Much of the hostility toward private wealth comes from the same impulse: hatred of its ability to insulate the citizen from the will of the state. Money empowers resistance; it gives one the ability to buy some gold coins, for example, and thereby hold a measure of independence from the monetary monopoly of the state; to send children to a private school and avoid the brainwashing of the public education monopoly; to open a foreign bank account and provide oneself with protection against legal confiscation schemes. Propaganda alleging the immorality of inherited wealth is also a reflection of the assault on the family. Before he dropped into noumenal oblivion, Charles Reich wrote that private property “guards the troubled boundary between individual man and the state,” but that there is a new wealth that has replaced it, one dispensed in myriad forms by the state. Increasingly, therefore, “Americans live on government largesse – allocated by government on its own terms, and held by recipients subject to conditions which express ‘the public interest.’ ” People who are thus described are more likely to be compliant servants of the authorities than are those who earn their living by giving value to private citizens who prize what they have to offer.
Idols for Destruction – Herbert Schlossberg
Family and Ministry
In an era that sees work outside the home as the way a woman should find fulfilment, it’s not surprising that many zealous Christian young women can pit family against ministry. They may want to serve God, but think that family and children may get in the way. This is a mistake. As we have discussed previously (both here and here), your most important ministry is likely to be your family. God has designed women to be directed toward their husbands and children. This is the ‘helping’ role of Genesis. This is a good thing. To turn away from this godly gift looking for something better is a mistake. Kent and Barbara Hughes address this in their book Disciplines of a Godly Family, arguing that ministering to family actually enables other ministry.
We believe this is an unfortunate delusion. Aside from the obvious objections (namely, that such thinking reveals a shriveled view of parenting, and the fact that good parenti9ng requires every ounce of intelligence and creativity one can give), it also fails to recognize that family is at the very heart of authentic ministry and evangelism. As ministry professionals, we hold the firm conviction that family is ministry and that the most effective spread of the gospel occurs through family. We are also convinced that we were never more effective in evangelism than when we had children at home.
Kent and Barabara Hughes in Disciplines of a Godly Family
Idolatry and Family
Over the past few years, I’ve heard and read a troubling little concept. It runs along the lines of “we’ve got to be careful we are not idolising family.” One time I have heard this is in response to parents who spend significant amounts of money on Christian education. What intrigues me about this is that these warnings to avoid idolising family are becoming more and more common in a period of history when family seems to be less and less important even in Christian circles. It seems to me that we are as a whole less likely to idolise family than previous generations. So what’s going on?
First of all, let’s think about idolatry. What is it? Well, of course, one way of thinking about it is placing something before God. God alone is to be at the centre of our lives. He rules, and we worship him alone. Thus far so good. Nobody I know is encouraging fathers or mothers to hold their families as more important than God.
Another way to think about idolatry is disordered desires. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo wrote on this subject. He said, “Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.” (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)
So what does this mean for the family? Yes, we can be involved in the sin of idolatry if we love family more than it ought to be loved. One example of this would be if we are not willing to give up our family for the sake of Christ. This is a very real issue for say a Muslim convert.
But I would suggest that in the Western world, we are more likely to be guilty of a disordered desire in the other direction. We are more likely to love our family less than we should. Is spending thousands of dollars a year to give your children a Christian education idolising your children? Of course not. It’s simple obedience to the king. In fact, I suspect that most reasons for not obeying God’s requirement to train our children ‘Christianly’ is rooted in some other idolatry. We have actually loved something more than family when we should have loved it less.
So the next time you hear someone talking about idolising family, ask yourself, “Why are we so prone to identifying as an idol the thing which is least likely in our cultural milieu to be one? Perhaps we do it to excuse ourselves from doing the hard work of what we ought to be doing. In this case, prioritising our families as highly as God calls us to.
Your most valuable ministry
Children can be extremely inconvenient. Personal goals, career goals, exercise goals and even ministry goals are impacted by the advent of children. Here’s a little anecdote of how children impact life. I remember when I was single. If I wanted to go somewhere, I could be out of the house, in the car and on my way within the space of 5 minutes. Marriage impacted that. One does not simply walk out the door. So the new time was 15 minutes. Children? Forget getting out the door in a hurry. An hour could be cutting things fine. Just before you’re ready to go, it’s almost guaranteed there will be a poo explosion requiring nappy and outfit changes. And inevitably, when you do actually get everyone in the car, and start driving down the road, someone will remember they have forgotten their hat, shoes or favourite stuffed toy or some other essential item.
If that’s the effect on something as simple as getting out of the house, it’s not surprising that the impacts on other areas of life are going to be equally seismic. Small wonder then, that people are having fewer children, having them later, or deciding not to have children at all. In the age of self, children put a damper on things.
Children and God’s People
While it’s unsurprising to see these trends in the world around us, it is unfortunate to see them creeping into the church. More frequently we see both parents out working, while their children are in daycare. I work as a teacher, and one of the saddest things I hear is parents complaining about the hassle of having to have children home in the school holidays. Children are seen as a nuisance to be shunted out of the house as frequently as possible, not priceless souls to treasure. So now school holiday programmes are the order of the day. I’ve even heard committed Christians ponder whether they are going to have children because they are considering the impact it might have on their potential usefulness to God. The implication is that children might get in the way of ministry.
We’ve been captured by the empty and hollow philosophy of our age. Climbing career ladders and earning more will give us self-worth. We’ve believed the lie that the more we capture places of greatness, the more impact we have. If we have our leaders in politics, and huge institutional churches, if we control places of power, then we can impact the world for God. And while there is nothing wrong with these things, we are forgetting great principles of the kingdom. In God’s order, the one who is the greatest is the servant of all. In God’s order, children are set up as an example of how the kingdom of heaven is entered. In God’s kingdom, Jesus wasn’t too busy to spend time with children.
This negative view of children is in sharp contrast with the biblical picture of children and family. God’s first command to people was, “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.” The earth was not to remain in an undeveloped garden state. God intended for people to develop agriculture, industry, commerce, music, education; a well-functioning society and civilization. And how was Adam to go about this duty? He needed a helper, and God provided Eve. How did Eve help Adam fulfil his purpose? Surely that is obvious. By having a family. We fulfil the creation mandate to fill the earth and subdue it by having children and raising families.
The people of God through Scripture understood the importance of family and children. In Psalm 128, the man who is blessed has a wife who is like a fruitful vine and there are little olive shoots all around the table! In Psalm 127, the man who has many children is described as blessed. Children are seen as a reward from God, and the way God’s people impact the world around them. In fact, throughout history, God has chosen to do his work in the world through families. In the covenant with Abraham, God promised Abraham ‘seed’, and that through his family, all nations of the earth would be blessed. And when God sent the great Messiah, to come and rescue his people, he didn’t send him into the world as a fully-grown adult unencumbered by family ties so he could more effectively get on with the business of his mission. No, Christ came as a baby born into a human family.
So the question is not, “How will children impact my ministry?” Children are the ministry God blesses us with. For most people, they will be the single most important ministry assignment God gives. Each child is an eternal soul, entrusted to us by the Creator. We are given the absolute privilege and weighty responsibility to mould and shape and send these souls, not only into the world to bless others, but into eternity to their own blessing or eternal sorrow. Children are not getting in the way of ministry. They are the ministry God gives!
Given this blessed God-given assignment, what should we do?
Parents
If we are parents, we should remind ourselves of the privilege we have been given at regular intervals. As parents, aside from our own walk with Christ, and our relationship with our spouse, the next most important calling given to us by God is our children. That being so, career must pale into insignificance. The pervasive cultural narrative that you find yourself in your career is not only anti-Christian, but it is also anti-family. Thus we regularly need an antidote to this poisonous falsehood.
Men need this reminder often. It is easy for men, particularly if they are the sole bread-winner, to spend more and more time at work and thinking about work. Yes, work is important. It helps us feed our families, and it is a God-given way of serving society, but it ranks below serving our wife and our children. We need to set in place strict limits that work cannot cross so that we can serve our families.
For women, there are perhaps more hurdles to cross. In the age where feminism seems to have carried the day, it is easy for a mother who stays at home to raise her children to become disillusioned and feel that what she is doing is not valuable. Women have been sold the lie that they are the same as men, and their goals and roles should be the same. Trying to both be good mothers and have careers makes many feel defeated. But since having a meaningful career seems to be how greatness is now defined, few would risk shunning that path.
Our world measures greatness quite differently from God. Recently in Disciplines of a Godly Family, I read this quote: ‘…many people are captive to a culture that defines self-worth and fulfillment in terms of contribution, name, education, and money. Society applauds the person who designs a building more than it does the one who attends to the architecture of a child’s soul.’ Dabney’s famous quote is also a helpful antidote to the view of this age that raising children is so insignificant that it can be farmed out to strangers.
Young Singles
For those who are young and thinking about life’s purpose and goals, think about how marriage and family may be a major part of that. Admittedly, not all marry. However, in a large majority of cases, God will give us the marriage and family assignment. In light of this, it is vital to make wise decisions in your late teens and early twenties that will aid your future self.
Think carefully about how to position yourself financially so that you can parent well. Avoid unnecessary debt. Consider whether tertiary education really is necessary, or if you are heaping up debt for no good reason. Debt will be like a millstone around your neck, preventing you from investing in the little souls that will come along in the not-too-distant future. Sometimes a university education is wise, but do not just assume this is what you must do because everyone does it. Question the typical narrative.
Is an OE really the best use of your finances and youth? Of course it would be a whole lot of fun. Yet, it may cause your future self a lot of headaches. Be aware that life is full of opportunity costs. I’ve heard so many of my contemporaries complain about how lucky house owners are, forgetting about the wonderful, yet expensive, OE they enjoyed earlier in life. Money saved earlier in life has the ability to grow far more than money saved in midlife. That’s just how interest works. So don’t cause your future self plenty of stress. If you spend up large now, you are highly likely to struggle to financially support your family in a world of high rents and low incomes. Either that or you may be forced to become a dual-income family or put off children until you are able to attain a more secure financial position. None of these options is ideal for your future children.
Save and get a house. In New Zealand, particularly in main centres, housing costs are difficult for single-income families, and unless you act with foresight in your first decade out of school, you can make life extremely difficult for yourself and family later. Buy a house earlier, pay down as much of the mortgage as you can, and your housing costs will be far lower than those paying rent by the time you have children and want to drop to a single income. For my wife and I, frugality, and the choices we made and opportunities we chose to forgo have enabled us to have a bigger family despite being on one teacher’s income. Getting a house and paying down debt really helped. To rent the house we are in now on a single-income would be impossible for us. But having entered the market earlier, we have very low housing costs per week. My purpose here is not to boast, for we were given wise counsel. Rather I am trying to encourage you, that even if your income outlook is below average, by acting wisely now, you can help position yourself well for future family life.
In addition, I urge you to develop a can-do attitude to finance. Too many people I know have looked at the huge hurdle of saving for a house and despaired. Rather than packing away the savings in a regular manner, they just see it all as hopeless and decide to take the opposite course and just spend. The truth is that a little bit here and a little bit there slowly but surely add up. You cut down a (carbon neutral!) forest one tree at a time.
Finally, while this may seem controversial and counter-cultural, young women should consider carefully their training and career options. Popular culture is a purveyor of the lie that you can have it all. You can’t. Spend years and years racking up debt and training to be a doctor will for most women make staying at home with children a difficult, if not impossible feat. Consider attaining skills that can be used to make money from home. Again, while not all will marry, and it is wise to be able to provide for oneself if that is the case, most women do in fact marry. Some career options are more conducive to raising a family than others. Whether in our age of equal opportunities we like this or not, it is true. Children are not accessories for our lives to make us feel good and complete. They are little souls, and research very clearly shows they need their mothers in the early years.
Churches and Church Leaders
Churches and church leaders including pastors should think about how they can support families.
Firstly, given that all members of a congregation have lived as children in families, many are living in families, and many will marry and begin new families, regular teaching in this area is essential. In my experience, churches are often willing to espouse hard truths about some topics – often finance – but are more reticent to talk about child-raising. But for most of us, working out our faith is in the context of family. We need to hear about this. We need our leaders to encourage us to be different. We are surrounded by a culture that demeans marriage and family, that espouses the lie that women find meaning in work and should escape the demeaning confines of home and hearth. We need encouragement to fight against this all-encompassing milieu. Help us take every thought captive for Christ. Help us develop a distinctly Christian way of looking at marriage and family and how these interact with work and finance. Help us see that some ways of raising a family are more helpful to our children than others. Help us critique the secular approach to family and children around us. Explain to the young the importance of preparing for marriage and family – not just from a spiritual perspective, but from a practical perspective. Encourage young people to save rather than just spend and give.
Secondly, churches should consider the impact of church calendars and activities on the family. Churches of various stripes are notorious for meetings. Cut them back to the essential. Working men have little enough time with their children as it is. Make sure your approach to meetings takes this into account. Do members really need to attend quarterly meetings for reading the Bible in church services? Expect less from your volunteers. Don’t act like a corporation demanding exacting standards. The church is not a corporation. It’s a body. It’s a flock. Care for it. Make sure that your get-togethers are family-friendly. Don’t always age-segregate activities. Encourage families to be together in your church services. Include children in your service planning, and make services shorter so the little ones can handle this.
There are many practical things churches can do to support families. One practical aid would be to somehow assist new mothers to transition into motherhood. Becoming a first-time mum can be very difficult. Going from the hustle and bustle and adult environment of work to being at home with a little baby in suburbs empty of adults during the day can be extremely lonely. Connecting new mothers with other like-minded mothers further down the parenthood path could be extremely useful.
I began by highlighting the inconveniences of parenting. But that’s not where we should end. God planned for family. It is his design. So there should be no surprises, that when we focus on performing this calling for his glory rather than avoiding committing ourselves to it, we will find joy and blessing.
How The West Lost God
I have had my eye on this book for some time, and when a friend kindly gave me money to purchase a book, I snapped this up quick smart. The central thesis of the book is that just as religious decline leads to a decline in the family, so too, the decline in the two-parent nuclear family contributes to the decline of the church. Eberstadt describes family and faith as ’the invisible double helix of society – two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.’
In the first chapter, Eberstadt turns her attention to whether there has been a decline in Christianity in the West. There are some who argue this decline is itself an illusion. Although I didn’t need convincing of this fact, she argues fairly convincingly that there really has been a decline.
Eberstadt moves on to outline the conventional views regarding how the West lost God. The first view she investigates is that people stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion. She spends time reviewing this theory but dismisses it because the demands of Christianity do not make it some crutch that makes life easier.
The second view she deals with is that Science, the Enlightenment and rationalism caused secularization. This is an extremely widely held view, but it just doesn’t fit the evidence. Christianity does not wax and wane in the way this theory predicts it should. Interestingly, in this section of the book, she highlights some interesting research on education and faith. The Enlightenment theory teaches us to expect that the more educated and wealthy people are, the less likely they are to have faith in God. This is precisely the opposite of what we see in a number of cases, and ‘contrary to popular belief, literacy and money do not drive secularism.’
Next, she moves onto the theory that the two world wars caused secularization. This is the view of Peter Hitchens in “Rage Against God”. While admitting this theory is not totally wrong, she highlights the fact that nations with disproportionate burdens of wartime all experienced a decline – Switzerland along with Germany and Great Britain. Furthermore, she wonders why later generations have not returned to the faith since they have known nothing by postwar prosperity. The next theory she addresses is that material progress caused us to realise we didn’t need God any more. But this theory is contradicted by the fact that religion seems to increase as the social ladder is climbed as mentioned earlier. Furthermore, faith has existed with great wealth throughout the ages. Why should this change now?
It seems that the believers of the secularization theory assumed faith was on its way out. They didn’t believe religion could wax as well as wane. It clearly has and does, so a theory is needed that can take this into account. This leads Eberstadt to explore the circumstantial evidence for her theory in chapter 3. She points out that sociologists have assumed that secularization and human development impact negatively human fertility rates. But this is an assumption. Perhaps the relationship goes the other way.
She notes that married people with children are more likely to go to church and be religious than single people. But why is this? Does faith drive family, or does family drive faith? Again she points to a link between faith and fertility. Those who are religious tend to have more children than those who are not. Eberstadt argues that instead of this being a one way street with faith driving family, at least some of the time, family drives faith, and sometimes this makes better sense of the facts.
Next, in chapter 4, Eberstadt moves on to consider some snapshots in the demographic record. Here she shows that family decline accompanies religious decline. Secondly, she notes that the trends of industrialization and urbanization mesh nicely with the decline of the family and faith. Both of these trends led to family decline, which in turn caused people to reject faith. The third piece of data she points to is the clear link between the most irreligious parts of the West and those that have the smallest, weakest and fewest natural families. A final and most interesting piece of evidence she investigates is the link between ‘family boomlets’ and ‘religious boomlets’. One example she highlights is the post-war mini religious boom, which overlay the better known post-war baby boom.
In chapter 5, she demonstrates how her theory answers the problems that the current theories of secularization have been unable to answer. It answers the problem of ‘American exceptionalism’. Why is America so religious, despite being one of the most advanced nations on earth? In America, there are more families following the traditional model, more marriages, and more children per woman than there are in Europe. According to Eberstadt, it also explains the male/female religious gender gap. She speculates that perhaps ‘women who are mothers tend to be more religious because the act of participating in creation, i.e., birth, is more immediate for them than that of men. Perhaps that fact inclines women “to be more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves.” The family factor also helps explain why 1960s was a pivotal year in secularization. The birth control pill approval changed relations between the sexes – and thus altered the natural family. Extramarital sex became much easier, and that has had a seismic impact on family formation and strength.
The Church has not helped, and according to Eberstadt has participated in its own downfall by ignoring the family factor. Here she explores reformist efforts in the church which made divorce more acceptable and allowed contraception and homosexuality. She sees these efforts as undermining the very thing the church relies on – strong families.
Chapter 7 ties all that she has written together. She points out that the experience of the natural family drives some people to religion. In addition, the Christian story is itself told through the prism of the family – without family, it makes less sense. For instance, God himself is described as our Heavenly Father. But for those who have not had a dedicated and loving father, this makes little sense. Moreover, the Christian code ‘becomes a lightning rod for criticism’. None of us like to be told that the way we do things is wrong. In an age of non-traditional and anti-traditional families, more and more people will take offence at the Christian message and its teachings on the family.
The book concludes with two chapters on the future. The first is a case for pessimism. Here we see that fewer people are getting married and having children. Fewer of those who are having children sustain a two-parent home. This is bound to negatively impact the church. But in chapter 9, we are presented the case for optimism. In essence, great catastrophes often lead to religious revival. The situation of the Western world, might be the decline necessary for faith to rise from the ashes. Secure and wealthy societies have been able to bankroll the decline of the family, but this might not be able to go on indefinitely.
A Theory of Secularization
Recently I’ve been reading “How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization” by Mary Eberstadt. The central thesis is that family and faith are the invisible double helix of society – two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another. Below is a short quote from the book:
“As secularization theorists correctly point out, urbanization is closely linked with smaller families. Following the industrial revolution, many Western people started having smaller families, and more chaotic families on account of their moves into cities.
Then came another series of shocks that further weakened family bonds: the legalization of divorce, the particularly momentous invention of modern contraception, the consequent increasing destigmatization of out-of-wedlock births…Many of these changes were then given even more force by related changes in Protestant theology…that unwittingly amounted to more blows against an institution already being roundly battered. Thus the severly weakened Western family ceased to transmit Christianity among its shrinking generations as it once had.”