Best of Cerulean Sanctum

The Reason the Church Exists

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Helping hands

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.
—Deuteronomy 10:17-18 ESV

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
—James 1:27 ESV

Recently, as I’ve sat at home and healed up from the numerous illnesses that have hit our family since Easter, I’ve had plenty of time to think about some of the comments I’ve seen left on various Christian blogs. One comment that repeatedly raises its ugly head goes something like this:

The reason this happened to you is that you didn’t trust God to provide for your needs.

On another blog, I left a comment that received this exact response. It wasn’t directed at me in particular, but was aimed at all those people who found themselves in dire straits and after much prayer, sought their own solutions, often through means that “aren’t Christian”—at least by the measure of the person leaving the comment.

I used to be one of those “faith bombers” who love to quote Scripture for the express purpose of making people feel bad about their solutions to tough problems. In many cases, a faith bomber proves his or her point by relaying a miraculous story of a specific answer to prayer that came about through direct intervention of God. The victims of the bombing are left to drown in the fact that the reason they did not receive a miracle was because they did not exhibit the same heaven-opening faith that the faith bomber did.

So there.

This post is an answer to faith bombers everywhere. It’s a wake-up call and a re-examination of how God works. It’s a message for every person who was ever tempted to bring a holier-than-thou attitude into the painful circumstances of someone in desperate need.

There have always been widows and orphans. The Bible repeatedly uses widows and orphans as a litmus test of need. To God, there is no one more needy than the woman who has lost her husband or the child who has lost one or both parents. God’s heart is always for them. Always.

Yet, we also know of orphans who die forgotten and neglected. We read stories of widows who live alone, who forget to pay the electric bill, then freeze to death in the emptiness of their little ranch house when the electric company turns off their power for non-payment. Just last year I read such a story of a woman who had been a Sunday School teacher for more than fifty years, described as a wonderful Christian woman who loved many, yet her fate was hypothermia and a lonely death in the darkness of her own home.

How can this be reconciled with a loving God whose heart is for the widow and the orphan?

Philosophers will argue for or against the existence of God. Some will scream about divine watchmakers who cast their creations onto beaches to be found and marveled at by the curious. For others, it is a question of evil and why it exists.

But what of this?

But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
—1 Corinthians 12:24b-26 ESV

The suffering of fellow members of the Body of Christ is my suffering. It is your suffering. It is not just the suffering of those who were unfortunate enough to be receive it.

And here is where the great truth exists: God made the Church to be His means of delivering grace. As the Body of Christ we are to be the Lord to all people around us, no matter how deplorable their condition.

Can God feed the widow and orphan supernaturally by reinstituting manna that falls from heaven right into their hands? No doubt He could, but with His founding of the Church, we are the ones to feed them. It is our duty as the hands of God to deliver them food. This is the wisdom of God. This is religion that is pure and undefiled: that we look after widows and orphans and be the hands of God working to meet their need in the midst of their desolation.

My wife and I support a ministry called Voice of the Children. It started when one man walked into the sewers of Russia and brought the light of Christ to the scores of abandoned children that lived in the dank, black, disease-ridden bowels of his country. He understood that unless he, as a child of God, walked into that filth, children no one wanted would live and die there without hope. God enlightened his eyes to see that his hands were His hands.

To the so-called “Christian” who wounds the already wounded with the shrill words, “It’s because of your lack of faith…,” I say, “Heed your own words because it is you, and you alone, who have failed your brother.” All day long the Lord cries out for His people to be the instruments of grace to others that He has called them to be. He beseeches us to be that miracle in the life of someone who has lost hope and has no solutions. How long before those of us who ignore this calling fall prey to the vicissitudes of life and suffer this fate:

Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
—Proverbs 21:13 ESV

Shame on us! Shame on every person who thinks they are exempt from being the solution, instead tossing that miracle back to God, saying with the words of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the reply of God, the one so few are willing to hear is, “Yes. Yes, you are.”

Ford, GM, and the Church

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Car wreckThis last week, the corporate bonds of General Motors and Ford Motor Company were reduced to junk status.

Now becoming BB-rated or worse doesn't mean a company is about to go bankrupt. That said, having the bonds of two of America's largest companies reduced to junk status should give us pause.

I tend to carp on business issues here at Cerulean Sanctum, but for good reason. When people lose jobs, the Church in this country handles it terribly. Every family in a church needs an income. Many people in our churches spend more time at their jobs than anything else they do in a week, yet the Church in America's silence on the business world is deafening.

So why are churches not preparing for the next economic downturn? What do we have in place to ensure every family within our churches will be taken care of should financial disaster hit? Time and again I look around and see blissful ignorance rather than a discerning of the times. It's as if we can't possibly bring ourselves to mention the 800 lb. gorilla in the room lest it tear us to pieces. That kind of Pollyanna-ish thinking is not the wisdom of serpents, but of doves. The way I read the Bible, that's not what it says in Matthew 10:16. Too often the children of this world are more shrewd than the children of God. This should never be the case.

So we twiddle our thumbs and rest contented in our lack of preparedness to deal with bad economic times. It was only recently that we had a prolonged economic downtown. Half the people I know lost their jobs in that time, including both my wife and me. The number one prayer request in the church we attended at that time was for jobs, and yet the church did little to address the need.

Listen, God can take care of the widows and orphans on His own if He wants to. But He chose the Church to be His means of grace to those unfortunates. The Church needs to always have a way in place for whatever need is out there. And again, there is no more pressing need than for people to have jobs, or in lieu of this, have people who will draw alongside the unemployed, help them find work, or take care of their financial burden when there is no work to be found.

There is no reason why your church does not know where you work. There is no reason why your church has not identified individuals within your congregation who can make employment hiring decisions. There is no reason why your church is not collecting funds to sustain families within the church during a financial crisis. There is no reason why small groups are not considering ways to support each other should some in the group lose their jobs. There is no reason to continue to ignore alternative community living that can better buffer us Christians against hard times. Yet for some reason the numbers of churches doing this is pitifully small. This is something that should be occuring in every church. Not only that, but I believe that this should extend across state lines from one church to another. If we are not networked in this way, then the area of the country that suffers the worst downturn cannot be helped by the area that stayed relatively immune from it. If things got bad in Detroit should the car industry there turn south, would we expect only Detroit-area churches to bear that burden?

The Church of Jesus Christ should always be on the crest of the wave, not floundering in the backwash. We need sober-minded people to start working out these issues in every church in this country. Not only will we benefit those within our congregations by doing this, but as the supposed "ants" of this world, we must have a better answer for the unsaved "grasshoppers" out there than "Tough luck."

The Church shines brightest in the darkest times. Are we ready to shine that light?

Stay-at-Home Dads (or “Guys the Church Would Like to Forget Exist”)

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Just this last week, the following was posted to a few Christian blogs:

Probably if everyone in the United States circa 1960 had known that taking modest steps in the direction of feminism would, in fact, lead during their lifetimes to the legalization of sodomy, to gay men marrying each other, to a small but growing number of fathers staying home to take care of the kids, to legal abortions, etc., etc., etc. the public would have overwhelmingly rejected those early steps. But the poo-pooers won the day, the people did not believe, and now majorities support most of those developments….
—Matt Yglesias—“Slippery Slopes“

Sodomy. Homosexual marriage. Legal abortion. Stay-at-home dads.

In the Church in America, it is not hard to see how many—particularly of the Evangelical persuasion— are up in arms about the moral slide of this country. But when I read something like this, it hurts me. A lot. Dad with kidsThat’s because I find myself lumped in with women who murder their unborn children, with men who lust after other men, with people who seek to mock God’s great gift of heterosexual marriage.

You see, I’m a stay-at-home dad.

In the four years that I have been in this role, the one thing I have learned is that Evangelicals find stay-at-home dads to be that chunk of indigestible gristle that wedges in the back of the throat. Now while I don’t need for them to come right out and say this to my face, the position taken by so many Evangelicals is the literal “death by a thousand cuts” when it comes to stay-at-home dads. If every stay-at-home dad would simply vanish overnight, I think most Evangelicals would breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Open up any Christian book that discusses the American family and you see this:

  • Dad works a high-paying job outside the home as the sole breadwinner. He continues this till the day he retires from the firm with the solid-gold pocketwatch.
  • Mom stays at home with the three to four children and homeschools them until the last one gets pushed out of the nest at age eighteen.

These are the two gold standards by which Evangelical families are judged for their conformity to a Scriptural mandate for the home. Any variance from this and the wrath of God is incurred.

I know this is the case because I read. Plus, any casual glance at the bestselling books on How to Have the Perfect Christian Family will tell us that this is the measure by which Christ judges us from His Bema Seat. Never have I seen an Evangelical Christian book or magazine that ascribes to this model even once consider stay-at-home dads except to brand them a breech of the natural order and anathema in the Church. As Mr. Yglesias points out (whether intended or not), a family with a stay-at-home dad can easily be equated to a household with two same-sex parents.

I also know the trouble caused by the existence of stay-at-home dads because I’ve been a Christian for almost thirty years. I’ve seen how families are treated when they don’t perfectly hew to the Evangelical family model. The judgment is passed (“As a family, you get an ‘F'”) and the arms come out to keep your perverted family at a safe distance.

This plays out in many ways. My son cannot come over to another house for playtime if the other child’s at-home parent is a woman. Wouldn’t be seemly for her to be seen with an “unknown man” coming into her home while her husband is away. I can understand that to a point, though it paints the at-home dad as a sex machine that will seduce any female he manages to get alone.

As an at-home dad, I’m not welcome into “parenting group” activities with at-home moms. In one such group that I was investigating, it was made all too clear that by my presence I was ruining the moms’ chance to catch up on daily gossip. How clear? One of the moms came up to me and told me that right to my face. Now she didn’t call it gossip (gossip is a sin, you know), but I’m not stupid. I recognized what I was hearing.

Whenever the Church devises mid-week events for parents, the at-home dad gets a sinking feeling because “parent” is not really the word they intend, unless the sole definition of “parent” is “mother of the children.” Simply showing up for such an event throws the organizers into chaos.

Now you would think that Evangelicals would be overjoyed that a family chooses to have one parent at home raising the children. You would think that they would celebrate the fact that some families have chosen to abandon the dual-income rat race that is afflicting so many families. You would think. But you would be wrong, dead wrong, if you think that the Church would be happy if the parent staying at home happens to have a penis.

One of my favorite foils here at Cerulean Sanctum is Focus on the Family. Seeing that I am a conservative Christian would make you think I hold Focus on the Family in high regard. Yet one of the reasons I find the whole organization to be less than stellar is their unwillingness to admit that the cultural forces that are tearing the family apart are not necessarily the ones they think are causing the problems. FotF’s blindered look at Christianity and culture finds them upholding many of the cultural anomalies that are responsible for the outcomes they decry.

Case in point: feminism is an easy target. A much harder target is the Industrial Revolution. In Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, he discusses how prior to the industrial revolution, almost EVERY dad was a stay-at-home dad. But then so was every mom. In fact, the economy revolved around the home. FotF, on the other hand, seems to lean to dad being locked up in a cubicle all day at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. Likewise, almost every book I’ve read about being a perfect Christian dad makes dad out to not only be the captain of his household, but a captain of industry as well—even if this means the family never sees dad because he’s slaving away for fifty hours a week or out being Steve, the Road Warrior. I’ve never heard an Evangelical organization similar to Focus on the Family question whether the work world we have created as a result of the Industrial Revolution is hurting our families.

Many men are stay-at-home dads because of mitigating business factors that Evangelicals refuse to address or address in totally anti-Christian ways. For instance, I was recently given some links to Christian businessmen networks. On one of the online forums I read a message by a Christian business leader talking about how “Christian excellence” requires him to fire all his IT people and move his IT operations offshore. He believed such a move was God’s will. However, nothing seemed to register in him that perhaps a little less profit could be had and that he could keep the employees he already has in an action that is far closer to the heart of the Gospel than what he’s claiming as God’s will. His downsizing move creates a hardship for the fired male employee who must come to grips that his career is drying up and that his family might be more stable if mom became the breadwinner (because she’s less likely to be fired in a downsizing move by her company in her field of college study.) The fallout of this is that the Christian business owner just created the very Evangelical headache—a stay-at-home dad— that every Christian family bestseller on the shelf of the local Christian bookstore insists must not exist lest the sky fall and dogs and cats start living together in violation of the created order.

In other words, if Evangelicals don’t like stay-at-home dads, then just what are they doing to ensure that work world issues are addressed that prevent families from having to consider that option? Truthfully, the answer is that they simply don’t care about preventing the “problem” of stay-at-home dads at all, preferring to attribute their blighted existence to evils of feminism rather than the natural fallout of the Industrial Revolution and the very worst aspects of capitalism gone to greedy selfishness. It is far easier to point a finger toward the at-home dad than to do something about ensuring work for all men who truly want to be the breadwinners in their family (even if that is not necessarily God’s perfect design.) Nor is anything being done to restore the work of fathers and mothers back to the home, just like in the days when this country was founded. As much as parachurch Christian organizations like Focus on the Family idolize America of that day, they make no mad rush to take on that particular aspect of the economy of that day and bring it into today’s homes.

So yes, I am a stay-at-home dad. To all the Christians out there who express concern about the fact that I exist in that role, I say, put your money where your mouth is and stop crucifying me on the cross of your righteous indignation.

Or is that a little too harsh?