April 2024
4. How does the impact of family breakdown in our society today negatively impact our church life and how should the church respond as the body of Christ?
There is no doubt that family breakdown has greatly affected the church in the UK, as it has in other countries, particularly in the West, where divorce is at such high levels.
Nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of any particular person who has been through divorce: you can rarely make an informed judgment on how much someone is a victim rather than a perpetrator. And no one whose parents divorced should feel any shame for the failure of their parents' marriage.
But, from memory, studies have shown an alarming similarity between family breakdown in the church and in wider society.
I suppose it should not surprise us: the church is a subset of that wider society. We live in the world and are subject to all the same pressures that are faced by our acquaintances outside the church. The same was true of the early church: Paul says of the Corinthians that, among them, some were sexually immoral, others idolaters, adulterers, men who have sex with men, thieves, greedy, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers (1 Cor 6:9-11).
And divorce was a feature too. After all, our Lord himself made it clear that divorce was allowed under the Mosaic law as a concession because hearts were hard (Matt 19:1-9). It was bound to affect the NT church too. So it should not surprise us that broken families would be present in the local church.
How does family breakdown impact the church?
1. The emotional toll it takes is bound to hamper the ability of the family members affected to benefit from involvement in church. I'm talking about benefitting from the means of grace: Bible study, preaching, close fellowship with God's people, etc. Children might become withdrawn due to the trauma that they have gone through, making it harder to engage them in spiritual conversation.
2. It will also take an economic toll: legal fees; dividing into two parts, each with a need for accommodation; the cost of getting children from one parent to the other each weekend, especially if one partner moves away. Believing divorcees will have less money to contribute to the work of the Lord in the church and elsewhere.
3. It will take a social toll: how many broken families will be able to host a church house group or offer hospitality to needy people? Even if the will is there, shifting to a smaller house may make hospitality very difficult.
4. And there is often a spiritual toll: In some cases children are absent from church week after week because they are with an unbelieving parent on weekends. So children with a believing parent are denied spiritual nurture from the church. It is a wonder if they do not drift away from the faith altogether.
And how should the church respond?
1. Teaching: Prevention is better than cure. It is vital that the church recognises the pressures that families are under and seeks to strengthen families so that they have the resources to resist the influence of the world. That means, surely, that biblical ethics are taught from the front, on Sundays, and at home groups and other small groups. (See my last letter.)
2. Warning: Church members must be warned of the pervasive influence of the world through technology, particularly social media - surely the most pressing face of the world in the church today. Pornography, I read somewhere, makes up 40% of internet traffic! It devastates marriages and devastates children - I think I read that 70% of children have seen pornography by the age of ten.
3. Prayer. We must pray for our families in the midst of such pressures. We need to pray that marriages will be preserved in the face of conflict and the inevitable influence of the world. The devil is always prowling around seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet 5:8-9). We need to pray that husbands and wives will resist him, standing firm in the faith.
4. Community: The church is the family of God. We need to encourage our people to open their homes to others in the church, listen to their troubles, pray with them, help them out, play with their children. And we who are given responsibility as leaders must lead by example: The quality of being hospitable is a requirement of elders (1 Tim 3:2). Broken families must be welcomed into the community (and encouraged to stay in the community). It will speak volumes to the wider society if we are serious about this.
5. Confidence: As I wrote above, the Corinthian church was made up of people with very broken histories. But the wonderful thing was, God was still at work: they were washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God (1 Cor 6:11). That's the beauty of the gospel. We have all these resources to build up the body of Christ to be the bride that she is meant to be.
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