The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. | 1 Peter 4:7-11
This Sunday, we looked at how Jesus has acted to reverse the consequences of the Fall and has secured a complete restoration of all things. As we wait, in the Now but not Yet, we should re-commit ourselves to the cultural mandate:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion |Genesis 1:28a
This mandate is the call to develop this world in line with the order that God created it in. I can think of no better way to do this than to strengthen the institutions of church and family. Here is something that I wrote 3 years ago on the topic:
Over the last 50 years, we have been going through a societal experiment: the un-fettering of the individual. With individual rights as the war cry, we have undermined numerous institutions and structures that used to hold communities together (this is chronicled in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone). The most serious of these de-constructions is the family. The family used to be the place people would turn when down-on-their-luck, mentally disabled, or elderly. Family was the place that helped teach you all of the moral and ethical lessons needed for life. Family was the place where you understood your place in this world. Now, families are a series of individuals jockeying for self-identification.
As the degrading of families began to show societal implications, people worked to build replacement networks through work, friends, and/or hobbies. These groups solved aspects of the ‘other people’ problem, but have failed miserably at the larger issue of rooting people emotionally and spiritually. As well, these fabricated institutions seem to fall apart the moment they are strained. It leaves people terribly lonely, unsure, and constantly doubting their own self-worth.
The answer to this problem is rebuilding the social structures created by God: family and church (I would argue that government is also divinely arranged, but it can not function properly without these 2 in order). If we could just flip-a-switch and make families healthy again, that would be great. But we can’t. We don’t even really know how too, because we (who make up the church) have been indoctrinated into this experiment. How can we begin to bring things back into alignment?
View your family as a gift to your community, not a means of self-fulfillment
I love my kids. I am proud of them when they do well and frustrated when they break my favorite coffee cup (still a sore spot). My kids are ultimately not about me. Much more importantly, and shocking to our sensibilities, my kid’s life is not about them. What I mean is: they were created by God for communal life, their role in this world is other-focused, not self-focused. One of the problems we have is that we have made our kids success, happiness, and well-being the focus of our parenting; they need to learn that these are not the goals of this life.
In order to raise children toward this requires us to be other-focused. We have to organize our family life in a way that both supports and encourages internally, while pushing outward on a mission toward the common good. In this way, your kids become the means that God re-prioritizes your life.
Use the church as a place to live out this other-focus
God has not only given us a family, but also a family of families, the church. This is a group of people, held together by the gospel, who are all working toward being remade into Christ-likeness. This can not happen if the individuals in the church are acting out their self-centeredness. If we come together as the church in an attempt to get something from this place or these people, we walk away unchanged and unimpressed.
God wants us to be part of the body, not an observer of it. To engage the church as a counter-cultural movement of loving the unloved and being sanctified by others turns the church into this exciting opportunity to bring healing into the broken.
Help the church be family to people who have none
We can not fix the brokenness; we can welcome people into a healthy family (pre-supposing we have done the work of becoming a healthy church). I believe the biggest mistake the church has made over time is getting side-tracked by the cultural battles and not spending enough time being the church. When I say, ‘being the church,’ I mean the simple act of sharing the love of Christ with those in our vicinity. Being family to those who have none. In this time of extreme disjointedness, I think this is the greatest gift we have to offer. We cannot rebuild all of the institutions that have been torn down; we cannot fix the ones currently failing, but we can work to make our church and families an alternative to individualism. Not to be right or to win, but because the world will be a better place for it. We will be a better people.