our children are getting older, our youngest is almost six and soon we will have 5 of our 8 aged 13 or older. That doesn't mean they don't need attention, just not as much of stuff like feeding and diapering which in theory frees up a lot of time. So we are giving serious thought to how the income end of the equation can change without compromising our core belief structure about having mom at home.

What we would like to see are multiple income streams. We have a somewhat unusual opportunity in that we live among one of the largest populations of Amish in the country and we have very good relations with many of them. This means that we can leverage those contacts to drive them places they cannot readily reach with a buggy, get into business ventures including one we are looking at very seriously and also a bartering economy where we trade their expertise for our technology like cars.

- The home as the economic center for the family

Alongside the multiple income streams, we would like to see the home become the economic focal point of the family. Rather than our home being the place we all go forth from to jobs/schools and then come back to for the purpose of eating and sleeping, we would love to see the home be where we work and where we live. That is how humanity worked for a very long time and I don't think modern "progress" has a whole lot going for it, far more so than the model of families scattering to the winds to chase "education" and jobs leaving families splintered and professional caregivers to take care of young children and elderly parents. Our next door neighbor is a hog farmer, his dad lives on the corner of his property and helps him with the farming still, and does so alongside his grandsons.

- An eye toward the future

Far too often in America adulthood means the kids striking off on their own to make their way in the world and this also often means moving away leading to fragmented families. Little wonder that families don't care for parents when they grow older and so many families put their children in day care. Our future hopefully is one where our kids are participating in the economy of the home and stay near us so that we can help care for their children and in turn can rely on them for assistance as we get older.

Also, what will the economy look like in the future?

Like it or not the United States is headed for a single payer health insurance system. While I think that is a horrible idea it is happening whether we like it or not. Having a job that provides insurance might not be a major concern. Also with a family economy it should be less important to have a million dollars socked away in your 401k. I think these and other factors are going to make the traditional employment model obsolete

That is just a rough plan to start.

We would like to get more property as we are kind of tight on land right now. One project we are exploring pretty seriously would require a new building and that would eat up the last bit of land we have that is vacant on our current property. So if we can get established with a decent income supplemented by jobs by myself and my older kids our next task would be expanding with more property, something that is pretty expensive with high crop prices and a ton of land hungry Amish to compete with! Really our goal is becoming more clear in my eyes and that is important. I really want to get out of the office/cubicle world and spend more time working alongside my family for a whole bunch of reasons and I think we are taking a few of the right steps along that path. You are welcome to follow along as we seek a new path!

Some Final Thoughts (For Now) On The Family Integrated Church Movement

I posted my review of Voddie Baucham’s book Family Driven Faith a few weeks ago and since Voddie is probably the most “mainstream” proponent of the Family Integrated church movement  (FICM) I think he is the best representative of the  movement as a whole. As I mentioned in my review, while I am leery of any "movement" in the church, I have a lot of affinity with the FICM. I appreciate the serious way they approach and treat the Scriptures and their unapologetic stand on the teaching of the Bible in matters of gender. They have taken what is an unpopular but correct stance against the consumerist mentality that has given us the modern “youth ministry” and age-segregation model. By and large they are guys that I would love to sit around and have coffee with. However, while there is much to commend in the FICM there is also a lot left “un-Reformed”. There is no better example of this than in this paragraph from Voddie’s book…

First there is no clear biblical mandate for the current approach. I have to choose my words carefully here, since I do not wish to intimate that churches with youth ministries are heretical or unbiblical. I fully recognize that many of the things we do in church today are not found in the Bible. We would be hard pressed to find a church building (as we know it), a pulpit, or a microphone in the book of Acts. So I am not arguing that the fact that something is not specifically mentioned in Scripture means that it is absolutely forbidden in today’s church. (Family Driven Faith, pg. 179, emphasis added)

Mull that over for a moment if you will because it is an exceptionally honest statement from a well-known and generally respected guy in the church, someone who defends the so-called Regulative Principle of Worship. Many of the things we do in church today are not found in the Bible. He mentions pulpits and buildings. You can add clergy, monologue sermons, seminaries, ritualized “Lord’s Supper”, "church membership", on and on. In fact the more you study it, the less of the traditional church you find in the Bible. We aren’t talking here about some lib’ral “mainline” Protestant here, we are talking a Reformed, sola scriptura group of churches and an uber-conservative spokesman in Voddie Bacuham and he bluntly admits that we do lots of stuff that isn’t in the Bible. That raises this important question:

If we claim to believe what the Bible teaches but the stuff we do isn’t in the Bible, why do we do it?

The answers are all over the place. Some people will insist that in fact most church traditions are in the Bible, at least in their church traditions. It requires some exegetical gymnastics to find them but they are allegedly there nonetheless. Others will appeal to pragmatism or culture or tradition. How can we have an orderly meeting if everyone is allowed to talk? How can we have church discipline without membership lists? How can we prevent heresy if no one is "in authority"? These and other questions are understandable given the propensity for people to wander but they place little trust in the Holy Spirit and the ability of the "average" Christian to read and understand the Scriptures.

I am not saying any of these extra-biblical traditions are inherently bad but I would ask where we find the support for them and what do we do when these traditions impede what the Bible does describe and command, as they so often do. If our traditions impede "one anothering" or if our traditions prevent us from being in fellowship and community with other believers, isn't the solution to get rid of the traditions? Somehow the church survived and even thrived in a much simpler setting in spite of rampant persecution and it is hard to argue that as we have surrounded ourselves with traditions that church life has improved at all.

In the end while there is much to be commended about the Family Integrated Church Movement, it falls down where so many other reform movements have stumbled: a stubborn clinging to the most entrenched, and often the most harmful, traditions of the church. Like the magisterial reformers, Voddie and others like him are “Halfway men”, the moniker hung on the reformers by the Anabaptists. They do get credit for taking a stand against the prevailing winds of the religious culture that insists on age segregation and erasing gender distinctions but it as a whole doesn’t go nearly far enough and ends up with a slightly more Biblical  gathering that ultimately is at odds with the Bible itself.

Book Review: Family Driven Faith

Voddie Baucham’s 2007 book, Family Drive Faith: What It Takes To Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk With God, is somewhat controversial in the church. Not because of heretical or radical teachings but instead because it challenges one of the pillars of the modern church model: age-segregation. It is an article of faith that in order to attract people your church needs to offer a comprehensive youth ministry, nursery during “worship” and preferably children’s church so that kids get a tailored experience and more importantly don’t distract the adults. It is all part of the subcontracting culture in America that is an epidemic in the culture and doubly so in the church. The Bible gives us a different story and is quite clear that God calls on parents, specifically and especially fathers, to be the primary molder and educator of the children God has given them. Not the youth minister. Not the public school. Parents.


The fact that this is radical and controversial says a lot more about the state of the “church” than it does about Voddie’s book. I actually found his suggestions to be common sense for anyone with even a cursory understanding of parenting from a Biblical standpoint. God has given many believers children. They are both a blessing (Psalm 127) and a responsibility. The church has a role to play in helping to equip parents, especially fathers, in their calling but the church is not intended to replace fathers in this, just as the church is not intended to replace individual Christians in the work of ministry but rather to be a place of equipping and encouraging.

I was more than a bit shocked to realize that I bough Family Driven Faith in 2008 and am just now reading it!

I really appreciated Voddie’s emphasis on the importance of Christian education. Family Driven Faith is far more than a diatribe against youth ministry, it is a call to Christians to recognize that our choices in educating kids has enormous repercussions on their corresponding understanding of the world. For example Voddie hits a drum I have been beating for a long time, namely that churches should see Christian education as something that we should invest in to help parents and provide an affordable alternative to government schools…

…I am sure that a community of believers that routinely raises millions of dollars to build sanctuaries for one-day-a-week use can find a few coins to help parents give their children a Christian education. (Family Driven Faith, pg. 209)

Yes! I am frankly disgusted that parents are expected to put money in the plate for pay for a building while untold numbers of children from Christian homes can’t afford private Christian education. An education based in Biblical teaching and from an openly Christian position. In my home of Fort Wayne there is a large Christian church with a comprehensive private school. High school tuition is almost $6000 which really is that much but that works out to monthly payments of $548 which is more than most car payments and almost as much as a mortgage! That isn’t even expensive as far as private schools go.

Voddie makes a lot of excellent points but I of course didn’t agree with everything. For a book that I am mostly in agreement with, I did have some issues to quibble over and one big issue that warrants a separate post.

I think Voddie overly relies on Deuteronomy 6 as the basis for his book. Deuteronomy 6 has a specific context for Hebrew parents to remind their children of the Exodus out of Egypt and the Old Covenant promises. The concept is correct as far as parents being responsible for raising their kids, and it does correspond with New Testament teaching, but it smacked of the sort of clumsy application that gives us tithing to the local church and plaques extolling the national identity of America as “God’s people”. Another concern. Family Driven Faith can be discouraging for those who, unlike Voddie, are not able to spend most of the day working from home. I get to work from home a couple days a week plus weekends so like Voddie I am around the house the majority of the time. Most parents are not and with the ridiculously busy schedules a lot of kids have, finding the volume of time is going to be difficult. Morning prayer and devotions is going to be impossible in some cases. I don’t think Voddie at all intends an “all or nothing” approach but it can come off that way.

From a style standpoint, a lot of the material in Family Driven Faith is a rehash of stuff Voddie has written elsewhere. Many of his books sound like the same stuff reorganized and repackaged: same jokes, same quips, same stories. That is kind of petty but it bugs me and as someone who buys Voddie’s books whenever they come out I think I get to make the occasional petty stylistic gripe!

Finally the biggest flaw, and one that is almost a fatal one, in Family Drive Faith is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, a flaw it has in common with the broader Family Integrated Church movement. Voddie is absolutely right that there is no Biblical basis for age segregation in the church but that is true not just for age segregation. Most of the arguments that Voddie makes against the youth ministry culture are as true for the rest of the traditional church as they are about age segregation! Like the magisterial reformers, Voddie only goes part of the way and in doing so misses the role that other traditions in the church have in leading to fathers that are not equipped to disciple their children and wives. Now as Voddie points out moving toward a full family integration is unlikely to happen overnight and in the same way I think that moving toward a simpler, more Biblical general ecclesiology is also not going to happen overnight. I am encouraged that many people who approach the Scriptures in a way that leads to family integration and homeschooling are also likely to eventually come to fully realized Biblical ecclesiology. It is a hard path but a necessary one.

In spite of a few concerns, Family Driven Faith is an important entry into the conversation about family and education and discipleship. I think Family Driven Faith is an important step in the right direction in spite of its flaws where church traditions are concerned. Reformation takes time and starting with the family is a great first step. Voddie is to be commended for being willing to take an unpopular stance, one that sees him regularly being misrepresented and attacked by some people who should be allies. Get Family Driven Faith. Read it. Be prepared to be challenged in some important ways!

The cult of child hatred

James Taranto, a secular editor for the Wall Street Journal, posted an interesting item last week as part of his popular "best of the web today" column, The War on Fertility. James was looking at an essay by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility. Apparently Ms. Miller takes umbrage that some Republican presidential candidates have large families and have the arrogance to not hide them away during the campaign. If you missed this column, you need to read it because it is equal parts fascinating look into the anti-child mindview and important lesson for believers. Here is the intro...

Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”


There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Gasp, there is nothing worse than a believer that...believes! It cracks me up that she has assigned a blanket, unspoken motivation that covers all of the past and present republican candidates even though that group contains a libertarian Christian man in his 70's, a much younger evangelical woman, a Roman Catholic and a mormon. She seems more put out by large, intact families than by Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery.

Needless to say, when she writes "There's nothing wrong with big families, of course", it is inevitable that she does think there is something very wrong with having a large family, namely that having a large family and daring to show them in public is somehow striking a blow against "women's reproductive freedom". How else to explain the "smug fecundity" of these...these....parents!

Of particular and unpleasant interest are the comments that follow her essay. If you thought she was a bit over the top, you ain't seen nothing yet! It is always instructive as well as ironic to read the vitriolic rants of people spewing hatred, stereotypes and intolerance toward those they accuse of....hatred, stereotypes and intolerance.

I have never, not once, heard anyone among the "Christian right" tout any of the candidates for their large family size. That doesn't mean that nobody has made that case but I haven't seen it and I certainly spend more than my fair share of time reading places where that should come up. This isn't really an issue among the "Christian right" at all as much as it is a visceral reaction among the secular Left to large families, at least large in the eyes of people in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles what qualifies as a large family. Where we live a family with five kids is not all that unusual but I can assure you that even in the Midwest large families garner a gasp and head shake response, perhaps more polite than in larger population centers but a shocked and disbelieving reaction regardless.

Although many people would classify me as intolerant because, for example, I think murdering unborn children is wrong, I don't presume to tell anyone else how many children to have. Of course I also don't presume to tell anyone how many children are enough. I think that decision is something left to each family to decide for themselves. For Christians it becomes more complex because we do have some explicit teaching from the Bible that describes children as a blessing from God which we ought to embrace rather than avoid, something that is formative rather than something to put off until the last moment. That doesn't mean that the Quiverfull folks are correct but I certainly am more sympathetic to their view than those who view children in a manner little different from the world.

That really isn't my point here. It is hardly news that "traditional" families seem to agitate people of a certain political viewpoint, especially if they are large families. Of greater concern to me, and what is sure to get some people wound up, is the way that feminism is being integrated into the church. From Taranto's post:

...why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

James Taranto, an admitted unbeliever, seems to understand something that a lot of Christians are missing. Feminism is not a force for the "liberation" of women, it is a method for ideological transformation. A lot of Christian are buying into a form of feminism dressed up in Christian sounding language and in doing so are unwittingly buying into a worldview that has a goal far beyond women pastors. It is a worldview that diminishes the importance of family, replaces mothers with institutionalized childcare and ultimately denies the image-bearer understanding of humanity as unique in the world. It is lived out in the disbelieving looks large families get and the subtle insults (don't you know what causes that?) even in the church and in the burgeoning literature of neo-feminist Christians who consistently misinterpret and misrepresent Galatians 3:28.

I make no apology for sounding the warning against the influence of feminism in the church. To me it is no different than any other worldly influence, whether patriotism or materialism or environmentalism, that seeks to pervert and diminish the worldview that should be the focus of Christians. Just as patriotism conflates national identity with the church and militarism flips the peacemaking life of the disciple on its head, feminism seeks to replace the complementary and interdependent structure of the family with the radical but false independent life that reduces women to occasional baby-makers before sending them back into the work force as a unit of production. Let me be clear, women are not "liberated" by going to work outside of the home. We are living in a culture that rapidly is becoming one where staying at home, once the norm, is becoming something only the very well to do can afford (see this excellent comment on this very topic by the same columnist, James Taranto: The Unchained Woman). When staying at home with your children becomes a sort of luxury good and status symbol, who is really benefiting from feminism? Not the women who scramble all week to get their kids up, ready for school and daycare, rush to drop them off before trudging off to work only to do the same scramble in reverse at the end of the day. Certainly not the children who are raised by and large by strangers because the harried schedule of their parents and economic pressure of a two-income society reserves full-time parenting to the country club elites.

As the church we are called to look at life and the world differently, to not be carried along by every wind and whim of the culture but to hold fast to the timeless and counter-cultural teaching of Scrpture. This is true for the family more than almost any other facet of life and not surprisingly the family is often ground zero for attacks from the Enemy. Not every Christians is called or able to have a large family and having a large family is not a sure sign of theological maturity but we must be wary of worldviews that teach beliefs that run contrary to the Bible. Even if those beliefs are not overtly anti-Christian we must examine the underlying worldview of those who teach worldviews contrary to Scripture, whether in the family, in education, in the church or anywhere else. Although some honest opponents of the faith will be open about their opposition, many others utilize a more subtle influence that often is dressed in religious language and aimed at tickling our ears. We must constantly be wary and hold up every belief to the Word and the influence of the Spirit working in conjunction. Otherwise we invariably will be led astray by those who deny the Son of God. The more we look and think like the world, the less we look and think like Jesus.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

Focusing on can rather than can't

Few discussions in the church generate more heat and less light than gender discussions. As a topic it is heavily influenced by our prevailing culture which makes it doubly difficult to have a calm discussion. This is tragic because it is an important topic to understand, both from an interpretive standpoint (for example why Jesus speaking to the woman at the well was so scandalous) and from the standpoint of practice in the church and in the family. It is easy for me to point the finger at those who I believe are influenced by the prevailing feminism of the day and are trying to force those contemporary cultural mores into the Scripture. I make no apology for that but I also recognize that on our end those holding to and advocating for a more traditional understanding of gender roles have done a pretty poor job of approaching a topic that carries so much cultural and emotional baggage. Part of the problem has been that we somehow have ended up with Mark Driscoll as the most visible figure in the complementarian camp. That certainly doesn’t help especially given the serious scholars and academic work that has been done by less…flashy…spokesmen, men like Wayne Grudem and John Piper. The other problem, and the one that I think is far more crucial, is the way the issue has been framed.

I think we have gone the wrong way by focusing on what women can't do instead of encouraging them in what they are called to do. Most arguments about gender roles, complementarianism vs egalitarianism, patriarchy vs Christian feminism, whatever you call it focus on the negatives and go like this:

- Women can't be elders. Yes they can!
- Women can't teach men. Yes they can!
- Women are to be silent in church. No they aren't!
- Wives are to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. No they aren’t!

Round and around we go, getting angrier and more strident as we do. Whether these are valid and applicable, and I believe they are, it turns discussion on gender to the negative leaving complementarians saying "You cannot" and egalitarians saying "Sure you can!". The debate centers around restrictions on what the church, wrongly, assumes to be crucial functions like "preaching" and often ignores what women are called to do which tend to be overwhelmingly what the Bible values most highly, functions like serving and caring for others.

Let's face it, no one likes to be told what they can't do.

Conversely, telling someone what they want to hear is always easier but it is rarely helpful.

Our sisters don’t need us to tell them what they can’t do as much as they need us to support and encourage and equip them to fulfill the noble calling of being a wife and mother. This requires two steps.

The first is kind of easy, at least compared to the second….

We as men in the church absolutely need to equip and encourage our sisters who are married in their calling as wives and mothers. The Bible speaks both positively about what women are called to, whether through example (like Mary anointing the feet of Jesus with oil and wiping His feet with her hair) and through exhortation (Titus 2:3-5; 1 Peter 3:1-6 ). There is a virtually unlimited need for the sort of service and ministry that women are not only called to but inarguably best suited for. We don’t need more people to give sermons or lead worship music or teach Sunday school. There is plenty of that already going on. We do need more serving of others, more loving homes, more mentoring of younger women by older women. This is not true just for our sisters who are already married with children. We also need to prepare our daughters and other unmarried sisters for this calling, not by sitting around pining for a husband but by ministering in and out of the Body in the ways that honor God and their calling as women and sisters in Christ. Being engaged in service and ministry before marriage is some of the best training to be a wife and mother that serves and ministers later on.

The second step is much harder, at least for me. The church desperately needs for men to step up so women don't have to fill in the gaps. That doesn’t involve watching mixed martial arts on pay-per-view, just FYI. I doubt that outside of a few ideologues who have an agenda to pursue that you would find many wives who don’t wish that their husbands would step up more in the church and the home. I fail at this on a regular basis and I am guessing most other men do as well. For the complementarian position to work, both sides need to be complementing the other and this often is an unbalanced situation where wives carry the lions share of the relationship.

If men would do a better job of encouraging women in their calling and serving as God has called them to do, I think a lot of the squabbling over gender roles would go away. Sure there are always going to be those who have a book to sell but among the "regular" folsk I think the debate would simmer down. A properly functioning, complementary and balanced marriage is one of the best witnesses to the world we have and the very best atmosphere for raising children but that sort of marriage won’t happen on its own. It is not enough and is in fact disingenuous to pound the pulpit about uppity women if we are not going to do everything we can as husbands to encourage our wives and rise to the challenge as men in our own callings.

I am not going to stop writing on this topic although I am aware that it rubs a lot of people who read my blog the wrong way. It is a subject that gets a lot of ink in the New Testament and that is reason enough for us to study it humbly and seek to apply what the New Testament teaches us consistently. I am going to try to spend more time focused on what our sisters are called to rather than what they are restricted from. I have made my position on the boundaries around gender roles very clear and now I need to spend more time working through how we equip women to serve in the vital ways that they have been uniquely called.

Don’t let anyone tell you that “just” being a wife and mother is something to be ashamed of or that you need to "do more" to be a valuable part of the Body of Christ. As I said, we have plenty of “preachers” in the church but we can never have enough wives and mothers carrying out that unique ministry.

The vocation of motherhood

Doug Wilson has a series of videos on the theology of work that I just stumbled across and they are pretty interesting, coming as they do from a particular worldview and doctrinal position. The most recent one is fascinating, an interview between Doug and his daughter Rachel Jankovic on Motherhood and Work: The Vocation of Motherhood. There is a lot that I disagree with Doug Wilson on, from the role of elders to infant baptism, but I loved this interview...


1--The Vocation of Motherhood from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

I found one line she said to be very interesting. She suggested that the work of staying at home is what drives women to the workplace (at around 1:17). That may not be true in every case but I can't tell you how many times women I work with have made remarks about there being no way they could deal with staying at home and caring for their kids "full-time". When I tell co-workers that my wife stays at home with our eight kids and also homeschools them, they get a look of horror on their face, as if somehow there is something intellectually stimulating and satisfying about working in a cubicle festooned with pictures of your children. 

As a culture we have so stigmatized motherhood as a vocation and calling and created such a horrifying picture of stay at home motherhood of the constantly weary, covered in drool and wearing frumpy clothes mom that we have made mothers afraid of motherhood. Rather than women seeing motherhood and child-rearing as the preferred state to be abandoned only as a last resort, women seem to default to working outside of the home and only reluctantly coming back home when they simply can't afford the child care any longer.

The devaluation of motherhood and marriage is all around us. It was reported yesterday that the percentage of married people in America has hit an all-time low and is heading for minority status. I am hardly surprised that is the case, in fact I am a little surprised that it is not even worse. Why would we expect unregenerate people to embrace an institution created by God for His people and as a picture of His Son and the church indefinitely? What troubles me is that the church, rather than standing in opposition to this trend and seeing family, marriage, motherhood and fatherhood as opportunities to witness to the world instead seems more interested in embracing and outdoing the world at its own game. Some of the most popular women writers in Christian circles seem to take delight in denigrating and mocking the Scriptures because they find that Biblical teaching on motherhood interferes with their own "gifts" and ambitions.

We should recognize and honor motherhood as the high calling that it is, in a realistic fashion recognizing how very difficult it often can be, but supporting and equipping women in this great service to God and the church. We hardly need yet another writer telling women that they need to be more than "just a mother" or "just a wife", as if those are degrading and unimportant things. Of course we should also realize that in this world merely telling young women to stay home and let us know how that works out for them is not proper either. The church exists in large part to equip every member for maturity and ministry and few ministries require more equipping, encouraging and maturity than the raising of children. The church should be pulling out all of the stops to encourage young women to embrace being a wife and mother but also making sure that we are supporting them in that vocation with love and wisdom, especially from older women (Titus 2:3-5). Unfortunately fewer and fewer older women have much experience in this area as more and more of the older generation of women have spent their mothering years working outside of the home.

Being a mother is every bit as important as being a missionary to far away lands even though few churches will put your picture up on their missions board. I wish they would! I would love to see a bulletin board in the foyer of churches with pictures of moms and their kids at home. We should love them and support them. I think it is a far better use of our offerings to financially help out a family in need so mom can stay home than it is to pay for another professional minister or supporting some denominational bureaucracy.

Honor moms. Support them. Love and encourage them. Nothing will have a greater impact on the future witness and mission of the church in America than strong families.

Asking the wrong questions will invariably lead to getting the wrong answers

CNN asks the question, What's fueling Bible Belt divorces. Why in areas where people are more “religious”, less educated and married younger are divorce rates higher than the Northeast where people are more likely to have a college degree, more likely to get married much later if at all and far less likely to be religious? CNN thinks it knows the answer....

Youth and lack of education can lead to higher divorce rates, said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center, who wrote a report on "The States of Marriage and Divorce." There's also an interactive map on the website.

"There tend to be higher divorce rates in states where women marry young," Cohn said. "Education also may play a role. In general, less educated women marry at younger ages than college-educated women, and less educated couples have higher divorce rates."

Values about premarital sex associated with the Bible Belt and rural America may be encouraging people to marry early, at ages when they are likely to have less education and less income to support a long-lasting marriage, according to Naomi Cahn, law professor at The George Washington University Law School and co-author of "Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture."

"There's a moral crisis in red states that's produced by higher divorce rates and the disparity between parental values and behavior of young adults," said Cahn. "There is enormous tension between moral values and actual practices."

All well and good. Except that in days gone by, people married at a much younger age, abstained from pre-marital sex at a much higher rate, had lower rates of education than today’s “everyone gets a BA” culture and yet divorce rates were much lower. Even compared to current Bible belt culture this was true. So what has changed?

Perhaps the problem is not getting married young and not going to college but rather a culture that devalues marriage? By almost any measure marriage is far less important as a cultural institution today than it was in prior generations. Today marriage is seen as an impediment to happiness rather than a means, something that traps you rather than fulfills you, an archaic institution that you enter into after you have lived your life and done your thing rather than the best institution for growing up. People see marriage as something to do once you are “mature”, which is ironic. I don’t think it is debatable that getting married in your early twenties is more likely to lead to maturity than going to college for five or more years. The confused masses of twenty-somethings living in their parents basements while wandering through life is not exactly a solid argument for waiting for marriage. Maybe if these kids would get married and have families they would get a clue and shape up?

Compounding this is the general muddled understanding of what marriage is, who should/should not get married and the separation of sex and children from the bounds of marriage. When no one in this country, including people in the halls of secular power and far too many “ministers” in mainline denominations, seems to understand what marriage is and what it is not and cannot be, is it any wonder that marriage is in such poor shape?

Furthermore, CNN makes the classic error of assuming that living in the Bible Belt, going to church and affirming some vague religious identifiers is the same thing as being a Christian. If you look at the divorce rate among people who are markedly more serious about their faith, the divorce rate changes dramatically for the better. Those inconvenient facts never seem to make into reports like this. There is more going on here than a dispassionate report.

Here is the no so subtle message of the article:

"The very fact that people feel less pressure to get married (in the Northeast) means they can be more selective about who they marry and take their time, " Coontz said. "They don't have to rush into it to please parents or avoid stigma of premarital sex."

So the message here is that you can do whatever you want and sleep around as much as you like until you find the “right” person to marry because that will lead to a healthier marriage. Again, that was not the case until fairly recently so what has changed? In spite of advances in contraception and our generally “enlightened” attitudes toward extra-marital sex , unintended pregnancies are still common, abortion is decimating entire populations and sexually transmitted diseases that common contraceptives don’t protect against are rampant. This is the new and brighter future we have been promised if we cast off the shackles of religion and repression?

If I were a conspiratorial fellow, I might wonder if there is not an agenda to these reports. Perhaps putting off marriage and delaying children is not as healthy as we are led to believe? Or perhaps just as likely this is a subtle shot at people in regions of the country that are more overtly religious. Sure people in the Northeast have lower divorce rates, they are getting married at a much lower rate in the first place and you can’t get divorced if you never got married! When you look at the cultural landscape of America littered with shattered families, promiscuity, institutionalized children, desperate couples who waited until they were too old to have children seeking ever more radical and moral bankrupt ways of turning back the natural biological clock, I hardly think that a rational answer is to further devalue marriage.

As the church, we musty be discerning when faced with reports like this. Our response is not to discourage marriage or follow the lead of the world in adjusting our priorities. Our response must be to embrace and encourage marriage in the church, especially among our young people and without apology. I hope my kids find suitable Christian spouses early in life and grow together as a couple through education, work and children and I make no apology for that. Nothing is more important for my children who have professed Christ than a God honoring marriage that is fruitful as God provides. Not a “good” job, not academic achievement. Nothing is more precious and nothing should garner more prayer for our believing children than their future marriage, spouse and children.

A broken heart trumps a church bulletin

A lot of us write about simple church, about why this form of gathering is more Biblical, healthier even, than the traditional meeting. There are lots of posts full of assertions and copious Scripture references that make a compelling case. By and large though it is all theoretical. Last Sunday I saw an example of what a simpler, more familial gathering looks like when someone is in need. This is where it becomes real, when a brother or sister is in need.

One of the sisters that gathers with us is a native of Syria. If you have been watching the news closely you will know that Syria is having protests like those happening all over the Middle East as part of the “Arab Spring”. In Syria the news has been less frequent, partly because of government control and partly because people have grown tired of the stories. This sister is still paying attention and ran across a video shot from her home country. She described what she saw to us and broke down as she shared. The video showed a young boy who was part of a protest, taken from his father and brutally tortured and murdered on film. The brutality and horror of what she saw led my sister to come before the church and share this experience.

This sister was brokenhearted, just pouring out the hurt she was feeling. We heard what she had to say, let her speak what was on her heart and then prayed for her. We ran over the time we normally stop by almost half an hour but that was OK because one of us needed the rest of us. As she wept and told us what she had witnessed, we listened and then one person after another encouraged her, asked us to sing hymns of praise for our Lord, prayed for her and turned to the Word of God for words of encouragement. Not everyone spoke but everyone could have. Rather than bottling up her anguish and putting on a happy face for “church”, she was able to expose her broken heart to her family and be lifted up and loved.

If she was in a traditional church, how would this have looked? Would she have been able to share her anguish with the church? Perhaps she could have spoken to the pastor and had a special prayer request made from the pulpit. Not quite the same thing as hearing her making herself vulnerable because she knew that she would be loved. Would she have been encouraged, prayed for, had Scripture quoted by the entire gathered Body? Probably not. She would have likely been like so many others in churches across the world on Sunday, sitting in her pew in her Sunday best, putting a smile on her face, telling people she was fine while being broken hearted inside. I am NOT saying that people don’t love one another deeply in traditional churches but I am suggesting that the structures and rituals we have put in place in those traditional gatherings make it difficult or even impossible for the church to function like a family.

When we treat the church as family, the needs of one another take precedence over the performance. There isn’t a schedule or liturgy needed to love one another and it is more likely that those structures prevent us from being encouraged and edified in the way the church was intended. Anyone who has a family knows that you cannot schedule, control or contain family. Family is family even when they annoy or hurt you and especially when they are hurt and need you.

Our group is not perfect. There are lots of personalities, lots of people coming from all over the place in terms of background, doctrinal stances, traditions. We need to intentionally find ways to be more in community with one another beyond Sunday morning. Coming from a pretty conservative viewpoint there are things that concern me with where some people are doctrinally. I sometimes wonder “where is this going?”. But I also see God at work and I see His people starting to function as a family. Most importantly I see people who love one another more than they love their traditions and that means we are generally as willing to be as flexible as we need to be. For example one sister offered to help with our little ones on Sunday so that my wife could just relax and be part of the group. This sister normally plays the piano for the group but this week we went without the piano. That would be unthinkable in most traditional churches. It is the little things like that that give me hope and encouragement for what God is doing.

If you are so led, please pray for this sister that God would lift her up, comfort and strengthen her and give her peace in her heart. Also I would ask you to ask yourself. What if she had come to your gathering of the church? Would she have been able to pour herself out and expose how wounded she was or would she have shaken your hand and replied “Fine!” when asked how she was doing?

Unity is not conformity

Alan Knox wrote a very important post this morning having to do with unity in the church, Disagreement is not Disunity. Here is a snippet...

Let’s start with a statement that, hopefully, everyone reading this will agree with: disunity is a major problem among the church. The church is splintered in its expression in spite of being one in Christ. This is a huge problem. However, forcing (or requiring) people to agree with one another about everything does not lead to unity. In the same way, disunity is not caused directly because people disagree with one another.

I think some people despair of unity in the church because they assume it means absolute agreement and conformity. That is fortunately not the case. In some ways I have used that as an excuse over the years. Well, I can't fellowship with those people because they believe A, B and C and of course they are wrong. That is a cheap and unscriptural view that much of the church holds even if they don't come out and admit it. I still struggle with this but I am trying to put aside my pride so that I can more fully experience the fellowship of other believers.

It is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary that we fellowship with people we disagree with on some issues. The only person I agree with 100% of the time is myself and sometimes I make pretty poor company even to me! The church is united by so many things, first and foremost the blood bought adoption by God. If God has chosen us and caused us to be born again and become part of His family, we need to be united with one another regardless of our differences. To do anything else is to tell God that perhaps He made a mistake in bringing those people into His family.

Men and boys

There is an article in the New York Times that is garnering a lot of attention on a familiar topic, the delay of adulthood or the extension of adolescence, however you want to look at it. The essay, What Is It About 20-Somethings? , is a fascinating and disturbing look at the state of 20-something adults.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

I read a take on this topic yesterday from Mark Driscoll. This should have been an excellent post from Mark but it didn’t turn out that way. Unfortunately Mark reverts back to form, going for cheap laughs in lines like this:

The tough retrosexual guys consume women, porn, alcohol, drugs, television, music, video games, toys, cars, sports, and fantasy leagues, as if being a man is defined by how much meat you can shove through your colon, how many beers you can pound, how fast you can drive, how stinky you can fart, how hard you can hit, how far you can spit, how loud you can belch, and how big your truck is.

Har har har! Guffaws all around!

This is a serious topic but it turns into a chortle fest, although frankly it is a pretty lame attempt at humor. I find it deeply ironic that in a diatribe against men acting like boys, you have a man trying to show how “real” he is by sprinkling locker room humor throughout his essay. Contrast what Mark wrote with this serious and thoughtful post from Albert Mohler on the same topic. Mark Driscoll apparently wants to have it both ways. On the one hand he wants people to take him seriously as a thinker and leader in the church, someone who has valuable insights and opinions (and who is someone that people will buy books from). On the other, he just can’t seem to resist delving back into potty humor to show that he is not some stuffed suit, that he is raw and real as if that makes his opinions more authentic, almost as if he were saying "Hey look at me, I am just as cool as you are but I talk about God too!"

The problem is here goes beyond internet pornography or video games. Those are merely symptoms of the problem and are examples of the market responding to reality. The deeper issue is that society no longer demands that men take responsibility as men and it does so by negating the single greatest maturing influence upon men: women. Getting married and having children pushes men into maturity. Having a wife and children to care for has an amazing effect on men but that is no longer a priority in society. Our cultural norms now tell women to put off getting “tied down” by marriage and kids and instead to give men what they want without expecting anything of them. What was interesting from the Times article was the impact of sexuality on maturity. We are living out the old and seemingly quant saying “Why buy the cow when you are getting the milk for free?”. It is little wonder young men don’t grow up, they are able to have all of the benefits of being an adult man without any of the responsibility. Instead of career, marriage and family maturing men, society waits around for men to become mature on their own and then get married and get a real job. Little wonder that without anything pushing them, men are acting like boys later and later into life.

I am a big believer that boys need to be prepped for being a man sooner rather than later but we find that a lot of what we value in society acts in opposition to this need. A big culprit is college (yes I am banging that drum again). Colleges have turned into hiding places where kids who have, against their will, become legal adults can extend out their childhood by 4, 5 or even more years of going to school. The line between “higher education” and “finding a place to hide until I can move back home” is getting pretty blurry. The other obstacle is enablement, parents and women enabling men to keep living out the behavior that prevents maturation. It wasn’t that long ago that men who lived at home or were unable to hold down a job were not terribly attractive to women and their parents were completely disinterested in having adult kids back in the nest.

This has a significant impact on the church. We already deal with a dearth of young men in the church. Scratch that, we have a serious lack of men at all and of those who do show up not many are terribly engaged. I would hazard a guess that the leading predictor of how engaged a man is with the church is his marital and family status and I am confident that studies would bear that out. The lack of men, especially mature men, in the church puts additional pressure on women to “fill the gaps” where men are absent and that leads to unbiblical usurpation of roles that they are not called to. In addition, more and more of the burden of ministry falls onto the shoulders of the few men that do step up in the church.

We are rapidly becoming a society of women, women without husbands and without children and that is unhealthy. More women are in the workforce than ever before as more men drop out. More women are putting off having kids until later in life or never at all. More kids are being raised by strangers in daycare and public schools and at home by women without husbands. More men are losing jobs and unable to find new ones, leading to a swelling population of men without jobs, wives or children and that is a dangerous situation.

Men and women were made to be together in the bounds of marriage and raising children together. Family both requires and fosters maturity in men and without the tempering influence of wives and children many men will stay in perpetual adolescence for decades. It is high time we demand that men and women alike grow up and start acting like adults instead of kids who can buy alcohol and drive cars.

Creating a new right to achieve social changes

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed. (From Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision declaring California’s Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional, pg. 113)

(This is a combo political/cultural issue but I am posting it here because I get way more hits on my main blog.)

The ruling over Prop 8 was hardly a surprise, coming as it does from an openly homosexual judge in the most liberal court in the land. No one thought the outcome was going to be any different, not in this court and not with this judge. What is especially interesting though is some of the reasoning that comes deep into the lengthy ruling, reasoning that comes across as purely subjective and that has nothing to do with the Constitution. You are going to hear a lot about the ruling dealing with the equal protection clause but as you read what you find is not a serious legal opinion but a lengthy diatribe by an activist judge with a direct, personal stake in the case as a homosexual living in California. The Wall Street Journal did us the favor of reading the whole 130+ ruling (I am working through it as well) and there are lots of choice tidbits in it:

Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment. Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that gays and lesbians are not good parents. (Page 93)

I don’t think Prop 8 specifies that at all since it is all of one sentence long. The law does not make relationships, even legal ones, between homosexuals illegal. It merely restricts marriage as a fundamental societal interest to one man and one woman. Or how about this:

Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology. (Page 95)

So Judge Vaughn Walker is not only a legal expert but he is also fit to pass judgment on developmental psychology! For his next trick he will rule on a criminal case while riding a unicycle, reciting Shakespeare and successfully demonstrating cold fusion! Wait, now he is going to rule based on irrefutable economic factors!

Proposition 8 has had a negative fiscal impact on California and local governments. (Page 90)

I am sure that the negative fiscal climate has nothing to do with the worldwide economic downturn or California’s hostile business climate or its ridiculously generous public employee benefits. In fact the rest of the country is doing swimmingly…oh wait, you mean the entire country is in bad shape? I guess Judge Walker can separate and distinguish the supposed impact of Prop 8 from the general and widespread economic malaise. One must assume that California would have bucked the trend of the economic collapse if it were not for the pernicious influence of Prop 8. By the way, I thought that Prop 8 was “unconstitutional”? You can make an argument that Prop 8 is bad for the economy of California, but the place for that was during the election cycle. That should have no bearing whatsoever on a ruling regarding the Constitutionality of a law, nor should his subjective opinions on the supporters of Prop 8 being bad people. Judge Walker having his feelings hurt doesn’t give him warrant to override the will of the people. A brief perusal of the opinion shows a stretching of the law to meet a desired objective that is fundamentally the same as Roe v. Wade, i.e. finding a “right” to abortion where none exists. Using the equal protection clause to argue that no one should be denied any activity that makes them happy if someone else is permitted to engage in that activity is bad law and hardly the intent of the Founders. Based on that logic…

- Should convicted child molesters be allowed to adopt children?

- Should polygamous couples be afforded "equal protection" and be allowed to marry?

- What about a guy who wants to marry his cat because it would further his pursuit of happiness?

Those are of course extreme and silly examples but no more silly than the men who wrote the Constitution would have found the idea that two men or two women have a Constitutionally protected "right" to get married. There are a ton of activities that some people are legally permitted to do but others are not. Under this interpretation we might as well negate all state laws in favor of Federal laws because no state would be able to enforce any law that would restrict anyone from doing anything that someone else could legally do. Judge Walker clearly is of the school of thought that the law is something that must bend to the whims of culture and that the Constitution is up for reinterpretation at will.

Please note this is not a Gospel issue. That unregenerate sinners would act like sinners and demand acceptance of their sin is not new and not shocking. Nor is our primary call as Christians in America to "defend marriage". Marriage doesn’t need to be defended. No matter how you try to redefine marriage, regardless if a couple of guys wear tuxedos or dresses and say "I do", no matter what tax breaks are involved, two men cannot be married nor can two women in the eyes of God. You can call a stone a steak but you still can’t eat it and you can call a legal arrangement involving a gift registry between two men a marriage but that doesn’t make it so. My concern is with the direction of the culture of our society and frankly I am not at all confident that this is the end of the collapse.

What we are seeing here is a decision that goes far beyond overruling a simple ballot measure. This is a decision that overrides the will of the people, upsets one of the fundamental societal foundations of America, creates a right where none exists and seeks to redefine not just marriage but gender itself. This is a huge decision that if it stands will fundamentally change American society. Some make think this change is for the better but Europe shows us the way we are headed, where marriage and family is virtually irrelevant. Europe is socially and culturally poorer than it once was and a large part of that has to do with the evaporation of marriage and family.

This ruling is going to be the next Roe v. Wade, a ruling that fundamentally changes American society and does so by creating a right where none exists, achieving a societal change desired by a minority over the wishes of the majority and does so by grotesque manipulation of the Constitution.

You cannot create a “right” that is given the force of law and the imprimatur of the Constitution to enact societal changes. If the people of California are having second thoughts about Prop 8, there is an appeals process on the books. Let the people of California decide. This sort of roundabout circumventing of the law by creating rights out of thin air and deciding Constitutional issues cannot be permitted to go on. If left unchecked, the Constitution of the United States, once the model for representative democracy in a free society, will have ceased to have any meaning whatsoever.

Community in the traditional church

Is it possible?

I spend a lot of time banging the drum for community. I also spend a lot of time critiquing (or bashing depending on your point of view) the traditional church.

I am a big boy and it doesn't take a seer to realize that the percentage of Christians in traditional churches is overwhelming. Is it 100%? Of course not but is it 95%? 90%? Quite possibly (note, I am not saying that 95% of people in traditional churches are Christians but that perhaps 95% of all Christians, at least in America, gather in traditional churches)

So how can believers who gather in traditional churches experience real community?

While recognizing that the traditional model of the gathering of the church is far and away the most common, I also recognize that this very common cultural icon makes it difficult to enjoy real, intimate, dare I say Biblical community. I count where we gather as a family in this camp even though we don’t have some of the traditional barriers to community. Creating community is more than eliminating some of the trappings of traditional Christianity but instead involves a conscious and intentional decision to cultivate the reality of what God has created among us.

First and foremost I understand that we cannot create community. The community of God’s people as an adoptive surrogate family, what Joseph Hellerman calls familification, is created by God and cannot be forced. I do believe that there are ways we can help foster community so that our relational reality matches our positional reality. In other words, while God creates the surrogate family through regeneration, there are certainly ways we can hamper community and conversely ways we can encourage community. I am not going to rehash the ways we diminish community, although that is an important topic because if we are aware of ways we hamper community and try to avoid them, community will more naturally occur. I am also operating under a precarious assumption of orthodoxy. I say precarious because it is certainly the case that there are lots of people who talk about community and fellowship while holding heterodox beliefs. Any community that does not have at the center a right understanding of who Jesus Christ is and what His work accomplished is many things but Christian community is not one of them.

Creating real community in a traditional church setting is something that has to go beyond Sunday morning “worship services” and organizing a couple of small group Bible studies. That might be a result of community but it will not foster community. It is a “chicken and egg” question that requires an understanding that we are brothers and sisters in Christ, not unified nor divided by doctrinal statements but unified with one another in Christ.

Here are some ideas I have come up with

a) Unity in Christ precedes community and supersedes doctrinal distinctives. Instead of starting with the things that divide us and working our way down until we get to common ground, our unity in Christ must be our starting point. We cannot have Biblical community if we demand doctrinal homogeneity as the entry fee. I am not suggesting that we expand the circle to include people who are rank heretics or who are in unrepentant sin but disagreements over most of what we quibble about, while interesting and important, ought not be dividers that curtail unity. How much community have we lost over the years, how many wonderful relationships have we missed out on because someone had a different view of the end-times?

b) Rethinking the purpose of the gathering. Rather than a primarily evangelistic effort where people thought to be unbelievers are invited to hear a sermon, the primary purpose of the gathering of the church is…the gathering of the church. That doesn’t mean that we bar unbelievers but it does mean that we shouldn’t lose sight that the focus of the church gathering is God’s people gathered together in community. The witness of Christian community can and should be a springboard to proclaiming the Gospel.

c) This will require Christians who are equipped and excited to share their faith with others. That is a dramatic change in mindset, from “evangelizing by inviting” to sharing your faith with someone directly. Too many Christians are unwilling to share their faith because they have not been equipped to do so even after a lifetime in the church and because they don’t see it as something they can or should do.

d) Community in a traditional church setting means spending time together outside of Sunday morning and Wednesday evening (and budget meetings don’t count!). We have trained Christians to not expect or seek fellowship outside of the scheduled meeting times and given the nature of those meetings it is nearly impossible to see community form within the restrictive boundaries of traditional church life. There is simply no substitute for time and if someone thinks that spending even more time with the church is inconvenient, they need to check their priorities because something is out of whack.

e) Spend time in edification that explores the Biblical meaning of the church as family and community. I am talking about in-depth studies of the language Luke uses in Acts, that Paul uses in his epistles and most of all the way Christ speaks about His people. Teaching that reinforces the traditional view of the church as hierarchical, church officer driven and focused on finances, programs and secondary doctrines is not going to help people see the need for and the potential of Christian community.

These are some ideas I had and it is a pretty limited list. For those who read this and are in a more traditional church setting, what (if anything) are you doing as the church or do you think you should be doing as the church to remove impediments to community and help create an environment where community can flourish? Or do you think there is not a problem, that the traditional model of the church provides a Biblical expression of community? I am interested in hearing your ideas.

When did unity become a dirty word?

I have come across just a slew of blog posts lately that seem to almost decry the very concept of Christian unity. It seems as if the word "unity" is entering the theological lexicon as a heresy. I have written before on this but a couple of things I have read recently have spurred me into reiterating these comments.

Many of the posts make the common blog error of creating two mutually exclusive positions with no middle ground. As it applies to unity, there are apparently two and only two positions. Either we accept (as usual) the status quo of Western religion with orthodox Christianity splintered into thousands of divided and competing denominations and traditions or we chuck the whole thing in the name of unity and accept mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholicism in the "Christian Big Tent". I reject this false dichotomy as not grounded in either fact or supported in Scripture.

The unity problem in the church is not that we have too much unity, it is that we have far too little even among those who proclaim themselves to be the most orthodox. We who agree on all of the basics of the Gospel still find ways to divide ourselves and in doing so weaken our witness. Far too many Christians are evangelists for their particular pet doctrines, whether reformed theology (which I subscribe to) or King James Onlyism (which I do not and I think is a dangerous teaching). Even the token gestures at unity we try are missing the point, whether in theology conferences or Good Friday community services where we knowingly and somewhat begrudgingly set aside our differences to get together for an hour or a couple of days.

This is not merely an ancillary doctrine, something that is elective in the church. Unity among the Body features frequently and prominently in the New Testament writings. Take for example Paul's words here:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit--just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call-- one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4:1-6)

Many of my Reformed brethren love to look at the first two chapters of Ephesians to support the doctrines of grace. Rightly so. But Paul has much to say about how we live after being born-again by regeneration. Paul here is urging us to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called. How are we to do this? By loving one another (all of us who are called, not just our local church). Bearing with one another (again, all of us and not just people who affirm the Westminster Confessio) and eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit. When we have so many churches that exclude from full fellowship those who disagree on fine points of theology, churches who would deny one of the very symbols of our unity in Christ, the breaking of bread, to brothers and sisters, then let me say very bluntly that we profane the words that Paul wrote and a so-called church that denies full fellowship to another believer over secondary doctrines is not walking in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called. I don't care how orthodox your statement of faith is, or how tightly you adhere to some centuries old confession or how rigidly you think you are following the "regulative principle" of worship. If you deny the unity of the Body of Christ in actions, even if affirming it in words, you deny the clear commandment of Scripture.

Again, let me be clear. When it comes to those who are clearly outside of the church, those who deny the Gospel and deny the sufficiency of Jesus Christ, they are to be viewed as any other unbeliever, someone who needs the witness of the Gospel. For those who are in Christ, there is no room in Scripture to create second-class Kingdom citizens. That doesn't mean we cannot disagree, but it does mean that if we deny the loving fellowship of Christian brotherhood to them, we deny what Christ has done to unify us as God's family. Instead of trying to twist the concept of unity to turn it into something dangerous, let's instead try to examine ourselves to see where we fail to exhibit a life worthy of our calling in Christ Jesus as it pertains to our relationship with others who have been called. Let's remember that those who disagree with us are not second-class citizens or people who need us to correct them on every point of doctrine but are rather our brothers and sisters, made that way and in that standing the same way we were. Let us discuss and debate, let iron sharpen iron by all means but lets not use that sharpened iron to carve other Christians out of our fellowship. That behavior does not honor God nor protect the Gospel, it tells God He might have made a mistake and that the fellowship created by salvation is subject to our approval. Is that the message we want to stand before God with?

Sharing with our family

“Mom, dad we are hungry!” clamored the hungry children clustered around the table. “What’s for dinner?”

“Well, let’s see. Mom and dad have lots of things we want to spend our money on before we go buying food for you munchkins,” replied Dad jovially. “We have retirement plans and cable TV and car payments plus a really nice vacation that we owe to ourselves. Let’s see what we have left over after all of that. Maybe we can find some money to buy you kids some food.”

We would look at someone who acted that way and pronounce them to be pretty poor parents. But how is that different from how we share materially with our brothers and sisters in the church? I am not talking here about tax-deductible gifts given through the local church. I can understand the hesitancy to put money in the plate when the vast majority of it goes to maintain the building and pay for the staff and programs of that local church. I am talking about making a priority of sharing materially with fellow Christians in need. We have been in several different church settings with pretty mixed demographics but we have never been in one where at least one family or person was not in some sort of economic distress. Reading the New Testament one sees a certainty of persecution and in light of that persecution we should be willing and eager to share materially with our brothers and sisters who are in need.

The familial terminology used in the New Testament is not merely window dressing. That is something that I am seeing quite clearly in Joseph Hellerman’s “When the Church Was a Family”. Let me clarify that a bit. It may not be window dressing in the New Testament but we sure treat it like it is. Lip service is about all it gets when we acknowledge one another as “brothers” and “sisters”. In practice we still see our blood relations, friends and co-workers as more important to us than those who share our common salvation. We snipe at one another, we gossip about one another, we sue one another and we split from one another incessantly. For some reason, it sometimes seems that being a fellow Christian makes one a valid target for things that we would never even think of saying to a family member or a neighbor. Perhaps it has something to do with how little time we spend together? I spend about 40 hours a week with my co-workers, I spend about 4-5 hours a week with the church. I depend on my job for financial support so I have to be courteous to my co-workers. I depend on the people at church….well, not for very much. If they get mad at me, I can just go to another church. We are connected in the church by preference and convenience.

Perhaps it is the blurring of what it means to be an American with what it means to be a Christian. The values of America, rugged individualism, conspicuous consumption as a measure of success, look out for number one (i.e. me!) etc. are at odds with what we see in the New Testament, where we are told to not lay up treasure on earth, to give to the poor, to love our brother more than ourselves. The self-made millionaire who goes to church on Sunday makes sense to us. The early disciples selling all that they owned and giving it away to their brothers in need doesn’t. In the early centuries of the church, being a Christian meant that all of us were persecuted. Now that we no longer have that persecution in much of the church, it is seductive to let our own financial security lull us into thinking that we have only a passing responsibility to our brothers and sisters. In other words, it seems that it is easier to share when we are all in need than when some are in need and others are quite comfortable. How tragic is it that the more affluent we have become, the less we seem to share with those in need?

When we worry more about wearing a suit coat to church than whether a brother has a coat to keep warm, there is a problem. When we get excited about building renovations when orphans languish without homes, there is a problem. When we spend hundreds of dollars on theology conferences and books when there are Christians around the world desperate to get their hands on even one Bible, there is a problem.

The love of money is featured as a prominent sin in the Bible for good reason. There is such a conflict between what we think money will do for us in the West and what the Bible says about money that it sometimes seems we are talking about different faiths entirely.

Have a baby and then worry about finding ‘Mr. Right’?

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article this morning on the trend toward singleness among professional women, The Right Man Is Getting Harder to Find. This quote is startling for how blunt it is and how reflective it is of the prevailing mood of the nation (emphasis added)…

All this leaves single women such as Rachel Downtain facing unwelcome choices. "Going the sperm-bank method is definitely not my first choice, but I am not willing to give up my dream of having a child just because I can't find Mr. Right. I am having to realize that my fairy tale dream may just be inverted a bit . . . I may have the child before finding Mr. Right."

Yikes that is a narcissistic attitude. Notice that this is all about her. What is best for the child is a distant second-place. She desires a child and in America you deserve to get whatever you want, no matter the cost. “I want a baby!” trumps “We want to have a family”. These women, increasingly desperate for children, are reaping the harvest sown by their parents. Buying into the mentality that says that women should strive for economic success first and then worry about family after they are “successful”, more and more women put off family for education and career. That is fine and dandy but biology and reality play key roles here. There are only so many years that a woman is of natural child-bearing age and it gets harder to get pregnant the older you get. I think the reality is that women are probably at their most fertile when they are in college and starting out in the workforce when they have been told they should be focused on having fun and getting a “good start” on life.

Parents need to be realistic when raising their daughters. Having your cake and eating it too sounds great but if place your focus on the importance of career and education to your daughters, you need to warn them that a pursuit of those things will impact their later desire to have a family. This is true for parents who are not Christians but it is infinitely truer for Christian families. My desire for our daughters is first and foremost for them to marry Christian men who understand and embrace being a husband and a father, someone who will lead in the home and will provide for his family. That comes before anything else including education and career. That might mean that instead of taking an annual cruise, they vacation close to home. Disneyland may have to wait, replaced by a trip to the zoo.

Our model as a family doesn’t make sense for everyone. We got married when I was in college and my wife was working. We had a couple of kids while I was still in school but one of our mom’s watched them in one of the homes we grew up in while we were at work or school. As soon as I graduated my wife quit her job and we have lived on my salary alone for almost 15 years. It has been a struggle at times but I also know that my kids are at home with my wife every day. We don’t have to worry about daycare or babysitters. Is that right for everyone? Probably not but I can say that it was right for us and that I don’t long for the material goods we missed out on or the trips we could have taken. Our family comes first and that is far more valuable than career aspirations, nicer cars or better vacations.