A Mass of Contradictions

Consider what a mass of contradictions we are. If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop. If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living – if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town – we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent. if a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall. But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents. Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #7

We continue today our look at the Directory for Private (Family) Worship. While I think we can commend the idea of church authorities encouraging families to develop the discipline of regular private worship, there seem to be a number of times where, (according to my cultural sensibilities) the church authorities who have written this directory are potentially overstepping the bounds of their realm of government. Today is another case of this I think.

VII. Whatsoever have been the effects and fruits of meetings of persons of divers families in the times of corruption or trouble, (in which cases many things are commendable, which otherwise are not tolerable,) yet, when God hath blessed us with peace and purity of the gospel, such meetings of persons of divers families (except in cases mentioned in these Directions) are to be disapproved, as tending to the hinderance of the religious exercise of each family by itself, to the prejudice of the publick ministry, to the rending of the families of particular congregations, and (in progress of time) of the whole kirk. Besides many offences which may come thereby, to the hardening of the hearts of carnal men, and grief of the godly.

So what does this mean in more current language? As I understand it, this rule begins with noting that in the past, when the church has been troubled, multiple families have gathered together to worship, and that God has indeed blessed this. However, in times of peace, they believe this ought not to be the normal situation. Why? Firstly, it can hinder the religious exercise of each family. My guess is that when you have a big gathering of families, it might be harder for the father to help individuals in his care than when families meet on their own. The second reason they give for this not being helpful is that it can prove to be to the prejudice of public ministry. In other words, it can cause division and families can tend to sense they do not need the local church when they band together regularly. It can lead to further error and hardening of hearts.

Now once again I see the points that these leaders were making, but I am not sure that this is something we should be making a rule against. Yes, families should be part of a local congregation, and the banding of families together ought to be in the context of a local church. Yes I think there are dangers in the denigration of the public ministry when families think they can replace the local church, but at the same time there are regularly times in Church history when the church is governed by men who do not love Christ, or who are teaching what is not true. It is in these times when rules against families banding together for worship are problematic.

Different Bodies Mean Something

Hate speech alert. God’s design for marriage is a man and a woman. The Bible makes this clear, but sometimes we don’t think too hard about this. Why do we need a man and a woman? Is it just because two are better than one? Are we essentially to function in the same way? Are we like dual hard drives in a desktop computer – just in case one fails, we have another exactly the same that can carry on functioning? Sure, we admit we have different bodies. We understand the birds and the bees. But do we realise that our different bodies mean something?

Modern Christians don’t seem to consider the significance of our bodies. This is probably why we have failed to be effective in so many areas. We seem to do pretty much the same things as the pagans around us. We don’t often consider that we are designed and that our differences are deliberate, and that they, therefore, have meaning and purpose.

Consider the modern evangelical Christian couple. They marry – usually later in life than in previous generations. Why? Like most pagans, they consider getting their careers on track is more important than sexual purity and creating a successful family. We don’t tend to question the relatively recent narrative that university education for all is the path to fulfilment and success, because we have accepted individualistic materialism and its focus on personal fulfilment. Then, like most secular couples, at some point, our evangelical couple decides they want to add children to their lives. And note, children are an optional accoutrement. They are not integral to the purpose of marriage. They are not core to the purpose of a man and a woman. No, career is much closer to this.

So what happens next? The wife takes a short amount of time off to have the baby. She takes maternity leave of perhaps a year if the baby is lucky, and then she is back into her career. Childcare is then outsourced to others while the couple continues with the main purpose in their lives – personal fulfilment and the pursuit of materialistic success and wealth. This of course leaves the couple, and particularly the wife feeling guilt as she tries and fails to ace her career, care for her husband and be a wonderful mother.

Is this the way it is supposed to be? Should Christians follow this narrative? Of course not! As Christians, we need to rethink the cultural narrative around us. Our bodies are designed by God and tell us about our purpose. Unfortunately, the story that a woman’s body tells has been placed on the book-burning list. Instead of raising our young Christian woman to see the glory of the domestic sphere – being a supportive wife and mother, as Paul notes (see Titus 2:4, I Timothy 2:15, ) we have taught them like the culture around us to glory in career. We have taught our girls to be men.

Now in Christian circles, highlighting the importance of motherhood and children for our girls is often critiqued. When young Christian women make decisions about further education (for instance choosing not to go to university) that express their desire not to rack up years of study and debt which might make being a full-time wife and mother from an early age more difficult, there are Christians who frown on this. Sometimes we are told, ‘What if she does not get married?’ Now there is an element of truth in this. Not all young women who desire marriage do in fact marry. Yet this does not negate a few important truths. First, marriage is normative, and this means that for most Christian women, the way they will fulfil their Christian kingdom work is in the context of being a wife and mother. Preparing for this is therefore of primary importance. Secondly, the argument can be flipped the other way. Most intelligent and capable young women are exhorted to aim for careers that are not conducive to fulfilling wifely and motherly duties. My question is, ‘What if they get married?’ This is the far more likely eventuality. And yet we ignore it. We end up putting both financial hurdles and temptations in the way that are likely to be a stumbling block to their primary role. Finally, we must recognise the cultural blinders that make us assume that more time at university is the path to success. Maybe a young girl won’t marry and have children. But does that mean working as a nurse is less important than working as a surgeon?

A woman in marriage is designed primarily to help her husband in his dominion task by carrying and nurturing children and creating a wonderfully supportive domestic realm. She is not designed to provide for herself. We should not be ashamed of these truths. The world and culture around us have neglected these truths, to the detriment of men, children and women. The Christian way is beautiful and provides an arena for us to flourish in the bodies and roles God has given us. So let’s encourage our girls that it is legitimate to long for children and desire to support a husband. Let’s innoculate them against the secular lie of our age that a woman’s greatest happiness can be found in a career or pursuing the masculine calling of dominion. Too many miserable and stressed women testify against this. Let’s teach our girls of the supremely important role they have in Christ’s kingdom. Let’s excite them with the impact that strong marriages and families have for the kingdom of God.

The Enemy Gets It. Do You?

..the battle for mankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizer of a new faith; a religion of humanity…utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach.

The Humanist Magazine – Jan/Feb 1983 Issue

That was 1983. Have Christian leaders and pastors caught up yet? Do they get the power of educating the next generation? They have the pulpit once a week, and even then they send the children out to help the adults enjoy the service more provide ‘age-appropriate’ learning. The humanists are preaching to their children every day in school, and the mentally unstable and degenerates are preaching to them in their spare time on social media. What chance do you think they have? We need to develop a Christian counter-culture. That’s more than just church on Sunday. It means starting our own schools and training institutes and choosing for our children to engage in more useful activities that build up their faith. Get your kids out of government schools. Get them off social media. Get them into theologically robust study and train them up in worldview. Spend time with them developing the relationship you will need to steer them through this chaos and get them to adulthood unscathed and ready for taking back this culture for Christ.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #6

In recent weeks we have been slowly working our way through The Directory for Private Worship which the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved in 1647. Thus far, we have noted the pleasing concern these church leaders had for the discipline of family worship and their understanding that the health of God’s church relies on the spiritual health of the individual families that comprise it. Today we look at the sixth direction.

VI. At family-worship, a special care is to be had that each family keep by themselves; neither requiring, inviting, nor admitting persons from divers families, unless it be those who are lodged with them, or at meals, or otherwise with them upon some lawful occasion.

This provision highlights the importance of families keeping to themselves when they conduct their private worship. What is meant by this? Well, it’s not a blanket rule. There are legitimate reasons the Assembly saw for worship to be conducted with other families. One example is when sharing a meal with another family.

So what is the thinking behind this direction? It seems likely that this rule is included to protect family worship from being hijacked (see rule 5), and to strengthen spiritual bonds in the family. Because family worship is so important, it is necessary that it is not regularly interrupted by outsiders. This no doubt makes it easier to rebuke and encourage members of the family in their ongoing spiritual warfare.

Thinking Longterm

Joy Pullman executive editor of The Federalist, has written an excellent piece highlighting the dangers of evangelical over-emphasis on evangelism. Before you burn her at the stake for a heretic, hold on. The context for the article I am quoting from is the Southern Baptist Convention where an ageing and declining membership are considered to be an issue.

As I watched my evangelical peers apostatize as they left childhood, it made me reconsider our churches’ frenetic verbal focus on evangelism. What trust — and financing — was it realistic to place in “evangelization” efforts run by people who are clearly unable to retain current members? Why doesn’t evangelization start at home?

In fact, I think it [evangelisation] does start at home. Before running out and attempting to “gain more souls for Christ” (itself theologically suspect, as scripture — at least as Protestants understand it — clearly teaches it is Christ who does all the work to save souls), what about attentiveness to the “feed my sheep” charge Christ gave the Apostle Peter in another mic-drop gospel ending, in John 21?

Shepherds — the antecedent of our word “pastor” — don’t go around rustling sheep. Shepherds tend an existing flock that grows almost exclusively organically, from within the herd. Shepherds cultivate those they are given; they don’t go around trying to convert goats or leaving their flocks to search for others. From where this Christian sits, our Western churches and most of their leaders have done a perfectly horrific job of tending to the lambs Christ has given into their care.

Too many men commissioned as shepherds are off wandering the mountains, leaving their sheep unfed and unprotected while wolves make off with the babies. The answer is not to focus more on wandering around in alleged search of random sheep, nor to steal sheep from other people’s flocks. It is to sacrifice anything necessary to beat off the wolves and protect the lambs.

She makes some excellent points. On the whole, Christianity in the West has been bleeding members. The tap pouring new members into the faith might be going full bore, but the hole in the bottom of our bucket is such that we are losing water at a faster rate. What’s going on? Often church growth is by transfers from other churches. We have Christians moving around from church to church finding the right fit. Some churches become the place where ‘the cool kids’ go. Then local churches can be stripped of their members as people head to the new hip church. There are of course churches that do have relative success in evangelism, and this can be measured in the short term, but what we don’t think about too much is what’s happening in the long term, and the long term trajectory is not looking good.

The evangelical church, as its name suggests, has a real strength in evangelism Our pastors and church leaders are extremely concerned with encouraging members to ensure they are taking opportunities for personal evangelism and as we have mentioned in earlier posts, church sermons are often targetted at ‘level 1’ or entry-level to the Christian faith. Our services are designed to be “seeker-sensitive”. But there are potential disadvantages to this strategy. More mature members can be seen as means to the end of gaining more contacts and therfore converts. These sheep can be left to figure out how to feed themselves.

But there is an even darker side to this. Pullman notes another interesting implication of this approach which she illustrates with Mrs Jellyby from Dickens’ Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby was an evangelical Christian whose every thought and effort was spent in ensuring Africans are evangelised and given opportunities to access wealth from trade while her own family lives in squalor and neglect. She writes of evangelical organisations that “spend so much time, money, and effort on what they claim is evangelization while the majority of children who attend their churches grow up and leave the faith.” She cites Mary Eberstadt’s research on the impact of family disintegration and its connection to church decline.

If that is the case, then Christians need to be doing things like countering the cultural insistence that people wait until they are financially comfortable before starting a family and stay artificially infertile indefinitely to help that happen; making theologically robust Christian K-12 schools the top priority of evangelization efforts; and making it more institutionally possible for young people to get started in life without college loans.

It’s not clear how much American Christianity’s decline stems from unthinkingly accepting our culture’s antagonism to sexual fertility and our refusal to prioritize evangelism in the home, but it’s clear there’s a relationship between these that bears deep introspection.

If we gain 10 converts a year for 20 years, but lose 70% of our children to the faith once they hit adulthood, we might need to rethink our strategy. Imagine if we kept 70% of our children growing up in Christian families, and they kept 70% of their children. Then imagine if we took God’s command to be fruitful and multiply more seriously and still had that rate of success.

Pastors are geared to look at the short term. A pastor, with God’s blessing, may be in a church for 20 years. It’s easy for him to think success looks like unbelievers coming into the church or the church growing in numbers whether by transfers or conversions. He knows he has a short time to ‘prove’ himself. Unfortunately, short term thinking can always get more people in, but long term effects are by their very nature…long term, and therefore harder to judge immediately. Twenty years is the length of time it takes for an infant to be trained for adulthood. It’s a long time to wait to see if families and churches have been successful. We want KPIs for each year – we don’t want to wait for the tree to be fully grown and fruiting. That takes time. But while the short term indicators might look good, if we take the twenty or forty-year view, when the majority of our children have left the faith, things look bleaker.

So what does this mean for churches and our leaders? Churches need to focus on the health of families and training Dads and Mums to raise a godly family. We should stop seeing these families as simply means to the end of reaching new people. These are people in our flocks. They need feeding and shepherding. To that end we need our church leaders to think far more strategically about how they will aid parents in the discipling of children from Christian families. Churches need to start Christian schools that focus on developing Christian worldview and culture or support people who are doing that. Our leaders may retort, “That’s not the business of the church!”. We need to show them that it is, and the reason we are failing on so many levels is precisely because we have not made the education of the next generation our business. How has the evangelical strategy of saving individual souls been working for the church? Not so well. Church leaders need to signal that Christianity is not just a personal faith which we worry about on Sundays, but it is a faith that takes all of life and brings it under Christ’s authority. It’s a faith that develops Christian culture. Getting people to level one is not enough.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #5

Let no idler, who hath no particular calling, or vagrant person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in families, to or for the same; seeing persons tainted with errors, or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into houses, and lead captive silly and unstable souls.

In more modern language, we might say that people who are lazy or have no settled work or home should not be allowed to perform worship in families even if they have a desire to. Why? These kinds of people are likely to introduce error and division into the family and potentially the church. The reference to leading captive silly and unstable souls seems to be a reference to 2 Timothy 3:6 where Timothy is warned by Paul against people who “worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires.”

Now when I initially read this I struggled to see the relevance to our situation today. To be honest, the chance of many Christian families even having regular family worship is not particularly high. So what are the chances of some ‘idler’ coming in and performing worship in families and leading people astray?

Yet when you think about it, there are many idlers and vagrants who are allowed into many Christian homes. We have social media where the clamor of idle, ignorant and bellicose women often reigns supreme. We have the teachings of Hollywood reminding us to ‘be true to ourselves’ and even those prosperity gospel preachers who deceive many ill-taught Christians.

While the original intent of this document lay in a slightly different direction, I think there is a call here for fathers and church leaders to warn against these deceitful teachers and influences. Certainly, fathers should police strongly what influences are allowed in their home via screens. It is our duty to protect our families. But what about our church leaders? If our church leaders used to take steps to stop idlers and ‘vagrant persons’ from creeping into houses and leading unstable souls captive, what ought we to see from our leaders with respect to the current day embodiments of this danger?

An Invitation to Your Mission

One of the issues I have thought through a lot in recent years is the place of a man in the church and the kingdom. Too often, for lots of men, the church seems ‘ho-hum’ and irrelevant. One of the reasons for this is that the role of men in the world is often denigrated. I’ve heard too many sermons that suggest serving Christ could mean dropping more of your vocational work to help in institutional church ministry. Other sermons critique wealth and suggest saving is not trusting God despite God calling men to provide for their families. I’ve seen videos of men at church valuing their role as a doctor only because it means they can fund ‘ministry’ in other parts of the world. Often sermons use examples of people in ‘full time Christian ministry’ (a phrase I find frustrating) as positive examples of Christian sacrifice. Rarely, if ever, are the laity and their ordinary lives looked upon as examples of godliness in Christ’s kingdom.

The problem with all of this is that it ignores core truths about masculinity in Scripture. While I am aware of some of the key issues with Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, there is a certain amount of truth in his diagnosis. One of his core arguments is that men are made for adventure and battles and a beauty. I might not put it in exactly those terms, but I do think Scripture teaches us that Adam was made for dominion. He was to go out into God’s earth and take dominion. He was designed to image God as he took what God had made and in an analogous way to God, fill up emptiness and give it shape.

Here’s how Eldridge puts it. Most men think they are simply here on earth to kill time – and it’s killing them. But the truth is precisely the opposite. The secret longing of your heart, whether it’s to build a boat and sail it, to write a symphony and play it, to plant a field and care for it – those are the things you were made to do. That’s what you’re here for. We are designed for dominion, and in Christ we are called to work to extend Christ’s lordship to the areas of his world that we touch. But too often we feel denigrated and tarred as ‘worldly’ for wanting to do these things. What we need to hear is the call that Christ lays upon every man to get out there and subdue his sphere of influence for Christ. This is the way you as a man are Christ’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. We need to be encouraged to wage war in this world – not with worldly weapons, but to take every thought captive as we seek to demolish the strongholds of Christ’s enemies in the arenas we have been called. That’s a lot more encouraging than to hear that most of our lives are irrelevant except for the times we are at church helping out.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #4

In recent weeks we have been working our way through the Directory for Private (Family) Worship. Today we are continuing our look at the Directory for Private (Family) Worship with a brief look at the fourth point.

IV. The head of the family is to take care that none of the family withdraw himself from any part of family-worship: and, seeing the ordinary performance of all the parts of family-worship belongeth properly to the head of the family, the minister is to stir up such as are lazy, and train up such as are weak, to a fitness to these exercises; it being always free to persons of quality to entertain one approved by the presbytery for performing family-exercise. And in other families, where the head of the family is unfit, that another, constantly residing in the family, approved by the minister and session, may be employed in that service, wherein the minister and session are to be countable to the presbytery. And if a minister, by divine Providence, be brought to any family, it is requisite that at no time he convene a part of the family for worship, secluding the rest, except in singular cases especially concerning these parties, which (in Christian prudence) need not, or ought not, to be imparted to others.

In more contemporary English we might put it this way. The head of the family is responsible for ensuring that everyone in the family participates in family worship. To that end, the pastor of his church ought to be encouraging and training heads of households for this duty. In some cases, a head of household might not feel the most qualified in his household to lead in this duty, or he might be unfit for this duty. In this case, the pastor of his church and the elders there may approve another in his place. Finally, if pastor is in a household, he should ensure that he leads family worship with everyone present except in special cases.

There is certainly some wisdom in this part of the directory. It does seem Scriptural that the head of the family ensure all of the family are involved in family worship. Additionally, it seems part of the duties of a pastor and his eldership team to encourage and train the household leaders of their congregations to perform this duty well. This would seem to be part of what it means to shepherd the flock. Thus when Paul writes to fathers, he reminds them of their duties in bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Once again I am not comfortable with this point in its entirety. This may be a result of the cultural blind spots of individualism, but it seems odd to me that this rule assumes that a pastor should lead family worship when he comes into the home of a family in his church. I may be reading this direction incorrectly, but that’s what it seems to imply to me. My understanding (which may be wrong), would be that a pastor is coming into the home of a household leader. That would mean he is entering into the sphere of another man’s authority. While he has spiritual oversight of the flock in his care, and can and should correct error, he should also show respect for a man’s leadership in his own family. Slavishly following this approach potentially undermines the good work this directory is trying to achieve, by elevating the role of the ‘priestly’ class of Christians as if they have more direct access to God than lay Christians. On the other hand, one would hope that the minister is more equipped to teach and lead family worship than most of his congregation given that he inevitably will have spent more time studying the Scriptures. A household leader with a pastor present in his time of family worship will no doubt be blessed by his insight.