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The One Metric To Heal The Broken Western Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  We've seen hundreds of families be completely transformed from kind of those weak nuclear Western families that are all about the individual. And they just keep falling apart to very strong households of faith because they become multigenerational. And this is the tool, you guys. People always ask us, where do I start? This is where you start.
• 0:19
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.
• 0:37
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. We are here in our totally new studios, as you guys can all see, although it looks almost exactly the same as it did before. So what happened, April? Something changed. What exactly is different about this? We rearranged our rooms. Yes. Yes.
• 0:54
  So we did the longest internal move you could from one side of the house to the other. And now we have our new space and it looks very similar to our old space, which is what we're going for. So you'll be able to crank out these podcasts for y'all. All right. So today I want to talk to you, April, about the one metric that we can be tracking to see whether or not the biblical blueprint of family is being restored. You ready for this?
• 1:23
  Snow ready. Okay. So this is called three generations, one table every week. And so I'm going to read you guys a little article and then April get your take on this. Business guru, Jim Collins pointed out the power of the single metric when he wrote, quote, there is one metric that towers above all others. One metric to track with obsession. One metric upon which the greatness of the entire enterprise hinges.
• 1:49
  It's not easy to find, but for every organization, there is one metric that, once everyone is focused on it, brings every activity into such focus and provides such crystal clarity that maintaining that focus makes achieving the mission a matter of time. I've seen the power of a single metric in practice.
• 2:07
  The drive to have the Bible translated into every language caught the attention of Mark Green from the Hobby Lobby family. The Green family brought together all the organizations involved in Bible translation into a single effort focused on a single metric called Illuminations, which took this effort from a 100 plus year dream to achievable by the year 2033.
• 2:31
  The hidden reason sports are so intoxicating is the power of the single metric, the scoreboard. Imagine a sport attempting to gain popularity without a straightforward way to keep score. That's the game I was playing in our attempt to achieve our mission to restore the biblical blueprint of the family as a multi-generational team on mission. Recently, I met with a group of leaders from various family ministries, and we discussed the challenge of finding a single metric to rally around that would focus our efforts on restoring the family.
• 2:58
  I spent two months thinking about this problem and at a gathering in a hotel in Denver, an idea struck me that I want to share with all of you. This is my proposal for a single metric that could focus our efforts and achieve our mission. Three generations, one table, every week. Could we count how many families have achieved this goal?
• 3:19
  I would guess that less than 5% of families are experiencing this kind of weekly meal. In contrast, I would guess that more than 50% of families in the state of Israel participate in this practice.
• 3:32
  We've lived in Israel on and off for the past 30 years, and seeing Gen 2 and Gen 3 families and individuals streamed by the thousands to Gen 1's house on Friday afternoon in time for a Shabbat dinner is a sight that is seared into my mind. Israel is also the only country in the developed world with an above replacement fertility rate.
• 3:52
  And second place isn't even close. And if you're watching this on YouTube, I can show you guys real quick what this crazy chart looks like. That's what it looks like. So you see here Israel, their fertility rates almost at three births per woman.
• 4:08
  And in the developed world, the next country with a fertility rate that's the next highest is 1.8. So, man, huge discrepancy between Israel, which is way above fertility rate, and every other developed country in the world, which is way below fertility rate with South Korea being the furthest down. I think it's at 0.07 children per woman. High fertility after a culture has achieved relative affluence results from a single variable.
• 4:38
  The Closely Connected Multigenerational Family. I've been training families for the past 20 years, and I've learned something shocking. If a family crafts a weekly, enjoyable, intimate family meal designed for three or more generations, that family will not be able to stop their family from going multigenerational. It happens automatically. This rhythm is that powerful.
• 5:02
  And I'm not talking about the quick weeknight meal championed by many family ministries where we eat fast, talk faster before everyone scatters back to their individual pursuits. No, we're talking about a practice of a meal that feels almost timeless. An evening where no one has someplace better to go. We're here to spend a whole evening together, to laugh, to share, to grieve, to play, to dance, to cook, to clean, to tell stories, and to live fully into our family identities as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter.
• 5:31
  I know many of you reading this or hearing this in this case are leading families at various stages. So let me outline a practical first step toward achieving this. For young families with healthy parents nearby, practice this with your small immediate family first. Once you get this down, invite your parents to these periodically. And only invite them weekly if it's healthy and you all look forward to spending time together. If not, see the next options.
• 5:55
  What about for young families with unhealthy parents? You can try this once or twice to see if it'll work, but if not, please don't get discouraged. This rhythm is still for you and for your family. The only difference is that you will achieve three generations when your kids have kids. That's okay. It's a considerable achievement. It took generations for your family to become broken, and it will take generations to heal your family. But if you do this well, your grandchildren will never know a time before the experience of this multigenerational meal.
• 6:25
  For young families with healthy parents far away, let your parents experience this when they come for a visit. Have them share stories. Give them a seat of honor at the table. Let them know this will happen every week. Their visits will likely get longer and more frequent. And at some time in the future, a move is likely to happen in your direction. For families with older kids,
• 6:47
  Tread carefully here. Your kids may have been trained that family should always be sacrificed on the altar of personal preferences. It usually takes a father repenting to his teens that he has led them toward hyper-individualism and a request to get their buy-in on a new experimental practice. Ask them to agree to try this for a couple of months. Let them help with the menu, with the activities, and sometimes even invite friends. They have to want to do this for this to take hold in the next generation.
• 7:17
  And so lastly, for grandparents with adult kids, make this easy on your adult kids. Make it an amazing experience for your grandkids. Maybe start once a month to not overwhelm your adult kids and make it more frequent after they love this rhythm and you have their buy-in.
• 7:33
  Everyone can slowly and steadily move their family toward a practice of three generations, one table, every week. If we focus our efforts on this single metric, the broken Western family will be something our great-grandchildren will only know about through studying our sad and confused period of history. Okay.
• 7:54
  So April, wanted to get your take on that. So there's a couple of concepts I'm trying to tease out here. One is the concept of the one metric. Secondly is like the Israel example. Third is like proposing this as the metric. And then fourth, we have kind of these examples of different kinds of families and how this might work or look differently depending on the way people's families might be currently constructed. So yeah, I'm curious. Any part of that jump out at you.
• 8:22
  Yeah, well, I think, you know, if you're asking why a metric, why do we need to measure this? I think part of it is to know, like, does this work for other families? Is this truly something that we are restoring? Are we restoring this ancient path of the multigenerational weekly meal that has a bit more meaning and depth to it than the weekly meal you have throughout the week? And how do you know if this is the same path?
• 8:51
  type of thing that's kind of spreading. And I feel like having a metric is important so that you can, it creates like a common language to be able to get to know people and say like, hey, is this what's going on with you? Because each one of those things represents
• 9:09
  a lot of work in particular areas. You know, being able to say three generations, that's just right there. Like, okay, where's the third generation coming in? Are we inviting grandparents into this? Are we having grandchildren be a part of this? So allowing the three generations to be
• 9:26
  present takes a lot of work and that can be years worth of work. So being patient with that process, but ultimately letting that be what we see in scripture where, is that Psalm 128? Oh, 128, yeah. 128, where we see a man who's blessed and he's sitting at a table with his wife as a fruitful vine and he's seeing his children's children. So there's three generations represented and it's
• 9:56
  This metric was, I believe, kind of set up for us in Scripture there with this idea in mind, the way God set the week up for us in creation and giving the seventh day as like an entrance into a day of rest where we are treating that day differently than other days of the week.
• 10:14
  And the evening starting the day off. So getting to kick a day off in the evening is kind of a foreign concept to us, but allowing that to be what starts a day of rest is another part of the metric where you have to work really hard to rest. So getting there also denotes a lot of the similar work you have with other people.
• 10:37
  Yeah, the purpose of having a single metric is not to suggest that this is somehow easy or simple, but it is to really create tremendous focus. And I think the thing that's really interesting about this metric, about having this weekly multigenerational meal, is I've wondered for a long time whether or not this practice is, is it sort of correlated with multigenerational family or is it causative?
• 11:01
  of multi-generational family. And my current hypothesis or my belief is that's actually causative. And that's why I think we can obsess on it. In other words, what I've noticed is that the reason why families don't go multi-generational is because
• 11:16
  They're just disconnected. They're emotionally disconnected. They're disconnected. So there's no real place or opportunity for them to truly enjoy each other, to learn to partner together, to want to be a team because they just don't spend enough time together. Doing a couple of multigenerational family meals a year says something about what you think family is. And what it says in our culture is we think family is really the nuclear family. We have made...
• 11:43
  decisions to really downplay and diminish the importance of the multi-generational family. And if you have made the decision like we have, well, we believe that God actually designed families to be multi-generational. We believe that we're designed to be together and to help each other across generations and to function like a team. Well, that team needs an arena to really foster its closeness, its relationships, and to
• 12:08
  And that can take a long time. And so if you're beginning this practice, you're like, well, we're not really that close right now. Well, that's why we do this. Because when you say that we're going to prioritize this meal and we're going to be learning how to make this life-giving, we're going to learn how to be looking forward to this meal. And that's why I kind of...
• 12:29
  the little tips I'm giving at the end is like, really start small, start really carefully, start with your nuclear family and make it sustainable for you guys first, and then begin to get that third generation, whether downstream or upstream involved. And like you mentioned, April, for a lot of people, you may be decades away from being able to involve a third generation, but it's important for those of you guys who are only doing this downstream with maybe your young children,
• 12:51
  What you're doing right now is that as they're getting used to this rhythm, and we thought about this a lot. I remember having this thought when our kids were young and we did this for probably six or seven years before we started involving upstream generations. And even then, I wasn't sure that was going to happen. But the one thing I was really excited to see happen is, okay, once our kids start having kids, let's craft the kind of meal that they really would want to be at every week with their children, with our grandchildren.
• 13:17
  And that's not for us. And I think a lot of people struggle with this. It's not because we have a particular preference to want to be around young children. It's not that April and I are obsessed with little kids. It really has much more to do with this is better for everyone. Like we, we love God's design and there's something about what those grandchildren need to experience that we have. There's something that our kids, you know, gen two needs to experience. We need to, we all need each other. Like we believe in that, in that whole reality. And so, yeah.
• 13:45
  Having a metric like this can create a ton of focus. And that's what we're really going for here. Yeah. I wanted to speak to the different stages that you mentioned at the end. I think I really like how you broke that down because it is different depending on what stage you're in, what this even means or looks like.
• 14:06
  But I want to really encourage, especially I'm thinking of the people that are starting this way down the line. Like if you are a grandparent and this is a new idea for you and you're like, well, my kids are doing their own thing with their kids. I don't know how to get them, you know, kind of reel them in or rope them back into something. I would say a lot of just encouragement about go ahead and try and like.
• 14:32
  doing, like initiating and taking on a lot of the work that it takes. So, you know, it could take three months to get one on the calendar to begin with, you know, just getting a night where everyone's in the same place at the same time on the calendar and it's not like Thanksgiving or Christmas. That could be the hard work at first. And then you being the one to cook all the food and provide all the food, that could also feel like you're doing a Thanksgiving feast or something like that.
• 15:02
  enjoy themselves, have a good time, you know, think of the kid, the grandkids and like do it in such a way that makes it approachable for your kids and their grandkids and different somehow. And for them to be able to be enticed by that down the road, you could say, Hey,
• 15:19
  Hey, I was wondering if you guys wouldn't mind bringing aside next time or contributing if they're starting to get really interested or into it. Just to encourage you to persevere because I think that you'll really benefit way down the line. Yeah. Hey, this is Jeremy. April and I have been building our family team for over two decades now.
• 15:38
  And one thing we've learned is that strong families don't just happen. They're built over time with intention. That's what the Family Teams Accelerator is all about. It's a 12-month journey we've created to help families like yours grow in peace, purpose, and unity. One month, one habit at a time. Whether it's learning how to lead a family meeting, setting up a weekly rhythm, or just having some tools to talk through the big stuff. We'd love to walk with you. If you're looking for a path forward, check it out at FamilyTeams.com slash accelerator. Thank you.
• 16:09
  This is such a good investment to make in your future family. And whatever stage you're at, that's one of the things we're trying to emphasize. Every family is broken in different ways. But if you're thinking about, okay, where could we start? And usually it starts with two generations. And be content with two generations. And really make it awesome for two generations. Whether that's upstream or downstream or whatever you can get there.
• 16:30
  And it'll allow that practice to happen and get better and better. Because eventually that third generation, when it comes, there's going to be an opportunity to bring in a third generation. And once you cross that threshold, I think at that moment, your family becomes a different kind of family. That's the moment that I'm sort of putting my pin in and saying, once there are three generations around one table every week, once that practice starts to become rhythmic and normal,
• 16:54
  Then your family has gone multigenerational. You have escaped the small, fragile, Western nuclear family trap, and you're now on a new journey towards building this multigenerational family. And your kids are going to feel it. They're going to experience it. They're going to think of themselves differently. Identity is going to go deep. Roots are going to start going deep. Like, this is the transformation of a family. And as you practice that week after week, month after month, year after year, you're going to start to experience
• 17:19
  more and more of that transformation. And part of what we want to do is help you guys understand kind of all the steps along that journey. But it all starts with creating that really simple idea, that simple place to say, we value the table. We want to steward this incredible resource of the table on a weekly basis to think about the criticalness of that. And I just want to say too, I really...
• 17:39
  want to give credit where credit is due. I am so grateful that the Jewish people have sustained this. It is an incredible gift that they have provided to all of us in the world. This idea of the criticalness of being around a single table across generations. And I have sat at those Orthodox Jewish tables and have just been so blessed to
• 18:03
  And it completely convinced me. And I think that this is, it's really important to not think of this as a, oh, this is a Jewish rhythm. Like, no, no, no. Every single culture that has a multi-generational family culture does this. This is why I'm saying it's causative. It's everywhere. If you neglect this meal,
• 18:22
  If it doesn't happen at least once a week, then your family will begin to disintegrate into the nuclear family, and then that usually disintegrates into individualism. So you're rebuilding everything back up. But because the Jewish people have been incredibly stubborn to maintain this meal, even as they've become very Westernized in so many cultures, they continue to practice this Sabbath meal as a part of really their religious life. One of the side benefits or a byproduct of practicing this
• 18:51
  has been that their families tend to stay multi-generational in character, no matter what culture they're in, because they continue to practice this meal. And man, what a gift to just sit back and see that experiment play out and see hundreds of cultures come into the Western world and just disintegrate from being multi-generational families like they were in China or Japan or Africa or other places in the world.
• 19:14
  They come to America, they become immigrants, and they're usually one or two generations away from completely falling apart. And the only families that can sustain that are those who have maintained one of these multigenerational meals. And the Jewish people have done this really, really well as compared to other cultures.
• 19:30
  Let me paint a little bit of a picture for people to understand what we have experienced. It's not just about this meal, but the ripple effects of the meal. For example, we were on public transportation one time and we got to overhear a few conversations. In Israel?
• 19:49
  in Israel, and we hear a soldier. There was a few soldiers on our bus, and one of them answered the phone and said, yes, mom, I'm coming home for Shabbat, and then hung up the phone and called dad and said, hey, dad, I'm on my way home for Shabbat.
• 20:06
  And we were like, what? They're like soldiers in their uniforms and they're on their way home for Shabbat. And now that we know more and we've had friends in the military and everything, in the IDF, they do, they send their kids home for Shabbat. Not every week, they're not able to do that. But at least, you know, every other week or every third week, it is a practice that these kids get to go home for the Shabbat meal. There's also...
• 20:30
  Some of this bleeds into like the day of rest, but like the convenience stores in Israel say open 24-6. So there is this culture of pausing, this ceasing that happens. The market, if you go shopping on Friday morning, because they do their Shabbat dinners on Friday night, their multi-generational meal on a Friday night.
• 20:49
  If you go shopping to the market on Friday morning, it's at your own risk because it's so busy and so crazy. And everyone's last minute getting this, getting their flowers, getting their challah bread so they can rush home. And then at some point in time, like between 2 and 4 p.m. on Friday, the streets are empty. The shops are closed. There's no cars. There are a few here and there. Public transportation has shut down. And everyone has gone home.
• 21:18
  And this is also in the secular world. It is prevalent within the culture that that is what everyone is doing. They're going home to Abba and Ima's, like mom in the house. And you hear the conversations and their whole culture just revolves around this day, this meal that happens. And so we just got to kind of sink in. We've lived in Israel for prolonged periods of time, many times, and so we're
• 21:44
  Getting to kind of like sit in this culture and feel what it feels like week after week for this to be like the epicenter of the week that returns to every seven days. It's really phenomenal and really does promote that.
• 22:01
  relational connectivity they haven't experienced the side of this that jesus has brought the freedom that jesus has brought many of them have not yet experienced that but as a culture as a whole their family ties are so much stronger and i think that it has so much to do with this three generations one table every week
• 22:23
  Yeah. Yeah. I think that this fertility crisis, interesting to watch demographers, you know, tie themselves up in knots trying to figure out why Israel is the one outlier in the entire world. And I'm like, I can tell you why they have a tool that causes their families to be durably multigenerational generation after generation.
• 22:45
  And there are so many countries right now that are experimenting with tax incentives. They don't realize that when people think like individuals, they're going to have fewer, smaller families. What really excites everyone in the family, and we've seen this with our kids, everybody's excited to bring children into a multigenerational family. And everybody in a multigenerational family celebrates that generation so much. It's such a gift to every single person.
• 23:07
  That is such a high value because you're something different. You are all together building this family and you want to see it grow and multiply. And so everybody is contributing to that and excited about that at the same level. You can't even imagine the joy of bringing that first generation. We are sitting on our Shabbat table after practicing this for 20 years with the three generations. We brought the first member of the fourth generation into that table.
• 23:32
  like that meal was so epic. It was like to know that our family is going to continue another generation through, you know, this grandson of ours, the great grandson of my parents and April's mom. And now as more and more of those, that, that generation begins to grow, everyone is excited. And so it's just like, you know, if you think about, you know, the pinnacle, I would, I mentioned sports, you know, if you, if you, what, what you keep track of, you know, what your score is and
• 23:58
  Like what, what game are we playing? And I think the thing that people are so confused about is that when you, when this becomes the pinnacle of your week, that experience of that multi-generational meal, everyone is, everyone's like the Zenith of everyone's week is that, that meal at that table, being able to experience that, that level of family. Then, then of course, the thing that, that, that really grows and magnifies that is more children, right? Getting to see more of those kids coming, coming together. And like you said, April.
• 24:26
  It's the ripple effects from there. It actually creates a completely different kind of culture, a different kind of family. You know, so it doesn't just affect our Friday nights. It affects how we think about church. It affects how we think about work. It affects how we think about living. It affects everything. Our vacations, our whole arc of life is affected by this perspective, this lens that we're given and we kind of put back on every single week. And as you begin to experience and see life through the lens of a multi-generational family, how incredibly healthy that is for children.
• 24:55
  how incredibly healthy that is for women who are mothers. This is another part of it that you guys constantly hear us champion, is that the culture today tells us the opposite of what's true about what's best for mothers and for children. We think more individualism, more giving into your individual preferences, less multi-generational family,
• 25:14
  All of these things women and children need to be liberated from. The problem with that is women and children are very, very vulnerable. They're particularly women who are having lots and lots of kids. Those are the most vulnerable members of our entire society. And so what you want to do, if you really want to bless women and mothers and children, is you need them to exist inside of an ecosystem that is multi-generational. That is by far the best thing for children.
• 25:40
  mothers and children, because during those vulnerable seasons, everyone is trying to help them. Everyone sees them. Everyone loves them. They are champions of the family. They're the heroes of the family. They're giving birth to the next generation. They're raising that generation. And that's what we are all so much prizing and celebrating together as a family, what that means for all of us as a family. And so for men to be doing everything they can to provide and protect that family,
• 26:05
  So that we all get to experience that because as men, we as fathers are like, that's what we want as well. Man, that God designed family so well, so well to protect the most vulnerable. And we are giving the opposite prescriptions. It is not surprising that we have an epidemic of women in particular in our culture who are going childless and who are struggling with anxiety, depression, and meaning in ways we've never seen before.
• 26:29
  And that children are constantly struggling in the way that we're creating culture, either being neglected or murdered in the womb or not existing because we don't value having children. And so the next generation is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so these pathways lead to death. And this is what God kind of laid out before the Jewish people in the Torah. It's like...
• 26:46
  Do these things so you don't die. These things lead to life. And so I'm just so grateful that we have a very practical thing. We're talking about very epic, theological, philosophical things. We talk about what is the family and how did God create kind of culture. But it all kind of boils down to, if you needed to reduce it to something that's really, really practical, to this one simple practice.
• 27:12
  really good at crafting that multi-generational meal, those three generations sitting around one table every week, that is going to create these enormous ripple effects. It's not that complicated, but like April said, it's really challenging.
• 27:24
  And I would say if you're the young family on the end of the spectrum where you maybe have a couple kids and they're ages like baby two and four or something like that, I would say this is a great tool to have that you can use for your training. So as a father and the husband and the wife are trying to cast vision or figure out what vision or mission their family's on, this could be part of that vision. And the idea of you might think right now, like, what? My kid's...
• 27:53
  Sitting at a table for an hour, like no way, this would never work or whatever. So using these as opportunities to train your children, like, okay, if I want my kids to someday be able to sit and listen to their grandparent tell a story,
• 28:08
  I'm going to have to start now, back up now to train them X, Y, and Z of how to get to that place, how to sit on their bottom, how to not yell, how to interrupt, how to participate in a conversation, how to ask for more food, how to say that they're all done. All of those things, I want to just say, good job and keep going because they are the building blocks.
• 28:32
  They may be teeny tiny building blocks, but they are the building blocks of getting to this place. Your kids have to learn how to sit at a table to start this. They have to learn how to maybe have an activity at the table after they're done eating so they can still stay with the family while the communication and hangout time is still happening. Like those kinds of things can become...
• 28:54
  goals that you have and ways that you are training towards. That's right. In the same way when, you know, we have a culture of, oh, we need to have, you know, kids sitting in rows and desks at school. And so we're very into like training kids, all the different steps about how to get them into this industrial educational system. Like we're comfortable training in that environment. But many of us have never trained our children how to flourish around the table with three generations or four generations.
• 29:22
  And man, that doesn't take too much training for most kids. I mean, it's very fun, but it does require some. And I think that, man, what a gift to give to them, to be able to learn how to enjoy that, to enjoy good food, to enjoy good conversation. Of course, when they're really little, they're going to be playing and, you know, they're going to be getting bored or whatever. But as they're getting older and they're like getting swept up into something that's just magical and beautiful and they get to see, wow, I get to be there with my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, my grandfather, my grandmother, wow, wow.
• 29:49
  you know, my aunts or uncles, whoever, you know, God blesses to come and gather at your table. So we want to bless you guys. This is something that, that we've, we've learned over and over again. We've seen hundreds of families be completely transformed from kind of those weak nuclear Western families that are all about the individual. And they just keep falling apart to very strong households of faith because they become multi-generational. And this is the tool, you guys, people always ask us, where do I start? This is where you start.
• 30:16
  You start to craft a two-generation meal that's aiming at becoming three generations, one table every week. That's what we would recommend as the step. And if you do that, wow, watch out. There's going to be 100 years from now, your family line is going to begin to become strong. It's going to multiply. It's going to be a team. If we can keep this going, if we can keep that emotional relational connection really solid through this meal, it's going to change everything.
• 30:42
  And that's the kind of family team you want to take on mission. This isn't just for us. We want to really see the world transformed into a kingdom culture and to the glory of Christ. And so this is what we need to make sure our families are a part of that culture and that it's being cultivated there first. So hopefully that's helpful, you guys. Thanks, April, so much for jumping on here today. Yeah, absolutely.
• 31:03
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.