Unfortunately it is not according to a Barna Survey. 51% of American Christian parents surveyed “expected the church to take the lead.” Only 49% of parents considered teaching their children about reason, faith, and Biblical Christianity to be their responsibility. Correctly children’s ministry leaders state that discipleship should begin at home.
The findings reflect another concerning trend, which shows 86% of parents “feel under-equipped” to teach their kids the Bible and basic theology.
There’s a deep challenge here, Barna stated. “If children’s ministry is going to be healthy, pastors must help both parents and their ministry leaders find common ground.” Discipling children should be a joint effort. For example, the Gospel is lived out in the home, alongside the Church, not just taught on Sundays.
The church needs to encourage parents to embrace their primary role, by teaching them how to have everyday faith conversations. Properly discipled mums and dads will be better prepared to disciple their kids.
Families, Barna continued, should be encouraged “to practice their faith together in everyday life—serving others, praying as a household, and applying Scripture in real situations.” This is “so the next generation grows resilient and ready to follow Jesus in the world beyond church walls.”
Barna’s insights are nothing new. They point back to the Puritans, who understood that every home was to be a little church. “A family is a little Church, a little commonwealth,” said William Gouge in 1622. “It is a school where first principles and civics are learned; whereby men are prepared for greater matters of Church and State.”
Or as Charles Spurgeon preached in 1875, “Men are as much serving God in looking after their own children, and training them up in God’s fear, as they would be if they had been called to lead an army to battle for the Lord of hosts.” This includes “minding the house and making their household a church for God.” “It is a grand event when a family is saved!” Spurgeon cheered. “Oh, if households enter into Christ, the very bells of Heaven may ring again and again and again with a joy that has many joys within it!”
With a powerful win and an even stronger message, Scottie Scheffler and Nike have spotlighted fatherhood as the true measure of greatness in a culture that often overlooks it.
Fatherhood and family — which are often portrayed negatively in popular culture — received a rare moment of glory recently, thanks to Nike’s heartwarming ad celebrating pro golfer Scottie Scheffler’s win at The Open Championship in Northern Ireland.
Posted on X, the ad featured two photos of Scheffler. The first showed the world’s top-ranked golfer playing with his one-year-old son Bennett on the green, with the caption, “You’ve already won.” The second image captured Scheffler mid-swing, paired with the words, “But another major never hurt.”
It would have been great to have God, the creator of families get a mention from Scottie Scheffler as we know he is openly Christian and speaks frequently about his faith. He identifies as a Christian and has stated that his faith is what defines him most, even above his golf career. He actively connects his faith to his golf, stating that he competes to glorify God and that his identity is in Christ, not in his achievements on the golf course, according to Christians in Sport.
Not every state in the U.S.A. is created equal when it comes to family flourishing. According to a new study released this week, nine of the top 10 states with the healthiest families are conservative.
At the root of what is hurting our communities is broken families,” Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), which commissioned IFS to carry out the family structure study, told The Washington Stand.
The 2025 Family Structure Index ranks all 50 states based on three criteria: the percentage of married adults between the ages of 25 to 54, the average number of lifetime births per woman, and the percentage of children aged 15 to 17 who are living with their married parents. The outcomes tracked closely with conservative political ideology, especially in states with a strong religious base, according to Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS).
States that support strong family structures reap the rewards of lower poverty rates, better educational outcomes, and economic prosperity,” Tom Shaheen, vice president of Policy for the Pennsylvania Family Institute, told TWS.
The majority of teenagers in 17 states are raised in broken or single-parent homes. In Louisiana, barely one in three teens (35.9%) lives with his or her own parents.
Areas with fewer intact families experienced more violence. Canton, where two out of three children are raised outside wedlock, has 12 times the level of violent crime as the Columbus suburb of Dublin, where 84% of teens live with their parents.
Children raised in areas with fewer strong families and a robust culture of marriage were also less likely to graduate high school. “Comparatively high family instability across the state is undoubtedly one reason Ohio ranked 28th in on-time high school graduation,” said the CCV. “We know that states with a greater share of married parents have substantially higher graduation rates, even after controlling for states’ median income, race/ethnicity, education level, and age composition.”
Not one of the 50 states has a birthrate that meets the replacement level of 2.1. The closest, South Dakota, has a fertility rate of 2.01. Every other state’s birthrate falls below 2.0.
The Centre for Christian Virtue offers three concrete plans to strengthen families — and, unlike other think tanks, some of the steps can only be implemented by the church.
“Restoring a Hope and a Future for our children is possible. It starts with a commitment to addressing the root cause driving the challenges in our communities. Changing course will require both Church and State solutions,” says the report.
The state should eliminate marriage penalties, teach the Success Sequence in school, and promote marriage broadly in the public imagination, say experts.
The Success Sequence, created by scholars at the Brookings Institution, found that if young people graduate high school, get a job, and get married before having kids, “it is nearly impossible to live in poverty,” in CCV’s words. They also found those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder saw the greatest gains from following those steps, which sometimes lifted 99% of the population out of poverty. “Ohio should require public schools to teach the Success Sequence as part of their curriculum,” says the CCV report. “Ohio should create a public education and media campaign focused on increasing the marriage rate and promoting strong and stable marriages,” it adds.
Churches should “emphasize marriage and family,” underscore the “value of a faith-based marriage and family life,” and encourage couples to cast the burdens of marriage on Christ. “Couples who attend religious services together are significantly more likely to be happily and stably married,” notes CCV. “Churches must routinely proclaim an inspiring vision of marriage where the beauty, goodness, power, and difficulties of marriage and family life can be shared in age-appropriate ways to the entire congregation.’
The title of “The Hope and a Future Report” comes from Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” The self-affirming verse has displaced the gospel message of John 3:16 as the most popular Bible verse in America.
The number of married households in America has fallen from 71% in 1971 to 47% in 2022? When mothers and fathers cannot take their place in God’s order, and children lack the example of a working father, society sets young people up for a life of government dependence and wasted potential. This is the big challenge facing the new Trump-led government, a godless generation.
America’s retreat from work serves as an indictment of the US welfare system. After the Left purposefully throttled President Donald Trump’s red-hot economy in the name of COVID-19, Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending spree gave workers collecting unemployment a $300 weekly bonus. That surplus gave approximately one in four workers more money than they could earn by working. One study showed that policy alone depressed employment by approximately 14%.
The report also shows the problems presented by counterproductive economic interventionist policies that destroy jobs and opportunity. Politicians promote tax hikes that raise prices, massive spending that fuels inflation, and subsidies for unpopular products such as electric vehicles — all of which distort the market — for short-term political gain. For example, a minimum wage, when raised too high, prices out the poorest and neediest from the job market. The CBO estimated a proposed minimum wage hike would give workers an average of $50 a week — and throw 1.3 million people out of the workforce, reducing GDP by $9 billion.
During the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration, all net job growth has gone to immigrants. Between 2019 and late 2023, 2.9 million immigrants took U.S. jobs, while 183,000 American citizens left the workforce. Mass immigration—illegal and legal—reduces wages, making a welfare check seem far more inviting than 40 hours of toil.
Churches alone stand in the position to address the underlying issues that keep sidelined Americans out of the workforce — addiction, depression, lack of motivation, family commitments, lack of child care, etc. — and to elevate even seemingly mundane work to its true spiritual significance.
The family is the basic unit of God’s plan for His world. He designed it to be a strong foundation for society and for each individual. When the family functions according to God’s design, it is a powerful force for good in the world.
As the original and basic cell of society, the family is the natural organic source of all societies. The liberal secularists’ assumption that the individual is the basic unit of society, is an assumption that is impossible to demonstrate.
Marriage being opened up to combinations of people other than one man and one woman marks the death knell of the nation. No society has ever endured far beyond the demeaning of the marriage institution.
Traditional marriages produce children, who extend the nation’s existence, ideals, goals, and wealth for another generation. Traditional families are healthier, more stable, and more productive than other kinds of families, resulting in a net gain for society.
God ultimately owns children, but he entrusts them to parents to discipline and disciple them, for him. That means the government/the state does not own our children.
“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” Psalm 127:3
Our enemy, Satan, knows that parents are the first and strongest barrier to provide protection for children against predation and grooming. He knows that God gave children parents to protect them from evil and danger, so he tries to separate children from their parents, isolating them and making them vulnerable to his lies. It’s all part of the spiritual battle raging around us.
Satan has the family in his crosshairs as he ramps up his attack. But God has already given us the answer to this spiritual attack, and it’s found in Deuteronomy 6 and Ephesians 6.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6:5–9
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4
The answer to the attack on the family and the intense LGBTQ, pro-abortion, CRT, etc., indoctrination directed toward children is parents—fathers in particular—teaching their children the Word of the Lord, day in and day out, in all situations.
If you are a father, are you the kind of father who is intentional about bringing your children up in the instruction of the Lord? The kind of father who spends time with his children so he has opportunity to talk about the Lord when he sits, walks, and rises with his children? You have the responsibility before the Lord to be that kind of dad—you cannot leave it solely to your wife or to your church. You stand responsible before God as the head of your family.
After all, marriage is God’s design for man, woman, and family.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24
Olga Khazan, who wrote the Atlantic piece and has been cohabiting with her partner for 15 years, says these stats also struck her as counterintuitive. However, she then admits that “this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.”
Of course, happiness isn’t the sole or even the best reason to get married. Many things in life carry deep meaning and significance that don’t necessarily make us happy. A life lived only for happiness is a futile “chasing after the wind.” Enduring suffering, overcoming trials and tragedy, or sacrificing time, energy, or even our lives for others are all richly worthwhile pursuits that yield rewards in eternity. Certainly, loving someone and raising godly children is worth it, even if it’s not always fun.
And we should note, that “happiness” is a malleable word. When survey participants say being married or having children made them “happy,” they may often mean that these permanent connections give them lasting joy, something more profound than fleeting happiness, which surveys seldom quantify.
Still, these consistently stark results are unmistakable. They should challenge the entire way of thinking in sitcoms, movies, and editorials. Marriage is one of the chief sources of well-being and satisfaction in life. The fact that marriage rates have declined so dramatically over the last 50 years has had real, population-wide consequences.
Because the reasons people are not marrying at the same rates are so complex, different solutions will be required to raise the marriage rate. According to Wilcox and Bass, one of the most important reasons is the fact that, for many Americans who are living together and may already have children, getting married incurs a tax “penalty.” The federal government needs to, in their words, stop “making marriage a bad financial bet for lower-income families.”
That would be a good start. Ultimately, however, our bad laws are reinforced by a low view of marriage that has infected hearts and minds via entertainment, media, culture, and individual choices. We have a worldview problem, which has led to a conflict between the values and priorities of millions of people and the way they were actually created to live.
Marriage is part of God’s plan for humanity and for His creation. No other human institution forges such lasting and consequential bonds. So, it should surprise no one — least of all Christians — that our nation’s 50-year experiment with alternatives to marriage has left huge numbers of people deeply unhappy. Repent and get back into a relationship with your Heavenly Father through the sacrifice Jesus made our your behalf.
” Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.“John 14:6
Dr Voddie Baucham does a great job of addressing the big issues confronting the church today. God is a God of order and that starts with the family. Satan is at war with God’s order and he attacks the basic foundational unit of society, the family.
From creation, we know that God made Adam first. He was made from the dust of the earth but Eve was made out of Adam to be his helper. So, with the act of Creation God made it abundantly clear that there was an established order. Moreover, God, also from the beginning, created the order of marriage and it is clear that “man was to leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 3:24). This was confirmed by Jesus “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew19:4-5). How the world has moved away from God’s established order and values. Jesus also told us that this is what the world would be like prior to His second coming. It would be like the days of Noah when God judged the world with a worldwide flood.
“For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Matthew 24:37-39
Putin claims West trying to destroy the family institution by normalizing gay marriage, ‘pedophilia’
Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning over what he called religious attacks from Western culture Tuesday as he suspended a landmark nuclear arms treaty and threatened to move forward with nuclear tests.
In his address, Putin leveled sharp criticism at Western values and said the U.S. and other Western nations were using “information attacks” to target youth, distort “historical truth,” and “attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious institutions in our country.”
Putin appeared to suggest the advancement of same-sex marriage and other rights for LGBT-identified people are aimed at destroying the institution of the family and promoting pedophilia. Putin at least got this right.
“Look at what they’re doing with their own people,” he said. “It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life.”
As an illustration, Putin claimed priests are being forced to “bless same-sex marriages.”
After asserting that “people can live however they want” and that Russia has “never intruded into people’s private life,” Putin cited the definition of marriage found in the scriptures.
“Look at the holy Scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned,” Putin said.
Putin also cited a report stating the Anglican Church is considering the idea of a gender-neutral God, an apparent reference to a vote earlier this month by the Church of England to officially endorse plans for priests to offer prayers of blessing for same-sex couples.
“What can we say? God forgive them,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
This is proof that God can use anybody to declare His truths. Just as God used leaders in the past such as Nebuchadnezzar and Darius the Mede he is using the most unlikely leader Vladimir Putin to declare the truth of what is really transpiring in the West.
Great article in The Australian Saturday 19th November 2022 by Angela Shanahan
COLUMNIST: Angela Shanahan is a Canberra-based freelance journalist and mother of nine children. She has written regularly for The Australian for over 20 years.
This week marked the fifth anniversary of Australia supporting same-sex marriage in a postal vote. Now we are being reassured by same-sex marriage advocates that “society has not fallen apart”.
Think again. If the punitive coercion suffered by people who did not support gay marriage during the period preceding the vote didn’t convince you that this was not just about marriage, but about the gradual imposition of a radical agenda on the whole of society, then look what has happened since.
If the dissolution of society as we know it was an exaggeration, a furious expression of frustrated Christians angry at seeing the social verities of the past falling away, people might start looking at their local school and see what sorts of things are being taught to their children. The notion that our sexual identity is fluid and not fixed is now accepted in most government schools, and challenging that view is impossible.
It has already been raised as a problem if a religious anti-discrimination bill is ever passed, and activists are now fixated on making it harder to challenge the trans agenda even in private and systemic Catholic schools. In Canada, despite assurances and a preamble to the law, Catholic schools are having a very difficult time teaching Catholic precepts on marriage and sexuality, and in the US many individuals and groups are being punished for what amounts to thought crime, prompting a conservative backlash.
The real problem with the Marriage Equality fight was the fight itself. It was never a civilised discussion in a civilised environment. It was bare-knuckle and nasty from the Yes side, from daubing vile slogans on church walls to ridiculing and denouncing people on social media. I know, I went through it. And it goes on.
It has spread beyond marriage, to the trans agenda. I recently wrote a column about a woman who started an app for women and girls called Giggle. This woman was threatened with a human rights action over the very nature of the people for whom her app was intended, women, by a transsexual person who thought they should not be discriminated against because they identified as a woman. These are the two great mantras of the new society” “Discrimination” and “Identity”. It will only get worse.
Go back to the case of Israel Folau. Freedom of expression was not available to Folau who as a believing Mormon did not support same-sex marriage. Not only did he lose his job as Australia’s star rugby player but other players who supported him and did not support SSM were told not to say anything. Meanwhile, those who supported the Yes vote were allowed to speak out. Rugby Australia undermined their freedom of expression about conscientiously held views, becoming, in effect, the arbiters of their conscience.
An even graver case was Archbishop Julian Porteous who, as a preliminary salvo to the same-sex marriage vote, was dragged before the Human Rights board in Tasmania for disseminating a booklet outlining Catholic teaching on marriage to Catholic students. The complainant was not protesting about the church’s ban on remarriage after divorce or any of the teachings about marriage and fertility tied to the vows which married Catholics must make. No, this was an opener in the battle for same-sex marriage. The agenda of the Equality movement was not about equality at all: it was about trying to muzzle the view that the family, based on a generative relationship, is the bedrock of society which has been common to all societies of all religious persuasions since time immemorial.
Meanwhile, the trans agenda has inserted itself into the centre of right think. Who says society as we know it hasn’t declined?
Consequently, the number of cases of well-meaning ordinary people being denounced on social media, or to the human rights apparatuses and even pushed out of positions for stating quite ordinary views on marriage, the family, and sexual identity is increasing, and freedom of expression – and particularly of religious expression – is being undermined.
Andrew Thorburn is an ordinary man who happened to be at a church nine years before when his minister expressed moral views not in line with the Equality mantra. Thorburn is chair of the City on a Hill Church, which Essendon football club pronounced has views in “direct contradiction to our values as a club”. So, a football club, assuming a prior moral authority to the church, forced his resignation as the club’s CEO.
Not surprisingly, it was this case that awakened the general public to the danger that now awaits anyone. Not only could someone dig up a sermon a pastor gave nine years before and still hold you to account, but how long before, Torquemada-like, you are taken to the inquisitors of the board of the company for which you work, or the school where you teach, or any governing body?
It is well known that in most echelons of the public service various topics of conversation, especially those dealing with sex and family issues, are off the table. The endorsement of Thorburn’s removal by the AFL and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews highlights the frightening seriousness of this. It has made a mockery of the idea that we have equality of expression, and that the real fault line is freedom of religion.
God is over mankind and all of us are under God’s authority. Man is the pinnacle of God’s creation and human beings were given authority over all other aspects of that creation. These two facts of reality are unassailable– in virtue of this we, as free agents, are burdened with hierarchy. And, being burdened with it, we are burdened with “moral responsibility” and “inescapable accountability”.
The structures of the biological family and of God’s spiritual family, the Church, are also hierarchical. To advance this truth today will obviously put one in the crosshairs of many who resent hierarchy in both arenas. However, the Church’s purpose is not to be the culture, it is to subvert the culture and call it to repentance.
The Triune God Is the Source of Hierarchy
Jesus subordination to the Father discloses something transcendent to us: the eternal subordination of the second Person of the Trinity to the First:
““Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” John 5:19
“Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” John 6:57
“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.This command I received from my Father.” John 10:18
These and several other passages, especially in John’s Gospel, reveal that there is subordination within the Trinity itself. This is why hierarchy can never cease to exist. Because there is a hierarchical relationship within the very Godhead, in the Son’s eternal subordination to the Father, and because the creation proclaims the glory of God, there can therefore never be a creation without hierarchy.
The problem, therefore, is not with hierarchy. The problem is what we as sinful creatures do with the authoritative roles that exist within hierarchies. That is the problem that requires our attention. All other attempts to eliminate hierarchy, authority, or subordination are but fool’s errands. They are quixotic undertakings that can never be realized and that only lead to our own misery as we continue to tilt at windmills.
Servant Leadership
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.“
Mark 10:45
“Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” John 13:12-14
And so while bad hierarchies or bad people who fill authoritative roles within a hierarchy may corrupt our understanding of it, it is not “hierarchy£ itself that is the problem. In fact, it is part of the solution to our modern malaise, our current malady of “tyranny of the masses.”
Unfortunately, for a culture saturated with Critical Theory in its various manifestations, just the mention of hierarchy, often construed as “subordination,” will engender a kind of primal rage– one that goes so far as to abandon the neutrality of law itself. Mari Matsuda, one of the founding mothers of Critical Legal Theory, explains the need to dismantle hierarchy and the means by which it might be done:
“Through our sometimes painful work in coalition we are beginning to form a theory of subordination; a theory that describes it, explains it; and gives us the tools to end it. As lawyers working in coalition, we are developing a theory of law taking sides, rather than law as value-neutral.” Matsuda, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition
For Matsuda, any structure of authority in the culture is a threat to autonomy. It is “subordination” to an authority other than the self, and subordination of any form to an external authority is treated as an intrinsic evil. The means to end “subordination” for Matsuda is to turn the law itself into a tool of political activism; to make the law “take sides.”
In this vision of the law, lady justice (or “person justice”) has the blindfold removed. Now the all-seeing eye of justice can impose justice where justice has been neglected. But this imposed justice cannot tolerate inequality of any kind, and so hierarchy in all its forms and manifestations must go–to include hierarchy in the family. As is with any Marxist-inspired mode of thought, however, the injustice that might have to occur in the process of righting previous injustices is given little to no consideration.
Jesus, unlike modern, Ivy league-trained lawyers, has a very different view of hierarchy and authority. On the one hand, he commends those who recognize their place in hierarchical structures, praising them in fact for their faith:
“When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?” The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.” Matthew 8:5-13
The centurion’s grasp of his place, both as a man under authority and one in authority, is held up by Christ as a model for others. Of course what stands out in this account is that the man in authority, the centurion, comes to Jesus on behalf of his servant–out of genuine concern, out of love, for the one under his authority.
This is servant leadership. It is the same kind of servant leadership that Jesus Himself exemplifies in paradigmatic form as the Creator of the universe who comes into His own creation to serve it:
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.Mark 10:45
“Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.” Revelation 20:6
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 