part eight of the podcast series on the family integrated church movement

Steve Doyle has an interesting view of the FIC churches and I appreciate him sharing his experience. I cheered when I heard -paraphrasing – “churches are not supposed to be making families but making disciples”.

One thought i have is that it is not unhealthy to be reading, listening, talking to, a wide variety of people, either locally or on the Internet. I think it is tempting to imagine that if people just listened to their local pastor they would not go off the rails. But a better approach seems to be one that I learned from a pastor I never met, on a discussion forum online – he taught his congregation and the rest of us, to think, to apply logic, to learn hermanutics, to question and examine and consider. I could say that that caused me a lot of grief as I did that and it wrenched me out of my “everyone who is a Christian is good” kind of thinking. But I think I am, and my family is, better for it all. People I know who are in FIC’s would benefit from a rousing conversation anywhere and are isolating themselves to protect their belief system. Hopefully these podcasts and the articles here are that conversation for many. Good work, Karen.

An interesting thing happened before I listened to the last few podcasts. I had been praying about a lot of “stuff” I’m seeing within the homeschool community and “stuff” that was affecting me and my love, grace, and acceptance of others. I would find myself disassociating myself from many homeschoolers and feeling more and more led to focus on the body of Christ in my prayers and attitudes. God did not call me to have “unity in the Spirit with a bond of peace” with homeschoolers. He called me to that with HIS BODY, which is the church!! I have seen much division because of wrong views of this.

Anyway, as I was just moving along through my day and had been at a homeschool function, the words “Idolatry of family” came to my mind. It was from the Lord, as I know His promptings. I had never even considered that to be an idolatry. Family is such a “good” thing. Then here I continue listening to the podcasts the next day, and that idea was posed in looking more deeply at the idea of “family worship” and what the idolatry it actually causes. I had never fully looked at idolatry of family in myself, and yes, it is a problem; and I had never fully seen it in others around me, and yes, it is a problem there as well.

Anyway, thanks for these podcasts. There is a freedom I am coming to with the Lord that is not explainable, really. Reading your blog and listening as well have been key elements in Him changing some of my long-held beliefs that weren’t really His in the first place!!

Praying for the Body of Christ, for all believers everywhere.

I should also point out that some of the hermeneutical difficulties we have in evangelicalism really come down to confusion between what the text says, and how it relates to culture. What I have found is that many people in the patriarchalist movement are cultural apologists. Now, there is nothing wrong with the field of cultural apologetics in general, but the problem is that such a field can be read back into the text. We take cultural problems [i.e., feminism, lack of support for homeschool families, etc.], and we then read our solutions to these things back into the text. Also, cultural apologists tend to be very radical and countercultural. They have to be, given the way in which the culture has effected our daily lives. The problem is, often solutions to problems are not as simplistic as this.

That is where I think hermeneutics and exegesis can help. While being radical and countercultural are virtues in cultural apologetics, they are not virtues in hermeneutics and exegesis, and can ultimately end up being vices. You don’t want to get cute and radical with your exegesis. That is a good way to get refuted. You have to have the care and precision of a surgeon. That is not to say that you will never have to say things that are countercultural. For example, there is a college professor/PCUSA elder who has written a huge academic work on homosexuality by the name of Robert Gagnon. While he applies critical approaches to the Bible, he is honest enough to say that, nevertheless, the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, and he has said he has had hell to pay for it. Yes, especially as evangelicals, there are times when we are going to have to stand our ground. Nevertheless, we need to do so after thoughtfully, and carefully coming to conclusions about which cultural areas are consistent with scripture and which are not.