Chief Executive Mom

Visit me at my new website - anniecrawford.com I have been wanting for some time to write a post in response to the Motherwise: Freedom for Mothers study I recently led. However, time and proper inspiration has illuded me. Fortunately, the recent issue of Modern Reformation contains an aritcle by Michael Horton on fatherhood called "Good News for Bad Dads" that expressed pricisely, and perhaps with more tact, the concerns I had with Motherwise as well as our own church's incresingly pragmatic philosophy of minsitry and spiriual life.

I will copy the portion of the article here that specifically expresses my growing concerns with current church trends. You can also read the full article here.

". . . if God’s fatherhood is only a model for us, it cannot come as good news but only as further condemnation of our own poor performance. The good news is that this God, the Father of Jesus, is now our Father because of his love and the obedience rendered by his Son. In Christ, we do not dread this Father’s displeasure as condemnation and judgment, but feel his fatherly hand in redemption and correction. In other words, the good news is not that God is our model of fatherhood, but that in Christ he has become the Father even of bad Christian dads.
So the good news for bad fathers, first and foremost, is also the good news for bad mothers, children, grandparents, employers, and employees. This is why, in our headlong rush for relevance, all of our “practical” preaching on fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, and family can become the most impractical preaching of all apart from the gospel.

A colleague tells me that not long ago a woman visited his church. “I’m struggling in my marriage,” she confessed to him, “and my church is in the middle of a series on how to have good marriages.” One would think on the face of it that preaching Christ from Genesis to Revelation would be less directly applicable to her situation, but she explained that what she really needed most in this situation was to have her Savior held forth as sufficient. Of course, she also wanted to know what the Bible said about how she should live. She knew that she was as much to blame in her marriage as her husband, and was ready to hear pastoral counsel from the Scriptures. But she found that having more “practical” tips on marital enhancement was not getting the job done. Instead, it was stoking the fires of her anger toward herself, her husband, and God. After a while of Christ-centered preaching, she was able to raise her eyes to heaven and gratefully embrace the God of Promise, and only then was she ready to deal with the issues she needed to address in her relationship.

So the most important thing we need as fathers is to have Christ placarded before us in his saving office. No amount of marital or parental technology will address the deepest doubts and insecurities of spouses and parents—which are always about more than being better spouses and parents.

Recently I saw a television news feature that offered valuable advice on how to protect one’s home from Internet pornography. There are secular books out there that can help us understand the differences between men and women and how to be more sympathetic in our relationships. Countless programs are available for developing healthy sleep patterns, discipline, and structure in our children’s lives—many of them my wife and I have found to be wise and helpful. But we go to church to hear and receive what cannot be said or given anywhere else. It is the most important message that anyone can hear, in whatever stage of life, and it is not only a message, but the actual gift of eternal life to sinners, even to Christian ones."

What Horton expresses in the last paragraph has struck me with particular force the last few months. No wonder unbelievers often find Christians as narrow minded and arrogant! How many of us won't read anything "secular" about parenting? How many of us realize that many "Christian" authors fill their books with not-so-Biblical ideas, yet they make Family Christian's top seller list? Some unbelievers have far more wisdom than some believers. It isn't your wisdom that saves you or places you in God's family. We become pharisaically arrogant when we think we are somehow better than unbelievers. It is undeserved grace that saves, grace through the foolishness of faith. That is the good news for bad moms too.

Horton writes more that must be quoted . . . " In his well-known exchange with the rich young ruler, Jesus was asked, “What is the one work I must do to be saved?” as if Jesus had come as a new and improved Moses, with some additional law, some new bit of practical advice for saving entrepreneurial types such as this fellow. Knowing that the young man wanted to justify himself, Jesus pointed to the law—not a new one, but the familiar one. “All this I have done from my youth,” the young man replied. Nothing new here: this is the old list he learned in Sabbath school. No doubt, he really thought he had done it all. Like many young men and fathers today, he may have had his checklist of principles for success in life. He was probably even doing the time-management thing. He was all put together—that is, until Jesus showed him the real intention of the law. “Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor,” Jesus commanded. Now he was undone. True, there was no law requiring a vow of poverty, but Jesus’ intention was to expose both the deepest meaning of the law as selfless love of neighbor and the deepest resistance to this law of love in the heart of this young man.

In much of our preaching and teaching today, the “principles of successful living/fatherhood/marriage/whatever” are familiar. Sometimes there is a new piece of advice that sounds useful, but for the most part it’s common sense. The law is always common sense—until Jesus explains it. Then it is just sheer “lunacy”—an impossible demand. That is why the rich young man went away sad. And it is why, after a constant diet of moral direction devoid of the serious demand of the law and the consolation of the gospel, so many end up concluding that the “God thing” may be for others, but not for them. Helpful advice can indeed come in handy. But until you have felt the force of God’s law and its demand for total surrender to the unqualified love of God and neighbor from the heart, you can never know the liberating power of the good news that “while we were still sinners”—still enemies of God and our neighbor, even those neighbors in our own household, “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8)."

Hopefully God will supply me with the time and inspiration someday to post more directly about Motherwise. There is a rough draft of my thoughts over at Rock Cries Out

I leave you with this last bit of encouragement from Horton's article . . . " One of the practical effects of clear preaching of the law in all of its binding force, and the gospel in all of its sweet liberty is that we are able, really for the first time, to be the failures that we all are (if we allow ourselves to hear of it). “Good” fathers are not those who “have it all together.” (Those people actually scare me.) In fact, one of the things we younger dads discover in conversation with more mature Christian fathers whose track record we respect is a corresponding sense of humility and weakness. Despite all the advice, they usually end with something like this: “But you know, it’s often a mess—a mess that I’ve made of things, and God seems to have cleaned it up.” This does not always mean that failures leave no lasting residue, but that God’s promise can be trusted: “I will be a God to you and to your children forever.”