Take Back Your Family: From the Tyrants of Burnout, Busyness, Individualism, and the Nuclear Ideal

by Jefferson Bethke

It doesn’t matter if you are a nice and tidy religious family or a rugged nontraditional family or some other version. In the West we have the same rot festering right below the soil—same disease, different plants. And that is the disease of self being the most important thing.

“Individualism hasn’t quite seeped in as strongly here, and they see the family as one of the main places to find an identity and the primary vehicle for bringing blessing and goodness into the world. In America, Christian or secular, we just simply don’t believe that. Families are teams here, and the Scriptures are their playbook.”

Those who most advocate for the nuclear family, Christians, don’t seem to want to return to a biblical vision in any sense of the word. They are not chasing an ancient picture of family. They are chasing 1950; they just want Leave It to Beaver.

“In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.”1 The more conservative people among us say, “Let’s bring back the power of the family!” But the vision is an actual impossibility for everyone except the rich, and not a true historical or biblical vision of family anyway. The more liberal folks among us say, “The family doesn’t matter. Do what you want. Family is anyone and everyone, right?” Both are wrong (with both also holding a sliver of truth, like usual).

One easy litmus test for God’s vision for the world is, if it’s worse for the poor, it’s most likely not his vision.

We pass on our faith to our kids, not so they can consume it for their personal emotional feel-good, but so the territory of the kingdom (God’s good and gracious reign and rule) can be expanded as we raise disciples who kick back the darkness and permeate every walk of life with the sacrificial love found in Jesus.

Basically, God didn’t make the whole world look like Eden. It’s just a common conflation for us to read the more “zoomed in” account and think it refers to everything even in the “zoomed out” setting. He created Eden as a prototype, made divine diplomats as agents and ambassadors of his rule, placed them in this garden, and essentially pointed out to the rest of the earth and said, “Your job is to go make the rest of the world look like this.” The divine vocation and call is to build. To rule. To bring order and shalom to bear on everything we touch. And to do it justly, wisely, and lovingly. And that is the job we self-sabotage too, by the way.

Worship at the beginning of the Bible primarily was centered around the job God gave us. Our job was to make, cultivate, create, build, steward, and tame.

Today, our Family Scouting Report includes the names of our kids, and we answer these questions about each of them: What’s their role on the team? How are they wired or gifted? How or where do they need the most support? What activities do we need to prioritize for them to flourish? What is the best way to spend one-on-one time with them? When do they come most alive?

Pentland meticulously laid out five distinct traits that top performing teams all have in common. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet. Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.6