#17. How Dads and Mums Might (Accidentally) Reform Churches
God’s way of teaching children his words and ways has always been through their fathers and mothers. Specialist Christian educators for children/youth/women are a very recent invention, a concession to the economic, social and familial fractures of our time. They are the bandaid, the medicine. Bandaids and medicines are not the goal, but tools to help us back to health. It’s hard to remember what health is, though. In his sermon, “Membership” from The Weight of Glory, C.S Lewis said,
“But do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. The mistake is easily made. Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported, and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities. But one meets people who have learned actually to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh. A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease. There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve.”
I wonder what would happen if fathers were taught to do their primary job in the world—to lead their families spiritually—and if they actually did it; and if mums took their place as helpers in this? It’s possible that we’d grow out of our need for a lot of our specialist ministries as they currently exist. Specialist church workers would be freed up for other kinds of service. But a temporary bridge has become the landmark destination. Church plants feel they haven’t “made it” until there is a Sunday School and youth group (and in my part of the world, Sunday School must be during the Bible teaching parts of the service, because many parents won’t come to church if there isn’t childcare available). We feel more secure with programs and events for all the different types of people. Perhaps this is the sign of immaturity in a Christian community rather than the opposite? I’ll expand on these thoughts more towards the end of the Light Duties project, in terms of how they relate to motherhood and discipling children. For now, my focus is on the good which could come about if mums and dads did take their duty for the spiritual formation of their children more seriously.
What is the Bible’s gold standard for training children into godliness? In the Old Testament, there were special occasions for collective teaching. Children were to be present when the law was read and the Covenant with God was made (Deuteronomy 29:9-15). Children were present, along with the men and women, when the covenant was renewed after the return from exile (Nehemiah 8-10). After the inevitable wanderings of God’s people, repentance was meant to be done as a whole family: “when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul…” (Deut 30:2). There was no separate program for the kids. But those special corporate occasions weren’t enough.
Beyond the religious calendar and occasional times of community instruction, the children were to be shaped in daily life by the constant, Bible-saturated, God-fearing, reverent nurture of their parents. The heads of households—fathers—had to make sure this happened, with the help of mothers. Just read Proverbs for a picture of God-fearing wisdom being taught by fathers and mothers. This commission to teach the kids is part of the long sermon Moses gives to the Israelites just before they enter the Promised Land:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
Parents had to take God’s words to heart and teach them to their kids, every hour of every day, using every God-given bit of material at hand: the home, the road, the couch, the field; hands, heads, doorposts and gateways. As God’s people teach their children to work and rest, they were to be teaching them God’s words and his ways. One household at a time. Simple, constant and thorough.
In the Bible, God’s people failed when they forgot. Idolatry always followed. Forgetfulness and idolatry happened when fathers and mothers didn’t do their job, when they didn’t declare God’s glories to the generation who they were raising; when daily heart/soul/mind/strength love gave way to presumptuous formalism. There was no way of parents passing on the knowledge of God and obedience to him, if they were not personally pious, if they didn’t actually fear and love the Lord every day. They simply couldn’t pull it off if God’s words were not attached to everything they did. And they couldn’t do it if the kids were not with them most of the time, apprenticed into a life lived as God’s people. (And even then, Eli is a cautionary tale of piety and apprenticeship where he had still failed to fulfill his responsibilities as a father. To the shame of many, “his sons blasphemed God, and he failed to restrain them.” 1 Sam 3:13. We’ll consider that side of things further down the track).
The Old Testament prophets anticipated a renewal of fidelity in the family, with the result that godly offspring would be raised. We’ve already looked at this in article #14. About Fathers. This pattern of a father, with the help of his wife, being responsible for the formation of their children continues into the New Testament. Like the call to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, this whole-family-whole-of-life discipleship was not made redundant with the coming of Jesus. See Mark 12:30. We aren’t meant to have grown out of it. Paul’s hope for younger women to be busy at home, loving their husband and children, in a cloud of godliness, makes a lot more sense when we see the primacy of this absorbing daily work of family discipleship.
Our economy is different from the world of the Bible. Parents and children now spend much of their waking hours away from the home and each other (lockdowns have reminded us how foreign, yet strangely familiar, being home together is). As impractical as it seems to have become, the call to whole-of-life, daily discipleship still remains. Our challenge is to do that when our lives are organised very differently from the ancient world. It will not happen accidentally. The most natural thing in our era, is to use specialists as a replacement for doing our God-given duty as parents. We’ve come to really like the tinned fruit and have forgotten the goodness of the fresh.
It’s easy to outsource discipleship in the same way work and education have been outsourced. A youth pastor or Sunday School teacher or a women’s worker can be a great blessing to someone who doesn’t belong to a Christian household. But when people in Christian homes come to rely on the specialist somewhere else, when those things become essential, we’ve forgotten the provisions God has already given us. We’re missing something actually essential.
No one else can compensate for the absence of everyday piety in men and women who claim to follow Jesus. A women’s pastor wouldn’t be quite so necessary if all the men were taking the daily initiative to read the Bible and pray with the women who depend on them. Then more women would be more nourished to encourage other women who don’t have godly men near them. When a woman is struggling to read her Bible because of the demands of very young children, the answer isn’t to create more women’s ministries with a childminding service. One of the guys needs to ask her husband why he hasn’t been reading the Bible with her. If she has a Christian husband, she has no reason to be starving spiritually. When husbands recognise and do their responsibilities, we don’t need as many bandaids. We might remember the taste of fresh fruit once the demand for tinned fruit subsides.
We assume that fathers will not read the Bible and pray with their wives, or bring their children up in the training and instruction of the Lord. We structure our church lives around their absence. An awful lot of effort, with good intentions, goes into bolstering up systems that presume fathers are spiritually obsolete. These assumptions have a formative effect on who fathers and mothers grow to be, to the detriment of us all.
Fathers teaching their kids to live for Jesus matters so much, that it is a requirement for eldership that the men have done so (eg. 1 Timothy 3). If Dads were proactively leading their families each day in everyday worship, we’d have more men who qualified as pastors/elders to lead the church. More families hearing and obeying Scripture would mean we’d have more hospitable households invested in welcoming those who don’t have the shelter of godly spiritual leadership. There’d be more shelter available for the widow, the orphan and the outcast. Instead of one or two evangelistic events a year, we’d have multitudes of homes testifying to Jesus day in and out, within and without. That’s a lot more surface area for gospel impact.
Australians are not a reforming bunch. We are more into flat, pessimistic, mind-my-own-business, it’s-never-going to-change resignation. Praise God that reformers from the past weren’t. I don’t think we need to orchestrate change. From what I can tell, reform doesn’t come from trying to rearrange a system. Systems and structures are rearranged as the demands on them change. We won’t need as much from these dearly beloved specialties as the Holy Spirit prods us into the small steps of everyday, household faithfulness. Then the systems and structures and specialists can meet other needs. I’m praying for a revival among the menfolk because I think we will all be revived when they are. Praise God that he is quite capable, and delights to do very surprising things.
