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| ISBN-13: | 9781612917719 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Navigators |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Household gods
Freed From The Worship of Family to Delight in the Glory of God
By Ted Kluck, Kristin Kluck
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Ted and Kristin KluckAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61291-585-2
CHAPTER 1
Spawning Family Idolatry
It is difficult to question anyone who explains that he wants a certain position of authority because God plans to use him in it (which is why this problem is so difficult to deal with).
— CHERYL FORBES, THE RELIGION OF POWER
"Everybody in our church growing up had a big family ... usually seven to ten kids ... always homeschooled ... and there was the pressure that all of those kids would be perfect and that, as a family, we'd all have some skill like singing together or drama," explains my friend about growing up in what sounds like a strange, burlap-jumpsuited, evangelical re-creation of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and The Sound of Music.
My friend is in his early thirties. Married. A father of two. An avid pickup basketball player. An excellent public school English teacher. A lover of books, Scripture, and the gospel. All of that to say he's remarkably, or perhaps unremarkably, normal. We invited his wife and him over because they are, to our knowledge, the only other couple in our church who aren't homeschooling. That makes them, potentially, prime friend material, being that homeschooling is the tie that binds people socially in our church.
"We didn't watch television, didn't watch movies, and couldn't listen to music with drums. We didn't date, we courted, which of course makes it more spiritual and of course makes it better," he says with a chuckle. It's the kind of chuckle that acknowledges the weirdness, but in a nonbitter way. "In our cult it was normal to be disdainful and wary of things like the government, college, and especially women who had jobs outside the home. It was normal to want to grow your own food, make your own clothes, and be 'self-sustaining.'"
What he's describing is a version of Christian life in which the Christian family is, ideally, sequestered or cut off from the culture at large and is a self-sustaining, apprenticeship-generating, college-disdaining, government-distrusting unit. It's a version of family that takes seriously the verse that says "be fruitful, and multiply" but often seems to disregard Scriptures on being salt and light in the world and not hiding your light under a bushel.
At some point over pizza it occurs to us that what my friend has been describing sounds eerily familiar to the de facto dominant subculture in conservative evangelicalism, at least in the Midwest, where we are. The disdain for government, the emphasis on family, and the "circling the wagons" mentality are all points of overlap.
"That sounds like what's popular now," I say, to no one in particular.
In The Pursuit of God A.W. Tozer wrote, "We imitate each other with slavish devotion. Our most strenuous efforts are put forth to try to say the same thing that everyone around us is saying—and yet to find an excuse for saying it, some little variation on the approved theme or, if no more, at least a new illustration." Tozer could have been writing in direct, critical response to today's evangelical blogosphere or church culture, except that he penned that particular sentence around 1948, proving at some level that there is nothing new under the sun.
Wrote Janet Fishburn in 1991's Confronting the Idolatry of Family:
A mother knew she was a success if her children followed the prescribed pattern. Her crowning achievement was visible whenever the family was together again—at worship in the "family pew." Though parents might have been unhappy knowing that some of the younger generation were there under duress, it did not matter a great deal. The important thing was that they were there.
This definitely squares with Kristin's description of her upbringing, which was in many ways easy and idyllic, as her parents were on staff with one of the 1980s prominent family ministries in evangelicalism. Being, though, that their family was essentially her parents' "product," Kristin felt a great deal of pressure when she was trotted out in front of supporting churches on the family's annual summer support-gathering tours. In her teenage years, grappling with questions of the faith seemed to take a distant backseat to looking right and saying the right things in front of people who mattered (read: supporters). This bothered her, and still does.
LEGALISM'S APPEAL
Why is slipping into law-based Christianity, fakery, and groupthink appealing to so many? Especially in a family context?
It's appealing because legalism makes following Christ easy, because it takes critical thinking and discernment out of the equation. Instead of studying Scripture, seeking God for comfort and counsel, and listening to the Holy Spirit in the midst of life's struggles, we can look to religious leaders for the answers. For example, Bill Gothard sold the dream of having an "ATI" family, which is about as eighties and corporate as it sounds. ATI stands for "Advanced Training Institute"—it provides training seminars for doctors, lawyers, teens, and families and includes life training on everything from what kind of a girl to marry to how to buy makeup to how to stand around as a guy when you're, well, standing around (seriously). No area of life has gone uncommented upon by Gothard's company.
It's this—the commenting upon of certain areas of life that fall outside of biblical directives (example: Paul didn't write another letter to the Ephesians telling them how to tuck in their shirts or how to stand around)—that resulted in the rampant legalism that ruined lots of kids' Christian school experiences in the eighties and homeschool experiences in the nineties, after God's explicit plan for education became homeschooling and not Christian schooling.
My friend, by the grace of God, has ended up remarkably normal and cool.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN
It's worth noting that we can't blame our family of origin, or Bill Gothard, or even trendiness for family idolatry. While Kristin and I somehow latched on to the 1990s ethic of "if something is really popular it must be bad," we recognize that family idolatry didn't start in the 1980s and certainly not with Gothard. And it's not finding its apex in today's large-family-homeschool-dominant culture. So the problem isn't cultural trends. The problem is sin, and the problem is me.
Paul wrote in Romans 3 that "Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin," and that "there is no one righteous, not even one," and later "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." The problem is that, although I mean well, my motives are inherently flawed. I want my kids to make me look great. I want all of my decisions about family size and schooling to turn out great so that I look good.
I need God's help to recognize these idolatries, confess them, and fight them. Paul captured this with brutal clarity in Romans 7:24-25, when he wrote, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
EVERYWHERE PRESENT
To be fair, family idolatry is not solely an evangelical problem. We see it in our own fairly average suburb. We see it every time we go to a ball game or performing arts event that our kids are involved in. We see it every time we spot a fifth grader's name and number emblazoned on the back of his mother's sweatshirt in the stands of a peewee football game. We see it in every harried family taking different cars in different directions to different sports practices only to reconnect at the end of the night to collapse into bed. We see it in our own hearts when we're disappointed that our child may not be the star.
We see it in the financial product advertisements that suggest that if we aren't building a financial fortress for our children and grandchildren, we're not doing right by them. We see it in the ads that suggest that if I don't buy my wife the hearts-on-fire pendant or tennis bracelet, I may not get the warm, suggestive television embrace that must mean that she really does love me.
We see it in the commercials that suggest that if we really love our children we'd buy the car with the extra air bags, or we'd start saving for college, or we'd take them to Disneyland where we could engineer a childhood's worth of family memories for the cost of airfare and a hotel suite.
I'm saying that—Christian and secular—we're all in danger of getting the value of family horribly wrong. So how do we stem the tide? How do we protect our hearts from something that, on the surface, seems so good, and is even celebrated and subtly encouraged?
It starts with searching our own hearts and our own motives, and with a healthy recognition of who we are without Christ, which is to say that we are "dead in [our] transgressions and sins." Even if we look good and have reasonably well-behaved kids, we're still dead in our sins apart from Christ. It starts with a call to think more deeply about the things we want and why we want them. It starts with a willingness to indict ourselves, which can be one of the hardest things in the world to do.
From Kristin
Imagine the kind of women's Bible study/gab session/hen party that happens all across the country. Imagine a little urn of coffee in the corner. Imagine danishes. Imagine name tags. Imagine a full-to-bursting lactation room around the corner. Imagine that the leader of said study asks, as she always does, "Tell us a little about yourselves!"
Gag. Cue family idolatry. As the dreaded Infertile Woman, I hate this part of these studies the most. The part where the woman in the fashionable jeans and faux-hippie dress exclaims, "I have five beautiful, healthy kids and I'm so blessed!" The part where the woman in the college hoodie says, "I've been married to my husband for ten years, and he's my knight in shining armor." The part where the overly enthusiastic leader then claps, middle-school-cheerleader-style (fingertips up and together), and says, "Yay!"
This is the part where I deflate and wonder how I'm going to deal with my own family-idolatry issues. This is where I wonder if I'm the problem, or if our culture is the problem. This is the part where I want to run away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Household gods by Ted Kluck, Kristin Kluck. Copyright © 2014 Ted and Kristin Kluck. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Ronnie Martin, xi,Acknowledgments, xiii,
A Note from Ted, xvii,
INTRODUCTION: Family Idolatry and Other Household Gods, 1,
CHAPTER 1: Spawning Family Idolatry, 9,
CHAPTER 2: Love Will Tear You Apart: The Household God of Being Someone's Idol, 17,
CHAPTER 3: You Should Be So Proud: The Household God of Living Your Dreams Through Your Kids, 37,
CHAPTER 4: Blue Chips: The Household God of Sports and Family, 51,
CHAPTER 5: On Writing and Grinding Concrete: The Household God of Vocation, 67,
CHAPTER 6: Be Perfect: The Household God of Winning at Everything, 81,
CHAPTER 7: Herod's Temple: The Household God of Being One of the "Haves", 97,
CHAPTER 8: Does God Love Me or Is He a Cosmic Trickster? The Household God of Cynicism and Irony, 107,
CHAPTER 9: Love Me, Love Me, Say That You Love Me: The Household God of Impressing Others, 115,
CHAPTER 10: You've Gotta See My Book: The Household God of Getting Published, 131,
CHAPTER 11: A Chance to Lose Your Life: What Family Showcases, 143,
Endnotes, 151,