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Family Decline…Are you helping?

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I was challenged by a recent post on the Resurgence entitled The Decline of the Nuclear Family.  Among other things, this post highlighted how the demographics of families have changed and how the church should respond.  The point:

Perhaps the most loving, most prophetic thing the church can do is to call men in their 20s to love Jesus, read their Bibles, get a job, to leave their parent’s house, and to love one woman—according to the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, no one is doing that.

Creating a culture of manhood is, evidently, not that hard. Let’s call men to this high standard and watch the fruit it produces.

One Reason Why We’re Doing VBS in the Evening This Year…

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…is because we are complementarian. Being complementarian simply means that God has hard wired the universe with men and women having unique roles to fulfill in their personhood. Both men and women are made in the image of God and have value in that. However, God has called men and women to different roles. And this calling doesn’t negate or determine value.

So, how does this relate to VBS? In recent years, as we tried to do VBS in the morning, I noticed that it was mainly women doing all the work. The daytime schedule meant that men, by and large, were at work in secular jobs and thus unable to serve in VBS. Couple with this truth the recent statistics on the influence that fathers (read men) can have on learning, and you can see why the need to change happened because we are complementarian.

So, this year, our VBS will be held from 6:30-8:30PM so that men, after working all day in many cases, can come and demonstrate Christ’s love by serving children in VBS. We’ve structured each class so that they have a man present. Each class is not necessarily taught by a man (again showing God’s creative complementarian design) but men are there to give grace to the children by offering an encouraging presence in the class. We are excited about what this might mean for our children and for the men who are serving in a way that God gets the glory.