Out of all the speakers that presented at the Sentralized Conference last week, Deb Hirsch’s talk on “Refocusing the Family” received the greatest amount of feedback. Deb asked why so many Christian households remain firmly shut to outsiders? Why is it that we find it so hard to open our homes? She stated that many Christians will serve at the church, give money to the poor, and perhaps even go on a mission trip, but when it comes to bringing that “mission” to the home, we flatly refuse. We unfortunately too often see our homes as our personal, safe space that ought not be intruded upon. Deb passionately argued against holding such a fortress mentality towards our homes. One of the most memorable statements from Deb was when she declared: “when we close the doors of our homes, we close the doors of our hearts.”
Following is an excerpt from the book Untamed, which Deb wrote along with her husband Alan Hirsch. It speaks to a portion of her talk from last week:
Part of the problem is that the church has now taken the family to be the frontier in its stand against the eroding forces of secularizing culture. In many ways this is right — the family is eroding — but the problem is that we find ourselves defending a non-biblical idea of the family! It’s not hard to see how this is absolutely disastrous from a missional perspective. Our families and our homes should be places where people can experience a foretaste of heaven, where the church is rightly viewed as a community of the redeemed from all walks of life. Instead, our fears restrict us from letting go of the control and safety we have spent years cultivating. But as Scott Bader-Saye notes, an ethic based on personal security produces a skewed moral vision. Any sense of personal obligation is tapered down to exclude anything beyond “me and my family.” This culture of fear is totally inconsistent with Jesus’s redemptive vision of the kingdom of God.
The problem is that, by and large, our churches and church leaders are not challenging us to get beyond this captivity. In fact, they end up catering to it by justifying it on biblical grounds. The so-called “family church” usually assumes the very narrow understanding of the nuclear family and gives it theological legitimacy. But the way the Bible conceives the term family and the way we see it are worlds apart.
Later in the chapter, Deb quotes Janet Fishburn, from her book Confronting the Idolatry of Family: A New Vision for the Household of God:
Where a domesticated piety dominates, or where the concerns of the nuclear family become the focus of a church, the conservation of middle-class ideals can blind both leaders and people to the prominent concern for social justice found in the Bible. And even when leaders are committed to seeking social justice, they have not been able to sustain a legitimate critique of poverty and injustice in America because the family ideals of the American Dream continue to be linked to democratic values and economic stability. . . . Uncritical loyalty to “the family pew” makes it very difficult to see or comprehend the plight of the poor and the homeless and the oppression of minority persons, as anything but their own fault.
Question: How would broadening your understanding of the family change the way you live? How would it change the way your church operates? What would it take for you to “open the doors of your home?”
