The Christian Family 5/9/48
Scripture: read Matthew 5: 3-16
The first week in May is quite generally marked, across the country, as National Family Life Week. I would like to add the word “Christian” - “Christian Family Life Week.” In our own church, the church school has sometimes sponsored a “Family Night” in the middle of the week, or a family picnic at the end of the school year. [Mothers had special invitations from the younger children to visit some of their classes in the church school this morning. Some of us noted that the local radio station had a “family” program on the air this past week late each evening at 10:15.]
The sole purpose of Family Week and Mother’s Day at the end of the week, is to throw the spotlight on what is important the year round. The family is just as important the third week of November or the fourth week of February as it is the first week in May. The recognition of, and often little gifts for, our mothers are just annual lessons in good manners -- in expressed appreciation of the good qualities in our mothers -- of children, and of fathers, too --- that should be a year-round appreciation.
From the standpoint of the mothers -- of fathers, too -- there is something more than the glow of filial appreciation. There is the sober concern that we parents may do as we should do by our children. An example of this need for constant concern appeared some years ago in an issue of “Wisconsin Church Life” in the form of a quotation of observations by Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Fine headed, “Are we cheating our children?” It had to do with the public education which American children are getting, and was a startling comment on our sense of balance in values.
1) We Americans spend less for education than we do for tobacco; less for education than for liquor; less for education than for cosmetics! Before I came to Wisconsin Rapids, I once knew a layman, of another church and denomination than mine, who used to appeal to his fellow church members to give to their church as much as they smoked in a year. He thought it was a pitiful minimum, and I did too -- but it would have been substantial! -- enough to underwrite quite an increase in that church’s activity!
Now back to education.
2) In the decade during and after World War II, 350,000 teachers have felt forced to leave their profession. One disquieting reason was that found in New York City where over half of the teachers found that they must do outside work to pay their bills. Where did they get time and energy to prepare the next day’s lessons, let alone really teach the children? The salaries of teachers must be kept abreast of living costs. For if one is to teach, there must be the time and energy for teaching.
3) Where rooms are overcrowded, where equipment is often inadequate, with classes too large for good teaching -- the terrifying result is that the children are learning only a fraction of what they ought to be taught.
4) Wherever children receive substandard teaching in overcrowded “educational poorhouses,” and there have been too many of them in the nation, that condition must be remedied.
5) The municipal dog catcher of New Orleans is reported to be paid more than half the teachers of that city.
6) Once we in America started universal public education, it has undergirded our democracy. Now England spends twice the proportion of its national income on education that we do. Russia spends 5 times the proportion of its national income on education that we do. If we think we are going to beat the Russian viewpoint in this world, our public school instruction is going to have to be steadily kept abreast of the need, and it must be supplemented and complemented by the home.
Now let us turn our thoughts more particularly to the Christian family. The sociologists, Burgess and Dollard, have defined the family as a “unity of interacting personalities, each with a history of its own.” And they point out that the modern family is a comparatively recent development in Western culture.
There have been 4 main types of family life through the long history of mankind. (1) There was the matriarchal family in which the mother was the head of the clan or tribe. She was honored and revered; her word was law and the makes of her group were in subordinate station. That pattern, say the sociologists, survives today only in primitive society.
(2) The second basic type of family organization is the patriarchal family in which the father very definitely “sits at the head of the table” and gives forth the law. That pattern still exists in some Old World cultures. But among us moderns of the new world, it probably exists only in the wishful thinking of the modern father!
(3) During the last 100 years a semi-patriarchal system has risen and then rapidly merged into a (4) democratic family pattern. And this democratic family is new in history. To this “unity of interacting personalities” has been added the phrase “each with a voice and mind of its own.” This is new. At the same time, something has been lost; so that there is sober discussion among the learned as to whether the modern family will survive or disappear. You will recall that Mr. Hitler seemed determined that it must disappear by the subordination of women to pure domesticity, and of children to elders of the Nazi brand of authority.
Sociologists comment that the family was once self-sustaining, or nearly so. It raised its own food; made its own clothes - even raised and wove the materials for its own clothes; created its own diversions and recreations.
But now, see the tremendous increase in bakeries, prepared foods, laundries, dry cleaners, and so on. And who, besides the late Mr. Gandhi, weaves his own cloth now? Or “tailors” his own suit? Even the neighborhood tailor is overshadowed by the production line garment worker of the large manufacturing concern.
Hospital beds increased in this country by 80% in 25 years -- and there is need for many more -- indiccating that the illnesses formerly cared for exclusively in the family are now handled (we feel) more effectively elsewhere.
These things but dramatize the change in family function.
The radio, the movie, the television, the ball game, the public playground, take the place of the recreation that was once found in family games, hymn sings, and so on.
As for the teaching of religion -- how often it is left entirely to a pitifully inadequate half hour of the week in Sunday school --- once a week for those who attend regularly --- and less often for the average of those whose parents even value religious instruction enough to have them in Sunday school at all!
No wonder those who believe in parochial education have wanted to “dig in.” We who do not favor parochial education had better keep doing some of our own kind of “digging.”
And yet the sociologists seem convinced that the family will not disappear so long as it performs 3 major functions. These three functions are as follows: (1) providing the security and stability which comes from mutual affection; (2) the rearing of children; (3) the informal education of interacting personalities. Probably the church is particularly concerned with the last of these three -- the informal education of interacting personalities.
The old saying that “Religion is caught, not taught” is half true, half false. Religion is caught by inspiration of precept and example. It must also be taught. Evangelism -- the desire to share the faith with another -- has been the technique for the extension of both Protestantism and Catholicism for 1900 years. But religion consists also of certain taught elements. For, in any definition of religion, there is an object of worship, and an attitude toward that object.
Now attitudes can be directed, encouraged, educated. Education is one valid method of promoting religion. The home ought to see that this promotion by education is done and also to set the atmosphere of family life so that religion can be caught as well as taught.
Here there can be no neutrality. Either we are setting the conditions right for the catching of religion in our homes, or we are not. A common viewpoint which says, “I’ll just wait till Willie grows up and decides for himself” is a delusion and an evasion. Willie will not, and can not, make a choice of anything except as he knows something to choose!
I once discussed this matter with the parents of an only child whom I proposed to invite to Sunday School while working in Hawaii. The father had been raised Irish Catholic; the mother Norwegian Lutheran. Nether of them paid any attention to their respective churches, nor to any other! They declined to enter the boy in a Union Sunday School on the ground that that would unduly influence his own choice when he grew up! What possible hope was there that he could make any choice as to religion when he grew up? His parents never gave him anything to choose from or to choose for! The only possible deduction he could have made from his experience at home would be that religion doesn’t matter to his parents or to him.
Paul, in writing to the Colossian Christians, uses the phrase “the church is in thy house.” [Colossians 4: 15]. The phrase comes out of a setting and time in which there were no separate buildings for Christian worship and propagation. Every home was teaching religion of some sort.
Free, democratic personalities do not come out of a home dominated by a dictator whose authority rests on parenthood alone.
Personalities with the requisites necessary to maintain (1) democracy; (2) self-discipline; (3) self-direction; and (4) personal initiative -- do not come out of a home lacking in thee only religious culture that can inspire these qualities.
How seriously crippled, for instance, is the notion of the “fatherhood of God,” the brotherhood of man, and worth of each human personality in the life of a Denver high school girl who was talking with a minister? The pastor made the statement that “God is like a father.” He never thereafter forgot the flash that leaped to her eye as she looked back at him: “If God is like my dad, I will have nothing to do with him!” No parent will need bother to labor the moral of that counsel!
If we are talking to members of families wherein selfish parents dominate their children for pure parental gratification; or of families wherein emotionally immature parents keep their children dependent on them for the sake of parental gratification -- all talk of the “beloved community” loses its effect.
Happy indeed is the family for whom this day is a reminder of the faith we learned about within the family! For here are disclosed the deeper meanings of God.
The church has always fostered a certain way of living that is rooted in love. Jesus set first the love of God, and then the love of fellow man as the first concerns of people. This principle of living must be caught and taught in the Christian family if that hope of the ages known at the Kingdom of God is to be a reality in the world.
What are some of the practical expressions of this family attitude? I close with a few suggestions:
1) Have good times together. “Family Night” in a church is but one little expression of this. The family that plays together is a stronger family.
2) Make democracy work in the family. Talk things over in family council.
3) Put Christ at the center of family love, companionship, and growth.
4) Think of families abroad and be sure your family is doing something to help those in need.
5) Invite other families to church and help make them at home.
6) Cultivate loyalty to your church within your family and help your church build up its resources for family living. (Perhaps take a copy of “Family Devotions” from the literature table if you haven’t already seen it.)
7) Study again the major Christian teachings and their relation to home life. “These words, which I commend to thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down and when thou risest up.”
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Dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, May 9, 1948
Wisconsin Rapids, May 7, 1961