I know, I know. There are all kinds of statistics showing that nuclear families give their children many advantages over the children of single moms. It is because of this reality that the church places great emphasis on nuclear families to the exclusion of others.
However, from a spiritual viewpoint, the Bible teaches again and again that nuclear families do not hold an advantage over single mom families and it is time for churches to acknowledge this reality.
As we have seen from my previous post, one important message from the Old Testament is that the kingdom of God cannot be built on the basis of human families and family lines because they propagate with them the fallen sinful nature of Adam. This explains some important facts that we are confronted with in the New Testament.
First, we have the necessity of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. The virgin birth of Jesus broke the line of descent from Adam (Matthew 1:16; Luke 3:23). Because of its fallenness, God could not be born into a true nuclear family. There had to be a break from it in order for the Incarnation to happen.
Second, while the Old Testament has several genealogies, there are no further occurrences of genealogies in the New Testament after the two genealogies of Jesus. In fact, they are frowned upon as irrelevant(1 Timothy 1:4).
Third, as the “Second Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), Jesus is the founder of a new human race of born again believers. As such, Jesus is the “firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Romans 8:29). It is this new family, called the church, that is God’s true ideal.
These facts explain why Jesus was so skeptical about the family (i.e., Matthew 10:34-37; 12:48-50) and why his ministry was so “extra-family,” so to speak. We see this extra-family emphasis especially when we compare the modern church’s almost exclusive emphasis on ministry to nuclear families — at the expense of those not in nuclear families, such as single moms, fatherless children, widows, and the disabled — with how Jesus trained his disciples.
To put it bluntly, Jesus didn’t go around the countryside holding seminars on how his disciples could be better husbands and better fathers. Nor did he offer consultation services to synagogue leaders on how they could improve their Jewish education departments.
In fact, it was just the opposite. Mirroring the lessons from the Old Testament and God’s practice of isolating his chosen leaders from their families, Jesus consciously and explicitly avoided any kind of “focus on the family.”
Instead, he insisted that his disciples leave their wives, children, farms and land to follow him as he ministered to those outside nuclear families — i.e., the outcasts of society (Matthew 19:27-29).
Jesus demanded absolute commitment, even to the point where, using hyperbole, he said anyone following him had to “hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life” (Luke 14:25).
Why did Jesus rip his disciples out of the context of their families? The reason is because they and their families in their natural fallen state were incapable of transmitting spiritual life, as the Old Testament proves again and again. As Jesus explained to Nicodemus, because of what is “in man,” fallen human beings can only transmit fallen spiritual life. Consequently, all newborn babies are spiritually stillborn (John 2:23-3:8).
The entire Old Testament proves the impossibility of transmitting spiritual life simply by being born into a family, as we have seen. One must be “born again” by the Spirit, Jesus told Nicodemus. And the way one is born again by the Spirit is through believing in Jesus Christ (John 3:16).
In his radical call for his disciples to follow him, believe in him and love like him at the expense of family, Jesus was deconstructing the family, and along with it, the clan, the tribe and the nation of Israel itself, hence, the entire social order of his day.
In its place, Jesus reconstructed the family, not as the foundation of the new order, but simply as one expression of it, and a temporary one at that because the family ends at death.
It was faith in Jesus, and membership in a group of people who love each other in the deep and profound way he does — that is the church — that became the foundation of the new order.
True, Jesus, and later his apostles, applied this same absolute love to marriage and family (i.e., Matthew 5:31-32; Ephesians 5:22-33; 1 Peter 3:1-7), but it was not seen as the sole, or even the primary, application of that love.
The tragedy is that today churches focus almost exclusively on nuclear families because it thinks these families are God’s “ideal” — spiritually superior to all other types of households. Rare is the church that has an effective and ongoing ministry that really serves the needs of its single moms, or anyone else not in nuclear families. After all, “the family is the foundation of society.”
Truth be told, that statement is a Christian heresy. Families, in their natural condition, propagate enemies of God who need to be saved from God’s coming wrath. As such — in their fallen spiritual state — nuclear households are no better than single parent households.
Instead, Jesus Christ is the foundation of all reality and of all society. It is his church, “the household of God,” that is “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15) and Jesus still calls each one of us to radically follow him.
Should the church continue its redemptive ministry to nuclear families? Absolutely! We should keep up the good work and do even better. But again, focusing only on nuclear families is not right because it belies the belief that nuclear families are spiritually intrinsically better than single moms and their children.
Single mother families, along with everyone else outside nuclear families, deserve the redemptive ministry of the church just as much as nuclear families do. And because of their fallenness, nuclear families need the redemptive ministry of the church just as much as everyone else.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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