Kingdom Family

Re-Envisioning God's Plan for Marriage and Family

Okholm

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891598
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

There is a lot of talk these days about how churches need to become more missional and Kingdom-focused--but what about the families that make up our churches and often reflect the surrounding culture more than the Kingdom of God? Christian families know that God has a better purpose for marriage and family but often don't have the slightest idea how to get there. And while many books on Christian marriage and family are inwardly focused on simply getting along better, this book addresses the cultural influences that have taken our focus away from God's intended purpose for marriage and family and, through analysis and practical suggestions, recalls marriages and families to the purpose for which God intended them in the first place--namely, to serve God's Kingdom as witnesses to a world desperately seeking deeper purpose and authenticity.

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Re-Envisioning the American Dream

Marriage and Family in the Twenty-First Century

•

Some marriages today are miserable not because people are not committed to marriage, but because that is their only commitment.

—William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas

When people evaluated how satisfied they were with their marriages, they began to think more in terms of the development of their own sense of self and the expression of their feelings, as opposed to the satisfaction they gained through building a family and playing the roles of spouse and parent. The result was a transition from the companionate marriage to what we might call the individualized marriage.

—Andrew Cherlin

If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy an infatuation and make me happy, then I’d have to get a new marriage every two or three years. But if I really wanted to see God transform me from the inside out, I’d need to concentrate on changing myself rather than on changing my spouse.

—Gary Thomas

What, Exactly, is the American1
Version of Family?

And so the story goes: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away some beautiful people lived in harmony, in a place called 1950s America—at least that’s what we’ve imagined for the past half century. In reality, 1950s America was the most unusual time for family life in the past century,2 maybe the most unusual situation for family life since the beginning of recorded history. And, in the past sixty or so years, since our 1950s utopia in suburbia, we have seen the widest pendulum swing in family life in American history.3

The mid-twentieth-century nuclear family, which is often touted, especially in evangelical circles, as the “traditional” family and often looked at as the “biblical” model for family, actually has very little in common with the biblical family of the Old and New Testaments. It has more to do with the “Americanization” of family that grew out of our mobility, our quest for independence, the impact of media portrayal of the family with the advent of television, longer life expectancy, and the boon of the post-World War II economy in America.

At the benefit of our North American ethos we find ourselves wrapped into two competing values. One is the value of the perfect, nuclear family and pro-family politics that entice us to idolize marriage as the best way to live one’s family life—marriage as a permanent, loving, sexually exclusive relationship, with divorce as a last resort. Our other value embraces the American ethos of rugged individualism and individual rights in which one’s primary obligation is to oneself rather than to one’s partner and even to one’s children. Individuals are encouraged to make choices about the kinds of intimate lives they wish to lead with an increasing quantity of living arrangements that are acceptable, and in which folks who are personally dissatisfied with their marriage or other intimate partnership are justified in ending those relationships in favor of personal fulfillment. (In many cases, the ending of these relationships is condoned even by the evangelical church.)

The family in our North American culture has come to symbolize tradition and stability (often in place of historical church traditions) and has come to be thought of as the building-block of community. The nuclear family in America is “inextricably linked with a complex set of moral-political concerns such as male-female roles, children, work and economics and the family is intimately linked in our minds and hearts with our religious faith.” The nuclear family has become “a potent symbol of a higher order of life.”4

In sociological reality, it is interesting to note that American religion as well as civic laws have made room for our national value of individualism by making room for divorce from the earliest years of the nation. At the same time, American-style religion (particularly in post-World War II America) has placed the individual at the center of the religious experience. The Americanization of the church has nurtured the individual’s direct relationship with God. As well, the American church structure has tended to divide the family unit of grandparents, parents, youth, and children with a goal to meet individual, age-level needs.

And so we find ourselves at a loss to understand the meaning and purpose of “family” as God intended it to become. We are often conflicted and confused.

Christian families are confronted with conflicting values and purpose, not only from the dramatically transitioning culture, but from our American churches. Too often Christian marriage speakers and counselors promote the “Americanized” version of marriage and family to the exclusion of the gospel message of being members of God’s family first.

The seed for this book was planted a few years ago when my husband, Dennis, and I were asked to speak at a weekend marriage retreat with newly married couples.

As they listened to us ask the following questions, the young couples seemed a bit confused, and rightly so. The topic we had decided on was what life could be like if Christian couples chose to work toward a more “externally-focused marriage.” We began by asking the usual questions:

• What first attracted you to your spouse?
• What increased that attraction as you got to know your future spouse?

But then we began asking them more perplexing questions:

• Why did you decide to be a married couple?
• How do you react to statements such as: “The church is ‘first family,’” “The nuclear family is not God’s most important earthly institution,”5 “The church does not exist to serve the family; the family exists to serve the church.” And what do you think Jesus’ meant by his statement: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)?

You can probably imagine their perplexity. No one ever asks such questions at a marriage retreat! We usually think of questions for marriage, particularly in the Christian community, to be more like: How do you love and respect your spouse? How do you embrace the romance? Of course, these are all important questions in creating a close relationship of honor and trust. But, as Gary Thomas asks in the subtitle of his book Sacred Marriage, “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”6

By the end of that weekend retreat those couples got it—at least, we hoped they did. And in that retreat the seeds for this book were planted. I am writing this book with two groups in mind. First I am writing for the to-be-marrieds, the newly marrieds, the young marrieds just beginning a family, and for parents struggling with the balance of raising Christ-like children in an affluent and often counter-Christian cultural environment.

Second, I am writing this book with the church in mind. My hope is that this book might be discussed by pastors and by teachers, and that it might be of interest for Christian education committees and marriage enrichment teams struggling to equip families to live as faithful members of God’s Kingdom in an alien culture.

This book is about living married life and creating a family from a Kingdom perspective. What if we were less concerned with insulating ourselves from the culture and more concerned to be a missional7 model of the God-ordained purpose of our marriage (for the sake of the culture)? This question becomes more urgent when we take a look at the institution of marriage as it stands in the American culture at the beginning of this twenty-first century.

Marriage? Not “How” But “Why”

Why marry? In our American culture that has become the question. There suddenly appears to be a lot of conversation around that question and most of it is not taking place in the Christian community. Of course, the church has a lot to say about how to live well and successfully within marriage and how to raise faithful children.8 However, it appears that today’s culture is not so much asking “How do we do marriage and family?” as much as it is asking “Why should we?”

It is interesting to note that at the same time the establishment and purpose of organized church has come into question. And as we come to grips with the deinstitutionalization of the organized church, the institution of marriage and family is also questioned. From a cultural perspective questions are being asked: What defines marriage? What defines family? Why get married?

Dr. Stephanie Coontz9 makes a case from history that the idea of marriage for romantic reasons is a fairly new phenomenon. Coontz points out that it has only been in the last hundred years in America that we have put all of our “emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love.”10

And according to Frances and Joseph Gies, the sociological concept of “family” is a relatively recent development in the history of humanity. In fact, “no European language had a term specifically for the mother-father-children group before the eighteenth century.”11 Marital love and the special relationship between married couple as well as...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Re-Envisioning the American Dream
• Chapter 2: Missional Living
• Chapter 3: Identity
• Chapter 4: Direction and Purpose
• Chapter 5: Learning to “See” Better
• Chapter 6: Freedom in Obedience
• Chapter 7: Desperately Seeking Authenticity
• Chapter 8: Radically Rooted
• Chapter 9: Kitchen Community in a Garage Door Society
• Bibliography