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April 19, 2006
Church, not family is first?
Steve McCoy references a great article on The Brutal Burbs: How the Suburban Lifestyle Undermines Our Mission. This post was written originally over at Out of Ur. Steve McCoy wrote this:
By idolizing the family, suburbanites may become focused on consuming more stuff to create the perfect home and family. There is nothing but contrived affection left to keep the home together.
All of this got me really thinking a lot about not only the surburban family and home, but the family in general. And I have recently been reading Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options by Rodney Clapp. It is an amazing book. But he says this about the family in Chapter 4, "Church as First Family."
In the postmodern world the market and its ways have swallowed our lives whole, so that living in genuinely Christian family is almost a lost art. Recovering the purpose of Christian family, on the distinctive terms of the Christian story, requires two declarations--one negative and one positive.
The negative declaration: The family is not God's most important institution on earth. The family is not the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians. The family is not the primary vehicle of God's grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.
And the positive declaration: The church is God's most important institution on earth. The church is the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians. And the church is the primary vehicle of God's grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.
Putting the church first, of course, runs counter to the interpretation of many evangelical traditionalists. They put the biological family first. They emphatically place family at the center of God's purposes and work on behalf of the world.......
Yet, we cannot put Jesus first and still put family first.
(pp. 67-68)
Read Christianity Today's Suburban Spirituality: The land of SUVs and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn't have to.
Posted by rhett at April 19, 2006 09:50 AM
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Comments
Amen. I will have to follow up on the the links later when I get more of a chance to read but great post!
Posted by: Wayne Bowerman at April 19, 2006 11:15 AM
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