All in the Family

Last week I wrote about it being the responsibility of Christian parents to make the worship of God and fellowship with the covenant community of faith a priority for our families. I am sure that I ruffled more than a few feathers, but I stand by every word I wrote. My role as pastor is not to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. As Rev. David Rohrer wisely writes, “The temptation is strong for us as pastors to settle for providing people with the religion they want rather than the truth they need. Yet prophets have nothing to sell. Our job is not to get people to buy Jesus as if he were some product. Our job is to give witness to the truth. What folks do with that truth is a matter between them and God…Truth may hurt, but it also liberates.”

Had I planned this out instead of just going with the flow I would have probably written last week’s post second and this week’s post first. Here’s how I would have organized this series of posts had I really thought about it beforehand:

Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next.

Topic 2: Making the Lord’s Day worship and fellowship of the covenant community of the church a priority. As I mentioned, I already covered this in last week’s post entitled, “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average.”

Topic 3: Having children, at least those of school age, present throughout Lord’s Day worship is a must for any congregation that is serious about passing the faith on to the kids.

So this week I will actually be addressing what should have been Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. This topic may actually take more than one week, several weeks actually.

Before I begin, let me say something important. Some people don’t have families or have been cast out from their families. For many of these folks, the covenant community of the church has become their primary family. That is wonderful and biblical, and we should strive to bring in more and more people who have no other family so that we can love them with the love we’ve received from God. A family did that for me once and through doing that for me they taught me what the gospel looks like when it is lived out. The Church is a family of families and individuals who become one big family through baptism. That being said, however, for those who do live in families, especially those who have children at home, the family at home is the primary vehicle for bringing children to faith and helping to form them into mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Voddie Baucham, an avid proponent of both “family driven faith” and fully “family-integrated churches” in response to the statistics that show that between 75-85% of young people have ceased active participation in a local church by the end of their freshman year in college (and very few of them are returning as they used to) writes, “I believe we are looking for answers in all the wrong places. Our children are not falling away because the church is doing a poor job—although that is undoubtedly a factor. Our children are falling away because we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home. At best, the church is to play a supporting role as it ‘equips the saints for the work of ministry’ (Ephesians 4:12, ESV).”

Although there are a lot of things that I don’t agree with Dr. Baucham on, the overall thesis of his work is something with which I agree wholeheartedly. I really do feel that “we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home.” It isn’t Dr. Baucham’s work (or anyone else’s work), though, that brought me to that opinion; it has been my own experience over the past decade in youth and children’s ministries. Once I started feeling this way I went out looking for resources to see if anyone else was thinking the same thing. I found that there are quite a few folks who, based on their ministry experience, have come to the same conclusion. So that’s what I’ll be spending the next few weeks on. I hope that even if you don’t have kids at home that you’ll read these posts anyway. Just maybe you will be blessed through something that may seem irrelevant to you on the surface but may either convict or comfort you at a deeper level.

In the overall epic narrative of Scripture, God has always worked through families. The promises to Abraham were family promises. It wasn’t that only he would be a blessing; his family was going to bless the whole world. It was Moses’ family that saved his life, and when it came time for Moses to live into God’s call on his life, God didn’t expect him to do it alone. God brought him back together with his family and they did it together. When the Israelites were about to enter into the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness, God commanded Moses to review the Law with the people so that they’d know how to live once they were surrounded by other people who did not care about their faith or way of life. “These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God.” The purpose of the Law being recorded and reviewed is so that one generation can pass it on to the next and to the next and to the next. How is this supposed to happen? Moses says, “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 door

frames of your houses and on your gates.” The faith is to be passed on by parents who love God and God’s Word teaching their children to love God and God’s Word. This will happen by having the faith present in all aspects of family life, even in the way their houses are set up.

Not long after Moses reviewed the Law with the people and commanded them to pass it on to their children, Moses died. Joshua, who took over for him, gathered the people together before they went into the land and said, “If you refuse to serve the LORD, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD.” In other words, Joshua was telling the people that they needed to make an intentional choice as to who they are going to follow because it is of utmost importance and because it is going to be hard work to keep up the faith in a surrounding culture that is filled with elements that are contrary to the Hebrews’ faith in God. Just “seeing where the journey takes you” isn’t going to cut it, Joshua is saying. As Dr. Baucham writes, “Raising Godly children is not a matter of luck; it is a matter of work.” Joshua’s family, not just Joshua, is going to follow the one true God because faith is a family affair, especially when living in the midst of a culture that doesn’t care what your faith is or is even hostile towards it.

The Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children. The institutions of the faith exist for communal worship and to assist the family in fulfilling their central role. To this day, the observant Jewish family will both prepare for and celebrate the Sabbath together as a family.

The entire family prepares together for the festive family meal held in the Jewish home on Friday night, and the children are very much involved in the celebration itself. Also, children take roles of leadership in the celebrations of religious holidays like Purim and Passover. The family is the center of faith; the synagogue supplements what is done in the family. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of my favorite authors, writes “It is important to me that [my children] have a solid grounding in their Jewish heritage and customs, and that they live by the Jewish values of holiness, community, charity, hospitality, and humanity. Within the great tradition of Orthodox Jewry come many smaller traditions that are an intrinsic part of our lives: we study the Bible daily, pray three times a day, observe biblical festivals, have mezuzahs on our doors, and keep a strictly kosher home.”

Jesus was, of course, Jewish during his years as “the Word of God made flesh.” All of his first followers were Jewish. The Apostle Paul, who spread the faith and wrote a great number of the documents in our New Testament, was Jewish. Therefore, it is not a stretch to say that the model for Christian families should be very much the same as the Hebrew model. It is true that Jesus said some things about the family that might not seem to point toward the centrality of the family in the life of faith, but when we read those sayings of Jesus in context we see that Jesus’ point was that if your family stands between you and discipleship in Jesus then you must choose Jesus over family. However, if your family is fulfilling its role as building one another up in your discipleship then this is as it should be.

This will have to be continued next week on December 26...

Keep doing those Advent sticker books together each day as a family, read the biblical Christmas story to the kids, and take time to pray together as a family, even on Christmas morning before the gifts begin. Over the coming weeks I will share with you a lot of resources for "family driven" faith and I will even promise to help you obtain those resources. You will never have a pastor who cares more about families and kids growing in faith than you do now. I promise you that.