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How Churches Can Bring Back the Multigenerational Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Why didn't the Protestant church resist the destruction of the multi-generational household? And what can we do about it?
• 0:10
  So what we want to talk about today is how churches can bring back the multigenerational family, some of the really subtle elements that have contributed to the breakdown of the biblical family. So my name is Jeremy Pryor. I'm with Family Teams. We're here to restore the biblical blueprint of family as a multigenerational team on mission. And I'm looking at some of the foundational elements that have really hurt the whole idea of the multigenerational family. We looked at it.
• 0:33
  some of the really kind of ancient elements in our last podcast. I want to talk about the Protestant church in particular and some of the things that have happened within the history of Protestantism that not only in the past, but today is directly contributing to the destruction of the multigenerational household. And I think that these are things that can be addressed, can be impacted at the individual church level. And so I really want to dive into this because I think a lot of pastors are just unfamiliar with Christianity,
• 1:00
  the subtle things that are really causing a lot of the ways that we're just contributing to the way that the family just continues to break down. So does today's Bible centered churches teach about the biblical family? There does seem to be,
• 1:14
  within family ministries, within churches, a theme. And that is that we tend to teach the same kind of theology of family as the sort of conservative, modern, Western world teaches. It's basically a nuclear family. It's mostly comprised of a mom and a dad and their children. There is really no understanding or specific explicit defense of the multigenerational family.
• 1:41
  of the family as a household, as a family as an economic unit, not just a nuclear family. So we have adopted essentially a Western idea family, and it's kind of strange because you don't see this idea family exist anywhere in the scriptures. The scriptures assume a classical idea family. What are we talking about here? Well, the modern Western family, the easiest way to think about it is that
• 2:01
  It sees itself as a springboard for individual success. The modern Western family is very successful when individuals launch and are successful in their own individual lives. And they oftentimes will start over. They don't know who their great-grandparents are because that's not relevant to them. They don't have any history. They have about an 80-year memory, these families. They're very, very focused on the nuclear family, just that.
• 2:21
  The family that exists before the children turn 18 and then the whole thing kind of self-destructs and starts over. That's why we call it a nest. That's what we call people that have had their children leave the family nest, empty nesters. This is a very novel, new, and I think very destructive idea. Family is not biblical. The Bible really describes family as a multi-generational team on mission. We are not...
• 2:43
  just trying to launch out individuals. We are trying to create and found family lines. Those family lines are multi-generational and they exist within households that have lots of a mission that we're trying to do together as a team. And so there are subtle things that church is really doing to contribute to these. I'm going to talk about three things that a lot of people probably don't think about, but really come to my mind when it comes to how we continue to
• 3:07
  to promote the idea that the family is sort of just a nuclear family unit. So one is career pastoral ministry. Two is the decision to topically teach in a way that downplays the Old Testament. And the third is disrespecting the office of father. I want to talk about those three trends within the Protestant church, and I want to talk about how if you begin to reverse these trends as a church,
• 3:32
  then you're going to start to see more and more people adopt the understanding that the family is really designed to be a multi-generational household. So let's talk about each one of these in turn. Pastoral ministry as a lifelong career calling is something that people just take for granted today. Now, this is a vestige of the Industrial Revolution. This is not a biblical idea. We do a lot of post hoc reasoning where we see things in modern day and read them back into the Bible. But that didn't really exist. You don't see any example of the sort of clergy.
• 4:01
  In the Bible, that is full-time and lifelong. That's a very unusual idea. Jesus did not think about his ministry that way. He was a carpenter and then spent three years doing ministry. That's very different than the way we think about lifelong career pastoral ministry today. Paul said,
• 4:19
  was also not supported full-time as a career. He would be tent-making, and there were times where he was supported, times when he wasn't, but it was always episodic. It was during certain seasons, during certain missionary callings. This is a very Jewish way to think about work. Levites were also very episodic in the way that they were supported. They got a certain amount of the tithe,
• 4:38
  that came in, but they also had pasture lands. We read about, there's a whole chapter in Joshua that describes all of the assets given to the Levites around their cities that are dispersed within Israel. They weren't given a single plot, but they were not lifelong. Even the Aaronic priesthood was not full-time and lifelong. You see that even with Zechariah. There was a season where they were on and a season where they were off, and when they were off, they were doing every other season
• 5:02
  Israelite was doing, and that is they were working their fields, they were building their assets. There are no really obvious exceptions, unless you look at someone like maybe John the Baptist, who was not married, was not trying to build a household or a family at all. So there's no real precedent in scripture for the idea that a 25-year-old who's like, wow, I really feel like God's giving me a calling to teach or to pastor people, and
• 5:23
  that their next assumption is I'm going to go to a specific kind of vocational training school called a seminary, and then I'm going to rely upon this for the rest of my life. And I think this has caused an enormous amount of damage in the church because there are seasons where you need to stop doing that because it's not in the best interest of your family, right? You're in an incredibly dry season. Well, I've got to keep pastoring because I've got three or four little kids that are relying on this for my income.
• 5:50
  Instead of building those streams of income, I would talk to an Orthodox rabbi, Daniel Lappin, who explained to me, and I did some more research and found this is true, within the Orthodox synagogues, there are very few rabbis who are actually supported in the way that we support pastors as a career calling.
• 6:06
  They tend to have multiple streams of income, part-time support, things like that. So I do believe we need to be supporting people that are teaching, people that are eldering, people that are pastoring. But the idea that they are not themselves trying to build family assets, but they're relying on this indefinitely and that they are actually taught to do that, they are encouraged to do that by their churches, by their denominations. I think this is really destructive with the household because where did this really come from? If we take a big step back,
• 6:34
  when people had farms or when families were trade-based. During the industrial revolution, when everyone started to create identities around specific career callings, we started thinking about career in this way. It's not, what is our family called to do? What are the assets our family is building? What are the things that are undergirding our household? What are the things that we inherited from previous generations and how are we investing those things into the future? That was the way that family provision was thought of for centuries. And now all of a sudden,
• 7:02
  especially post-industrial revolution, we think about careers as identities, individual identities apart from our family. And so we just ask, well, what do I want to be when I grow up? Well, pastors sort of have fallen into the same way of thinking. Now, the problem is, and the reason why this is so destructive to the multigenerational household is that the pastors and teachers are the models within the Protestant world for how the normal father is leading his family. And so he's thinking of himself as a career man, right?
• 7:29
  not as a asset builder leading a team that's multi-generational, but no, I have pursued a career and I am held accountable to exclusively sticking with this career because by the time I'm 40, I could not make my money in any other way that would really provide for my family. And so even if I feel a deadness, even if I feel I need to transition out, even if I feel this isn't best for my family or my kids, I don't really have anything to pass on to my kids, none of that matters within the careerist mentality. And so when pastors are modeling this,
• 7:57
  This has an impact on the church. This has an impact on the other fathers. It's difficult for a pastor to be calling his congregants out of this kind of thinking when he himself is in a very advanced form of this kind of thinking with regards to his own career. So I'm going to talk about some alternatives to this in a second, but that's the first one. The second one I want to talk about is unhitching from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures. One of the really dangerous things that has happened is,
• 8:23
  is that modern Protestant churches that have really emphasized topical teaching in order to become more relevant to the culture, they have downplayed really critical elements of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. You see this really in an advanced phase with a guy like Andy Stanley, the pastor of one of the largest Protestant churches in the country. And one of the things he said is, we need to unhitch from the Old Testament.
• 8:47
  We need to stop relying on the Old Testament. We need to just go ahead and downplay what was happening there. There's a lot of confusion there. People are Googling things that are really hard to defend. And so we need to somehow get away from this. And, of course, this is really unbiblical, not just Old Testament, but New Testament. When Paul says that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, correcting, training, and righteousness, he says that in 2 Timothy. The reason why he's saying that is he's talking not about, of course, the New Testament. They didn't have the New Testament at the time.
• 9:11
  When he says that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, he's talking about the Hebrew scriptures. He's talking about the Old Testament. A part of what he's doing is that these Jewish believers, they are beginning to train these new Gentiles in the ways of the Lord. And they're, of course, using the Torah. They're using the Old Testament. They're using the Hebrew scriptures as their primary curriculum for doing that. Now, Bethlehem.
• 9:31
  part of what I've encountered, especially if I've spent a lot of time within Orthodox circles, Orthodox Jewish circles, they seem to really understand fatherhood at a deep level. And when I began to understand, why is it that there's such a deep understanding, a deep reverence for fatherhood, a deep desire to see your family go multi-generational, a real interest in your descendants and in your ancestors, all of this, of course, comes from their study of the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament. And I'm like, I don't understand why our Christian ministries
• 10:00
  don't have this same passion, the same understanding. We just kind of go along with the culture's redefinition of family as a springboard for individual success. And the reason, you guys, is really simple. It's just that we do not teach the Old Testament. I'm going to talk about a very clear example for how this could completely transform the way we talk about family in the church if we actually cared about that. But the third one, the last one I want to mention to you guys—
• 10:23
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• 10:44
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• 10:58
  that is a big part of this is not permitting fathers to speak in church. We disrespect the office of the father in the way that we construct our services. And so one of the things that is really unusual is you will have a, let's say you have a 35 year old, a seminary educated pastor who gets in front of a congregation and will give a lecture and,
• 11:20
  And he will have in that audience all kinds of people who are elders, who are fathers, who have a lot of experience. And he will give a lecture to that congregation and then get off the stage. And those fathers will be required to remain silent.
• 11:36
  And we think that's very normal. Of course, you know, that would be disruptive. You know, it'd be very difficult to manage if you let other people speak. And we don't understand how disrespectful that is. But that sends a terrible message about the office of father when there's very few arenas. Now, there might be like small groups and Sunday school classes or whatever. It might be places where, but there's no real elevated place for fathers to make comments. This is just very unusual. Historically, in the synagogue, there was interaction. Jesus taught always. There was interaction. Paul, every time he taught.
• 12:05
  Um, there was interaction. You see examples of that in acts, even the word teaching and Greek is the word for dialogue. It was a back and forth conversation that was happening. We are obsessed with the lecture and you know, there's, there's industrial reasons for that. When you got large groups of people and you want to like preach out to, to all those people, um, then you need to kind of control the mic and control, um, all of the elements of the service. Um,
• 12:29
  Um, but we don't realize that there is a massive downside to this obsession with lectures and making this the vast, uh, kind of center for how all teaching is done, that there's no interaction is that you require fathers to be silent. And one of the reasons why I'm using this language is that there is a huge debate in the church has been raging for the last 2000 years about what Paul meant when he said women must be silent in the church.
• 12:55
  And, you know, we think we resolve that by saying, oh, well, those are cultural things. But the real way we resolve that is to insist that fathers be silent in the church, which is very bizarre to me. And I think there's other ways. I'm not saying that we...
• 13:10
  We're actually trying to follow that verse when we made this decision. It's just an ironic reality that we have adopted a model of teaching that requires the elders remain silent in the church, that there is no interaction, that no matter what you're talking about from the stage and bringing out that that father has to remain silent week after week, month after month, year after year, sitting there with their household, being taught by this professional church,
• 13:37
  and given no opportunity to ask questions, to give color, to interact. And this is a very just weird way of teaching. Of course, we understand that the lecture and, you know, you study education, pedagogy, they will say this is probably the least effective way of teaching, allowing for some questions, for some interaction, for some comments. If you ever have the opportunity to do that, let's do that. But, of course, there is historic reasons why we are obsessed with the lecture. It really comes from, you know, trying to replace what was happening within the Catholic Church
• 14:06
  at the altar with the Eucharist, with the sermon, and the pastor preaching a sermon. It's not a biblical idea. It really comes from an attempt to reform the way the Catholics were doing things. And so we've just been holding on to that tradition. And I think that it's dangerous and not helpful if we want to see and respect multigenerational families because one of the elements of that that you need to really respect at a high, high level
• 14:28
  is the ability for the father to be, this is almost an office within the church. Like the father himself is leading a household and those households need to be deeply respected. And those households are sort of a fractal unit of the church. The church is a family of families and therefore the fathers have a very important role in the outworking of the family. And so what we have done is we've said, no, this is a professional organization.
• 14:53
  This is a very professional role that people that have the right training can participate in, and we need to be able to do this at a scale that doesn't allow for really any interaction. And I think those are very costly decisions. We don't realize that there are other elements to how those decisions have been costly in terms of just things like –
• 15:10
  are we using the most effective teaching method? But here's a very subtle way that I think we are not, we're not talking about this. And the whole reason why the new Testament talks about women being silent is really not talking about women. It's talking about wives in a specific context where there is a potential for them to be at odds with their husbands, with the father of the family, because the new Testament really respects the role of father. Part of what Paul was very interested in preserving is that any place in which that tension might exist, um,
• 15:37
  that the structure of the family needs to hold even when the church is gathering, even when women in those settings are equal to their husbands in every way. They have equal gifts. But the family structure needs to still be preserved in that case. So we're not going to go deep. There's a very deep...
• 15:53
  a conversation to be had there. But I think part of what I really just want to like throw out is that there's something going on with the way that we're doing ministry that is making this very difficult. So how do we recover from this? One of the elements is I think pastors need to really consider how to develop multiple streams of income. And we need to be thinking about how to help pastors do this.
• 16:13
  So I've been a part of churches that really want to keep pastors poor in order to keep them under their control. There are boards that I've seen that literally have this as a part of their strategy. This is incredibly short-sighted for so many reasons. If pastors are really suffering and they need a break, or if pastors need to begin to develop other streams of income in order to provide better for their families, or in order to be able to work as a team with their adult children as they're becoming older, then these are things that should be celebrated.
• 16:41
  And they should be encouraged because of our appreciation that pastors also need to develop multi-generational households. They're also a part of multi-generational families. These households need to have economic engines and the pastors need to make sure that they have the time and the resources to invest in their family's economic engines. And so we can start to do that. We can value that. I love when I hear pastors that really understand that they do have a calling to teach. They do have a calling to teach.
• 17:05
  to shepherd a particular flock, but they also need to care for their families. And one of the ways they need to do that is to develop a household. And households have economic engines. They develop over time multiple streams of income. Number two, in terms of unhinging from the Old Testament, we need to teach Abraham as the meadow father. I think one of the reasons why Jewish communities and people that are studying Hebrew
• 17:24
  immediately go to Abraham as a model for being a metafather is the word Avram literally means that. Av in Hebrew means father. Avram means exalted father. And so this idea that we have in the Hebrew scriptures an actual understanding of the Old Testament that gives us a model for how God interacts with fatherhood through Abraham. It doesn't mean that Abraham was the perfect father. It means he's the perfect father.
• 17:47
  model for how God interacts with fatherhood. A fallen father, nevertheless, it's like you can see in that story so many incredibly helpful elements. And so what we do, we tend to do in the Protestant tradition is we just downplay elements that really help us understand the way Abraham saw family as a multi-generational unit. He saw himself as a part of this thing and that he was desiring to see his descendants like the stars, like the sand, as God was promising him.
• 18:16
  These are things that Jewish fathers care about today, but Protestant fathers tend not to care about. Why? Because we have unhitch from the Old Testament. We need to stop that. There is so much. The Hebrew scriptures are useful, as Paul says, useful for teaching, for correcting, for training in righteousness. They're God-inspired as well.
• 18:33
  And then the last one that we talked about was the importance of engaging fathers. Anytime that we have sort of a teaching arena, we need to allow there to be places for comments from fathers, to honor the office of father, to see that father as the first teacher, the first pastor of their family. And so part of that means they need to be respected in a specific way.
• 18:57
  And there's probably creative ways to do this, but I just really think that we need to be very careful about this move that we're making to disrespect the fathers. And that there needs to be more of a deference given to the fact that they have responsibility. And when fathers have this huge responsibility to be the primary teachers of their families, then that needs to be expressed somehow in our traditions as churches. And right now they're just sort of.
• 19:20
  audience members in so many arenas. There's not a clarity around, okay, guys, let me speak to the fathers right now. I know that you guys, do any of you guys have any comments or anything you want to ask me or like really cause them to not be passive, not be like Adam, but to be interactive, to be engaged because you see them, you see what you're doing
• 19:40
  So this becomes a pastor or a teacher starts to see themselves as of a teacher of teachers. And when you're in your teacher of teachers, like in any seminary course, you would want those future teachers to interact because you'd stop at different points and say, guys, I understand that someday you're going to be out there teaching. And so if you've got questions about what I'm saying or you disagree with me.
• 19:59
  or you have comments to really color some of the things I'm describing here, please speak up. And of course, that's what you do anytime you really care about teaching teachers. And really, it's important for us to understand that when we're teaching fathers, we're teaching pastors and teachers of households.
• 20:15
  And so if you expect them to function in that way, you got to interact with them in that way. So those are some ideas for how to think about these things. I just want to like really spend some time and we're just going through a series here where I want to unpack some of the foundational things that have happened to the multigenerational family. And so I just really wanted to tease out. These are some of the ways that in particular, the Protestant church is giving in to the way that we're thinking about family in a very Western way, and that we can begin to pull back.
• 20:41
  and begin to adopt traditions of practices that really allow us to think about family in a biblical way. 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.