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99% of Christianity Gets This Wrong and It's DESTROYING Our Families · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  It looks like around 99% of Western evangelical Christianity teaches the same basic secular vision of the family that we see within the Western culture.
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  And one of the things we need to really tease out is, is this a biblical vision for the family?
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  And so I'm always collecting thinkers who seem to have realized there's something terribly wrong about the way we're thinking about family,
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  that it's not biblical, that it's not historical,
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  and it is very unusual even in most places in the world today.
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  Jenny Donnelly does a great job of breaking this down
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  and how different this is.
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  This is one of the most profound insights you could ever hear
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  about the nature of the family,
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  and this really gets to the very root of what is wrong
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  with the modern Western family.
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  Take a second, check out what Jenny Donnelly says
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  about the nature of the family.
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  The Jewish culture, African culture, Muslim culture, and American culture around family.
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  I just was curious.
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  What I found, all cultures except for the American culture, multi-generational, everybody's family.
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  It's not, thanks mom and dad for raising me, I'm 18 years old, I gotta go live my life, you know, and I'll see you on holidays maybe, and when I feel guilty I'll call you.
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  Because the American culture is out with the old and with the new.
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  And it actually broke my heart when I started reading about this.
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  I'm thinking, man, I don't want to be irrelevant in my own kid's life.
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  My daughter just got married.
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  I'm like, I don't want to be like, okay, bye.
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  But in American culture, we break generations because we are focused on,
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  this is the biggest difference between American family culture and most every other culture,
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  is we celebrate, catch this, individual fulfillment.
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  Individual fulfillment.
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  I'll give an example.
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  In the Jewish culture, they do not have Mother's Day and Father's Day.
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  They only have Family Day.
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  You are not celebrated for your independent role apart from what's actually the entity is family.
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  So it'd be like me saying today I'm celebrating my hand.
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  You are incredible.
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  And I just want to honor you.
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  No, not my foot.
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  Your next month.
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  This hand is incredible.
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  See, we see everything separate.
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  Mom, separate.
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  Dad, separate.
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  Child, separate.
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  And so the Lord was telling me in order to do family well, we have to know what we're aiming for.
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  All right, did you guys catch what Jenny Donnelly says there?
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  She kind of breaks down these three critiques for the way that we see family, that all these other cultures see family as multi-generational, that there's a continuity between generations, that that's important, that that's really at the very nature of what the family is.
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  One is chronological snobbery, right?
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  Out with the old and with the new.
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  There's an extreme bias in our culture for what's new.
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  And this extreme bias causes us to really downplay the things that we could be getting from the past.
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  And so this really sets us up for a terrible misunderstanding of family because a lot about what makes families really rich is our history, our heritage, and where we come from.
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  This is why the vast majority of Americans can't name their great-grandparents.
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  Some of us even might have met them, but we have a really hard time naming those eight people because they seem irrelevant, because they're a part of this ancient history that is totally not a part of our lives.
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  She also talks about how there's a resistance to the culture of honor, right, that we just discard things in the past.
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  And then she really lands on, I think, the most important critique, and that is the hyper-individualism.
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  We are hyper-individualistic.
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  Sociologists have said that American Western culture is the most individualistic society that's ever existed in human history.
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  And so this is at the root of why family breaks down uniquely in our culture.
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  This is why America has now become the number one country in the world for single-parent families.
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  because in our culture, whatever the disease that's breaking on the family, we live in ground
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  zero of that disease right here.
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  And I think she really nails it with this idea of hyper-individualism.
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  We think that the individual is always right.
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  Now, part of why we need to kind of think through
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  what's happening here is, and she talked about how we don't really know what we're aiming at.
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  There's a confusion around the destination or the actual purpose of family.
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  We think
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  that a successful family in our culture is a springboard for individual success.
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  So if you
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  launch your kids out, then you have been a successful parent and that is a successful
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  family.
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  And that's why the nest is the best analogy for the Western family.
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  That every 20 years,
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  we just self-destruct, see you later, good luck.
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  And we'll see you on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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  This is such a bizarre way to think about family and it's so fragile.
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  It's going to break down so
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  predictably.
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  And so part of the reason why we know this is wrong isn't just because you look at other
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  times in history, and they all would disagree with kind of the modern Western idea of family.
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  And it's not because you look at other cultures around the world today, and they also disagree
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  with the way we see family, and they have much, much more stable families.
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  The main reason why
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  we need to deal with this, if you're a Christian listening to this, is because the Bible itself
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  gives us insight into exactly how God made the family, with the purpose of the family,
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  what he made us for.
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  Because we have in Genesis 1 a description of what God was thinking when he
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  created the first family.
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  In Genesis 1.28, when he made male and female, gave them his image,
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  he says, he blessed them and says to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it,
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  rule over my creation.
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  And that five-part mission to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill, subdue,
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  and rule, this is the thing that really gets to the essence of how we need to think about family.
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  So we're going to talk a little bit about why this has to be multi-generational.
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  We're going
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  to look at different elements of this five-part mission and how it clarifies for us a blueprint
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  for how to think about the family.
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  But I think one of the things we have to take a big step back and say,
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  how do you figure out what something really is designed to be?
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  And I think you have to go back to the designer.
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  This reminds me of a story I heard once about two people in an art museum,
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  and they were looking at this gorgeous painting,
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  kind of an impressionist painting of a flower.
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  And somebody says, wow, that's an amazingly beautiful rose.
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  And the other person was like, no, no, no, that is clearly a carnation.
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  Can you see this, the way the petals are designed?
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  And they just argue and argue and argue.
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  and both of them are 100% sure that they're right.
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  And all of a sudden, the painter walks in to that room.
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  And guess what?
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  Once the painter walks in, argument over
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  because he or she will know the truth.
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  They actually know what they were trying to paint.
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  And this is what happens when you debate about family.
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  Now, there should be a debate about the essence of family.
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  Is it designed to be a nest or a team?
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  Is it designed to be one generation or multi-generational?
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  These are really important questions,
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  But I think that part of what we have to do as Christians is understand that the author needs to come, the designer needs to come into the room and tell us the answer to this.
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  Help resolve this for us, please.
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  What kind of family did you want to design?
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  And when you look at that basic way that he talks about the purpose of family, to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill, subdue, and rule, you have to ask yourself a series of questions.
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  Did he, for example, assume that he was designing family to be one generational or multi-generational?
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  He gave the family a mission that only could be accomplished through multiple generations.
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  You can't fill the earth if you're Adam and Eve in one generation.
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  He created an entity that was designed in its essence to accomplish a multigenerational mission.
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  And this is one of the reasons why you see all through the scriptures, every family is multigenerational in essence.
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  Like you see the continuity, the connection between fathers and sons.
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  You see these family lines.
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  You see beautiful stories like in the story of Ruth and Boaz, and it describes their genealogy as it gets to King David.
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  or just why the Old Testament authors spend and spill so much ink over genealogies,
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  because there's an obsession with we have to know the full story because family is in essence multigenerational.
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  Now, we get incredibly bored and confused when we get to those kinds of passages in the Bible as modern Western Christians,
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  because we're not going, wow, I can't believe in the Bible.
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  I can see my entire multigenerational line.
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  What a gift that God gave to Abraham's family to be able to trace their whole lineage in that way.
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  Instead, in the West, we've been brainwashed into thinking that there is no better story than the individual story.
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  We are incredibly hyper-individualistic.
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  None of those things really matter.
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  We think that as long as we're celebrating the individual, then that is the essence of a good story.
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  That's the essence of the way that we should think about the world.
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  and anything that would cause us to actually sacrifice for the larger group, for the family,
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  for the team, there's something unhealthy, toxic, and it's lacking proper boundaries.
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  Now we can experience this on a sports team because inside of a sports team, there is
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  sort of its own set of rules.
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  And so once you join a sports team and you have a coach there who's constantly encouraging
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  you to sacrifice for the team, we can get into a state where we actually start to experience
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  the values of family, the way family was actually designed to be.
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  This beauty that comes when we
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  don't try to constantly fight for what is best for us, but we're actually looking for what's best for
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  the team as a whole.
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  And so if you've ever experienced that on a sports team, and then
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  you've actually experienced victory as a team, you'll know that there's absolutely nothing that
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  as an individual that can really surpass or eclipse the celebration, the excitement,
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  the wholeness that is experienced when you as a full team have all played your different roles
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  and sacrificed together for the team as a whole.
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  Now, Western culture really got the first part of
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  individualism right, right?
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  Part of what Western culture has said is that the individual must be
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  sovereign, in other words, must be allowed to make the decision for themselves, and they must be
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  allowed to follow their specific individual conscience.
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  And I think that that was a huge
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  leap forward, that we should not coerce individuals to force them to be on teams, to force them to
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  play a collective game.
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  The problem is, where we really got off track is that then we said the
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  individuals should do what's in their best interest.
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  So what we should do, part of what I
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  think makes a very healthy culture is to give that and admit that the individual does have that
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  sovereignty, and then to call the individual to voluntarily make sacrifices for the team.
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  So this is what needs to happen in every single family.
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  In every single family, you need to build
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  up the individual and then call them to a life of sacrifice.
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  That's beautiful.
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  Now they could
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  always say no to that call.
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  They can say, no, I want to do what's best for me.
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  And that freeloader
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  mentality will start to unmake that team if they're not able to overcome that sin, right?
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  That idea that I am most important and this has really got to be primarily just about me.
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  And so part of what this has caused us to do in our culture is to think that we are playing a
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  single player game, that life itself is really a single player game.
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  Naval Ravikant said this,
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  he said that, look, life is a single player game.
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  You're born alone and you're going to die alone.
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  And that's not really true.
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  You're born into a family.
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  You live your life with a family.
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  And if things go well and that team really coheres, then you'll likely die surrounded by your family.
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  There is an individual component to life that's very important and needs to be preserved.
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  But the goal is to move from individualism into the team itself and to be a part of that larger team.
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  Now, I was super confused about this.
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  I was raised in the Seattle area where I saw so much hyper individualism and family was breaking down because the fathers and mothers were all sort of fighting for their individual rights.
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  There was no real culture of team.
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  And so the kids growing up in that culture were like, what in the world?
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  Family is just this thing that's broken and just as ridiculous.
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  And we need to get away from this.
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  And this is why Seattle became the first city in the country to have more dogs than children, because so many people were trying to find ways to get out of this thing that they were locked into, this family that was so stifling because it just kept breaking down.
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  It basically presented a promise and just repeatedly did not fulfill that promise.
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  And the promise of family that I want to talk through is really threefold.
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  The first promise that it has is stability.
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  It is so important that our families fulfill that promise for the sake of our children and future generations.
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  We need to provide stability.
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  The reason why a husband and wife make a lifelong covenant to stay together until death do us part is it creates the environment where maximum sacrifice can be made by the individuals for the team so that you can experience the maximum life as a team.
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  Now, we don't understand that any longer.
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  We don't understand why this stability needs to exist.
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  We think, well, this is for me as an individual, but the problem is it's really holding me back from other things I might want to experience as an individual.
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  And so we continue to, after making a covenant, try to use this thing called the family to launch our own individual lives as far as possible.
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  We're thinking about ourselves first.
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  And when the family no longer meets my needs the way I wish it would, then it then becomes healthy for me to separate myself from that family and go and try to find other communities or a new family or a new spouse.
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  So this lack of stability really comes from a lack of understanding the nature of the family, that the team is what we're trying to aim at.
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  And if you're just trying to use the family in that way, you're going to constantly be incompatible, right?
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  Being selfish is always incompatible with another selfish person.
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  These things never work together.
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  The only way for you to begin to experience something where you're actually cohering as
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  a team is through sacrifice, right?
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  And it's that sacrifice that creates the stability.
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  The second reason why we want to be forming family teams is because the impact of the
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  multi-generational family far exceeds anything individuals can do by themselves.
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  So we need to experience the power of the impact of multigenerational families because they can really go into the world through generations, through centuries of working on a similar mission together.
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  That these, again, need to be taken up voluntarily by individuals in every generation.
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  But when the individual sees themselves as a part of this larger team and that the impact of that team is greater than what they could ever do as an individual, they begin to become excited about being a part of that and saying, that's ultimately where I want to spend my life.
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  Now, part of the problem is we are struggling with what I think of as Little Mermaid syndrome, right?
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  Which is you constantly are being told in this culture that your family is holding you back, right?
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  So she starts to have these desires in that movie, The Little Mermaid, that are not exactly aligned with her father, with their family.
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  And instead of telling a story where these desires are explored and then brought back into the family, you see the story moving in a linear fashion.
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  So Eastern stories tend to be more cyclical.
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  They have beginning, middle, new beginning, where everything kind of comes full circle.
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  Western stories that create hyper individualism are linear.
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  They go beginning, middle, end.
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  And so you are moving into a different direction.
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  And so ultimately, there's no reintegration of Ariel with her family.
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  She is desiring to be on land and she is saying goodbye to her family and there's not even a promise of maybe we'll see you again someday.
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  It's like it is over.
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  She is off living her own individual life and there is no reintegration or full circle idea there.
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  And that is a perfectly told Western story.
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  And that's the kind of story that destroys the family because it creates intuitions that say that I'm more important.
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  there is no reintegration in the family.
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  The impact that we can do as a larger family team
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  is nothing compared to what I can do as an individual.
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  And the only thing the family can do is let me go.
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  Let me go, let me go.
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  And that's what we believe at a deep level.
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  But the third thing,
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  and I think the ultimate thing
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  that I would really encourage you guys
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  to sort of dial into when you're wrestling with this
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  is the beauty of the multi-generational family story.
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  It is so much more beautiful than the individual story.
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  The epic nature of stories,
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  And I absolutely love watching movies or shows that really show how three, four, five generations are pieced together.
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  So you can sort of track the beauty of that story.
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  It is so incredible to have at the same table and in a part of the same team, people that are from three, four generations who remember generations before them and are seeing the generations after them.
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  And if you don't sense the depth of beauty when it comes to encountering a multigenerational family, you need to be exposed to these kinds of stories because they're so much more powerful, so much more beautiful.
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  And I think that we really need to begin to tell these stories.
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  And I am seeing more examples of this, right?
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  There was back in the day a movie like The Godfather that kind of hit the world in a really powerful way because all of a sudden there was this depiction of three generations.
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  And you sort of see, even in the brokenness of this crazy crime family, the connections between the different elements of the family.
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  And so father and son meant something very different than what we think father and son mean in our culture.
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  The way we tend to think about it is a father and a son is something that happens with little children, now with an adult son.
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  And there's something far more beautiful about the connection.
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  And you're seeing so many shows that really highlight the adult children's relationship with parents.
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  And, you know, there's all kinds of complexity there.
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  But oftentimes what you start to sense deep down in your heart and in your soul is there's something more beautiful about these stories.
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  I remember when my grandmother came, my kid's great-grandmother, to our Sabbath dinner, and she was spanning seven generations of our family while she was at our table.
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  She could remember three generations that came before her.
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  She was seeing four generations of our family.
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  And the sense of meaning at that table when you begin to see these connections between generations is so intense.
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  And I think that part of what will really help restore the idea of multisensory family to our Western culture has to come from really sensing the beauty.
• 18:20
  So if you want to go deeper into this, we like to walk people through kind of step by step exactly what it looks like to begin to think about family in this way.
• 18:28
  So you can go over to familyteams.com slash transform.
• 18:30
  We have just a five-part little mini course where we like to talk about what are these big epiphanies that really cause people and the tools that go with them to begin to transition the way they think about family because we have so much muscle memory around these Western ideas of kind of the one-generation nest idea of family.
• 18:48
  So go over to familyteams.com slash transform if you want to go deeper into that.
• 18:51
  And then we're going to keep going further into the ideas, both in the Bible and in the culture, in sociology, to help us understand how to recover a much healthier understanding of what a family really is.