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.