Revisiting a Minefield--Part 4
This post will deal with "equipping the saints" as taught in Ephesians 4, applied specifically to the administration of a church-directed education program.
In an earlier post I noted that when teaching occurs in the churches we read about in the Bible, it's an adult-to-adult activity. While it's possible that children were present when this occurred, they were apparently there as onlookers.
Ephesians 4 says that the various gifts that Christians possess--teaching among them--are given to the church "for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry." What if churches made a concerted effort to equip each parent for the work of ministry in their own home (To minister means to serve.), specifically as teachers to their children?
In one possible scenario the choices would look like this:
1) At church expense, unless performed by volunteers, teach one set of parents who will then teach their own six children at home.
2) At church expense, unless performed by volunteers, teach each of the six children as part of a group in a facility designated for that purpose, with a hired teacher.
Option one turns out to be not only logistically more reasonable, but it fits in with what Ephesians concerns itself with, while option two is outside the parameters of what Scripture directly addresses. With option one, the church is responsible for teaching fewer people, and the ones they are teaching are adults, not children. These factors exponentially reduce the costs and the time required away from home.
I will not belabor this point by spelling out all the details. Suffice it to say that I see equipping parents involving some combination of group instruction and one-to-one mentoring. Some of the group instruction could be in separate gender groups. Also, I envision a program like this implemented first and most intentionally with parents whose oldest children are still preschool age.
Another factor in completing this picture involves how the father in a family makes a living. Experience has taught me that clearing out this minefield is particularly arduous. Even when the subject comes up for public discussion, the discussion is always led by men, and I've never heard a conclusion different than something that amounts to "men have to make a living somehow, and if it takes them away from their family most of the time, then so be it." This actually seems like a fairly reasonable and accurate analysis, but to me it represents something akin to rejecting the family ideal with a careless shrug of the shoulders.
After such a discussion in our church, one very perceptive little preschool girl asked her father afterward why no one said (about a father making his living from home) "It's nice for a family to work together." I wish everyone could have been this insightful during the public discussion. Instead it leaned very heavily toward justification for fathers NOT making their living from home. If we could at least agree on the little girl's simple ideal, a lot of what is necessary (working away from home) could at least be seen in perspective--necessary, for a time, perhaps, or necessary part-time perhaps, but it would move us away from what seems to me a defeatist attitude: This is the way things are, and we'd best learn to live with it.
Unless I miss my guess, the word from mothers and children would always favor Dad making his living without having to be gone all day every work day. I can't think of a taller order than a mother being responsible all alone for making everything happen that needs to happen during the day. This involves many incidents of crossing a child's will, and, even courageous and capable mothers can spiral into depression when they are alone with this task, day after day. Trust me, I know how difficult it is to come up with ways to make this ideal possible. It never happened in our years of child rearing--not for lack of praying and thinking and trying. I still remember with deep gratitude two people--Milton and LeRoy--who actually offered us materials and suggestions along this line. I believe far more could be done within the church to facilitate this for each other--but not without first nurturing a vision for it.
I know of one church where the men meet regularly to pray for each other and to help each other find a way to make a living in a way that allows them to involve their family. I'd like to see that happen in every church.
I know very well that producing goods and providing services both require contact with buyers of goods and services, and making connections will require leaving home sometimes. Furthermore, the laws of the land place increasing restrictions on where production and marketing can take place, and how goods must be produced. Child labor laws can be inordinately restrictive. This, in fact, is one excellent reason for finding ways for parents to put their children to work at home--because working for one's parents is still far less regulated than working for anyone else. Also, marketing from a rural location, for example, is often less regulated for goods that are produced directly on the premises of that location--a distinct benefit for family-based home businesses. A home-centered mindset makes possible the production of more food at home for the family's use. Anything you consume is tax-free, available without having to consume fuel and time to drive to the market to buy it, and all the inputs are known to you, making possible a more limited chemical load in the food you ingest--again, an exponential gain, far more significant than might be apparent at first.
A number of years ago, in our community, a young man decided to sell wagons (the little red kind). I have always admired how he proceeded to do this. He could have borrowed money to build a manufacturing facility and hired people to do the work. I'm not sure of all the details (There may have been a partnership with one other family man.) but I know this: He did not build a central manufacturing facility. Instead, the wagon chassis was made at the home of a friend who had welding and other metal-working equipment and skills, the wooden wagon boxes were painted at the home of another family with a paint shop inside a farm shed, and the wagons were assembled and sold by the first young man, who lived next to a road combining a state highway and a US highway. He put a big sign out by the road, and the business was up and running.
The young wagon seller was killed instantly in an accident while his children were still very young. His widow, with help from others, continued to run the business for some time. Consider how different this prospect might have been if there had been a big debt to pay off on a building, and hired men coming every day to take orders from the factory boss. More than that, consider how doing it the way he did it enabled at least three family men to make a bigger part of their living from home. This kind of intentional decentralization of manufacturing is one of the things that needs to happen, in my opinion--to facilitate more fathers working from home, able to involve their own children in their work, and available to their wives throughout the day.
In some cases, community-built processing facilities would enable many home businesses to thrive. For example, goat dairies require a much smaller land base than "cow dairies." The problem in our area is that there is no milk processing facility in the area that accepts goat's milk. Another very specific example: Lots of people know how to raise beets, but the market for fresh beets is limited. How might things improve if they could produce canned pickled beets to sell? This would require an inspected food processing facility--a great group project--something that could easily happen in a church kitchen, if there were a vision for it. Raising rabbits is easy on small acreages, but, again, no nearby facility processes rabbits. We're an unusually resourceful people. Why can't we make things like this happen?
What's the bottom line on this "equipping parents with home businesses" bunny trail? Just this: It takes two parents to raise children. Teaching them is not just a mother's job, and academics is not the only kind of teaching required. To cover all the bases, a father's direct involvement is necessary, and doing all he needs to do when only a few waking hours are shared is very difficult. A father needs the equipping help of the church in meeting his responsibilities just as surely as the mother does, no matter who actually teaches the academics.
When a father dies, God Himself promises to be a father to the children. Fathers are that important in a child's life. When a woman has no husband, her Maker promises to be her husband. Husbands are that important to women. When a husband and father absents himself voluntarily and regularly from his family--even for the purpose of making a living, with no awareness of what is being lost, I think it matters to God. I know it matters to women and children. It ought to matter to everyone in the church.
The Bible is full of family imagery when it describes Kingdom realities. Christians are family. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." We are brothers and sisters in Christ. The church is the bride of Christ. Christ is the Bridegroom. Jesus is our elder brother. How are we to understand the depth of these truths if we have never fully experienced their counterpart in life? How are intact families to experience it if they are regularly disassembled for most of their waking hours? Only by the grace of God, surely.
This matter of equipping the saints for the work of ministry as parents in their own homes is a palpable burden to me--of the multiple-cement-bag variety. I pray it becomes a shared burden.
In an earlier post I noted that when teaching occurs in the churches we read about in the Bible, it's an adult-to-adult activity. While it's possible that children were present when this occurred, they were apparently there as onlookers.
Ephesians 4 says that the various gifts that Christians possess--teaching among them--are given to the church "for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry." What if churches made a concerted effort to equip each parent for the work of ministry in their own home (To minister means to serve.), specifically as teachers to their children?
In one possible scenario the choices would look like this:
1) At church expense, unless performed by volunteers, teach one set of parents who will then teach their own six children at home.
2) At church expense, unless performed by volunteers, teach each of the six children as part of a group in a facility designated for that purpose, with a hired teacher.
Option one turns out to be not only logistically more reasonable, but it fits in with what Ephesians concerns itself with, while option two is outside the parameters of what Scripture directly addresses. With option one, the church is responsible for teaching fewer people, and the ones they are teaching are adults, not children. These factors exponentially reduce the costs and the time required away from home.
I will not belabor this point by spelling out all the details. Suffice it to say that I see equipping parents involving some combination of group instruction and one-to-one mentoring. Some of the group instruction could be in separate gender groups. Also, I envision a program like this implemented first and most intentionally with parents whose oldest children are still preschool age.
Another factor in completing this picture involves how the father in a family makes a living. Experience has taught me that clearing out this minefield is particularly arduous. Even when the subject comes up for public discussion, the discussion is always led by men, and I've never heard a conclusion different than something that amounts to "men have to make a living somehow, and if it takes them away from their family most of the time, then so be it." This actually seems like a fairly reasonable and accurate analysis, but to me it represents something akin to rejecting the family ideal with a careless shrug of the shoulders.
After such a discussion in our church, one very perceptive little preschool girl asked her father afterward why no one said (about a father making his living from home) "It's nice for a family to work together." I wish everyone could have been this insightful during the public discussion. Instead it leaned very heavily toward justification for fathers NOT making their living from home. If we could at least agree on the little girl's simple ideal, a lot of what is necessary (working away from home) could at least be seen in perspective--necessary, for a time, perhaps, or necessary part-time perhaps, but it would move us away from what seems to me a defeatist attitude: This is the way things are, and we'd best learn to live with it.
Unless I miss my guess, the word from mothers and children would always favor Dad making his living without having to be gone all day every work day. I can't think of a taller order than a mother being responsible all alone for making everything happen that needs to happen during the day. This involves many incidents of crossing a child's will, and, even courageous and capable mothers can spiral into depression when they are alone with this task, day after day. Trust me, I know how difficult it is to come up with ways to make this ideal possible. It never happened in our years of child rearing--not for lack of praying and thinking and trying. I still remember with deep gratitude two people--Milton and LeRoy--who actually offered us materials and suggestions along this line. I believe far more could be done within the church to facilitate this for each other--but not without first nurturing a vision for it.
I know of one church where the men meet regularly to pray for each other and to help each other find a way to make a living in a way that allows them to involve their family. I'd like to see that happen in every church.
I know very well that producing goods and providing services both require contact with buyers of goods and services, and making connections will require leaving home sometimes. Furthermore, the laws of the land place increasing restrictions on where production and marketing can take place, and how goods must be produced. Child labor laws can be inordinately restrictive. This, in fact, is one excellent reason for finding ways for parents to put their children to work at home--because working for one's parents is still far less regulated than working for anyone else. Also, marketing from a rural location, for example, is often less regulated for goods that are produced directly on the premises of that location--a distinct benefit for family-based home businesses. A home-centered mindset makes possible the production of more food at home for the family's use. Anything you consume is tax-free, available without having to consume fuel and time to drive to the market to buy it, and all the inputs are known to you, making possible a more limited chemical load in the food you ingest--again, an exponential gain, far more significant than might be apparent at first.
A number of years ago, in our community, a young man decided to sell wagons (the little red kind). I have always admired how he proceeded to do this. He could have borrowed money to build a manufacturing facility and hired people to do the work. I'm not sure of all the details (There may have been a partnership with one other family man.) but I know this: He did not build a central manufacturing facility. Instead, the wagon chassis was made at the home of a friend who had welding and other metal-working equipment and skills, the wooden wagon boxes were painted at the home of another family with a paint shop inside a farm shed, and the wagons were assembled and sold by the first young man, who lived next to a road combining a state highway and a US highway. He put a big sign out by the road, and the business was up and running.
The young wagon seller was killed instantly in an accident while his children were still very young. His widow, with help from others, continued to run the business for some time. Consider how different this prospect might have been if there had been a big debt to pay off on a building, and hired men coming every day to take orders from the factory boss. More than that, consider how doing it the way he did it enabled at least three family men to make a bigger part of their living from home. This kind of intentional decentralization of manufacturing is one of the things that needs to happen, in my opinion--to facilitate more fathers working from home, able to involve their own children in their work, and available to their wives throughout the day.
In some cases, community-built processing facilities would enable many home businesses to thrive. For example, goat dairies require a much smaller land base than "cow dairies." The problem in our area is that there is no milk processing facility in the area that accepts goat's milk. Another very specific example: Lots of people know how to raise beets, but the market for fresh beets is limited. How might things improve if they could produce canned pickled beets to sell? This would require an inspected food processing facility--a great group project--something that could easily happen in a church kitchen, if there were a vision for it. Raising rabbits is easy on small acreages, but, again, no nearby facility processes rabbits. We're an unusually resourceful people. Why can't we make things like this happen?
What's the bottom line on this "equipping parents with home businesses" bunny trail? Just this: It takes two parents to raise children. Teaching them is not just a mother's job, and academics is not the only kind of teaching required. To cover all the bases, a father's direct involvement is necessary, and doing all he needs to do when only a few waking hours are shared is very difficult. A father needs the equipping help of the church in meeting his responsibilities just as surely as the mother does, no matter who actually teaches the academics.
When a father dies, God Himself promises to be a father to the children. Fathers are that important in a child's life. When a woman has no husband, her Maker promises to be her husband. Husbands are that important to women. When a husband and father absents himself voluntarily and regularly from his family--even for the purpose of making a living, with no awareness of what is being lost, I think it matters to God. I know it matters to women and children. It ought to matter to everyone in the church.
The Bible is full of family imagery when it describes Kingdom realities. Christians are family. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." We are brothers and sisters in Christ. The church is the bride of Christ. Christ is the Bridegroom. Jesus is our elder brother. How are we to understand the depth of these truths if we have never fully experienced their counterpart in life? How are intact families to experience it if they are regularly disassembled for most of their waking hours? Only by the grace of God, surely.
This matter of equipping the saints for the work of ministry as parents in their own homes is a palpable burden to me--of the multiple-cement-bag variety. I pray it becomes a shared burden.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
9:06 PM
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