Recently, Steve spoke with Reverend Dr. Emily McGowin, Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College. She is also a priest in the Anglican Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others (C4SO). Her latest book, Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God is now available from IVP. Dr. McGowin earned a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton, M.Div. from Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, and a B.A. in biblical studies from Criswell College.
What are families for? I mean, that seems like the most silly question. Well, it’s so we can love each other, so you have someone to raise you when you don’t know anything. But what does the scripture say about that?
Some of the things you named are absolutely true. We could talk about it from an anthropological point of view. Yeah, families are for the survival of our vulnerable ones, making sure we have our material needs met, safety, security, that sort of stuff. And that’s real. But I think from the scripture’s point of view, family is for growing in love of God, self, and neighbor. I think that is our primary calling as the people of God. Whether we’re talking in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, we’re supposed to love God and love others. Therefore, family is supposed to be the place in which we learn how to do that. In the cooking, and the cleaning, and the chores, and the baseball practice, and all that kind of stuff.
You tell this story about going to a seminar that was emphasizing parenting as a way to launch economically independent young adults into the world. This made you scratch your head, so talk to me about this.
It did, and I may not have been completely honest in the book. I came out really annoyed. My poor husband had to listen to me rant all the way home. My concern was that approach, seeing launch-ability as the major goal, seems to conform more with the American vision of economic success than it does what I think the Christian purpose in parenting is. Which again, is to raise children who are able to love God, self, and others. I wouldn’t suggest that we ignore one for the other, but it just felt too constricted of a vision.
I did not grow up longing to have children. I didn’t really relate to kids very well, but I thought this is what we do. And I do remember my wife, at eight or nine months, just saying, I cannot believe how much I love this child I’ve never seen. And as a good husband, I did not say, I have no idea what you’re talking about. How can I love someone I know nothing about? I do remember the moment my daughter was born. They’re carrying her across to go weigh her and her head turns to the side. And I know they say newborns can’t focus their eyes yet, but I promise we locked eyes, or at least from my point of view. And it was like I was hit with a hammer in the chest of, that’s who you are, this is who you are, you’re this whole person.
Yep.
The love was there for me. I had to, I guess, have someone there to know. There is something incredibly spiritual about this new being, this creation and child of God coming into our lives.
I think that you’re right, that receiving a child into your life, whether you’re the parent or the grandparent, or aunt or uncle or friend, it is a mysterious gift. It’s something completely unearned that you feel unprepared for, and it’s so overwhelming in the way it changes your life. That’s why I think a lot of parents just can’t compare it to anything else in terms of your relationships. You never experience the world the same way again.
For us when we were driving home from the hospital with our first child, I just thought, I cannot believe they’re letting us do this. We have no idea what we’re doing. But eventually, I think if we can get focused on what God intends for us in the world, then we realize that it’s far more complicated but also simpler than we realize. It’s about communicating the love of God, learning to love themselves, and learning to love others. Now there’s tons of other stuff we have to do. They have to learn to tie their shoelaces, drive, arithmetic, and all that stuff. But all of that is on the way to this, what I call, apprenticeship to love. That is the primary focus. I think that gives you a place to stand when everything else feels shaky.
What do you think you’ve learned about God in your experience as a parent?
I used to hear anger or wrath of God and assume that it was like the way we experience adult anger, this egotistical lashing out. And of course, we know God is not like that, but that’s our human analog. But I’ve realized since having children, that I think the love of God is the source of God’s anger and wrath. In other words, it’s when God sees the way the beloved is being destroyed or unjustly treated, that God is wrathful. It’s not out of ego; it’s out of love for the beloved. You see your child hurting because of what someone else has done to them, and all of a sudden, I see how love could lead to fierce anger. Now we have to, of course, correct that discipline. But I just appreciate more that God’s anger and God’s wrath are coming from his eternal love, not from a place of ego. And I think parenting has helped me get a taste of that.
Somewhere around page 118 of Households of Faith, you’re talking about some single friends in the church. And one of them you call Brandon. He gets frustrated at some point and he finally says, I am a family. Now he doesn’t mean, I secretly have a spouse and children somewhere, but he is a household of faith in the church. And what can we do better? For instance, in my denomination, it was announced a few years ago that more than 50 percent of the adults are currently single. And I thought, whoa, that means over half of the programs we have should be for them, but it’s the other way around.
We’re typically like waiting for them to catch up. Right. And the sign of being a true adult with your own household and to be treated as a full member of the church is to be married and have children. And good gracious, that is wrong. I think for me, in my position in the church, I primarily serve by preaching and teaching. And I’ve really tried to fill my imagination with the stories and experiences of single people so that when I preach and teach, I’m thinking about them just as often as I’m thinking about my married friends.
What you just said there is such good advice, to know the full scope of who is in the congregation. That’s beautiful advice even just to say, I need to think about who’s here and what do I have to feed them.
This is going to sound funny. I actually have a list of people’s names so that I would really have them in mind as I wrote, and Brandon was among those.
So as a parent, we get this idea. I will be the good example. My children will follow in my footsteps. Or not. We are not all on the same spiritual path. So, do you have counsel about parenting when children turn out to have minds of their own? Imagine that.
I know, imagine that. My kids are only fifteen, fourteen, and twelve. So I still have a ways to go, but they are already demonstrating their own independence of thought and interest. And so, it’s a daily discipline for myself of trusting both them and God. That they are not without care beyond my grasp, right? When they’re outside the door, when they go to school, when they’re with friends, I can entrust them to God. They’re never outside of God’s loving care. Even if they think that they are.
What about parents who have done their best and they find that they have kids who want to cut them out of their life?
Because so many of us are trying to heal from our own wounds, while we are learning how to love those in our households, we’re going to get a lot of it wrong and make our own mistakes. That’s hard to face, because you want to get this thing right. This thing that is so intimate and so personal. I don’t know if there’s pain, like the pain of failure in a relationship when it comes to parents and children. From a Christian point of view, we know that Jesus Christ himself experienced the disappointments and frustrations and hurts of having family that didn’t understand or support in the ways they should have. He’s familiar with the pains that we are going through and, though not a parent himself, he expresses himself regularly in the language that we might use as a parent. Jerusalem. Jerusalem. How I’ve longed to gather you like a mother hen gathers her chicks, right? And this, just for me, is knowing that I have a God who understands and who is not abandoning me in the times when I can see that I have failed. There is, if not resolution and redemption right now, there is hope of that in the resurrection.
Well, you start the book with a nice personal story that I’m sure people can relate to about how you were given a blueprint for family life. This was from a very popular Christian marriage manual of the time. What was that blueprint and what was it that made you think, wait a minute, this doesn’t quite sit right with me?
I was in the Southern Baptist Convention, along with my fiancé, and it was a book that was well known at the time and basically said that my husband was meant to be the leader and the head of our home. I was supposed to be his supportive partner; my realm of influence was the home and children, and his realm of influence was public. Whatever work he was doing, I was meant to support. Now, on the one hand, I definitely wanted to support my husband and his work. That wasn’t the issue. I also very much wanted to have children. But from very early in my Christian life, when I became a Christian as a teenager, I felt really drawn to theological studies and even more to teach theology. And so, we had from the start of our relationship known that I was headed to higher education. So, all of a sudden, I was like, how am I going to pursue that career and also measure up to this ideal that I’m being told is the biblical ideal? It did create a minor crisis for myself. My husband, he was fine. He immediately said, ‘well, honey, if this doesn’t work for you, if you don’t think it’s true, then just get rid of it. We don’t have to deal with that.’ And I thought, oh, thank you, Lord. We’re going to be okay.
Well, you used the word Christian and traditional, and I’ve heard these, traditional marriage, biblical marriage because people, especially Christians, want to refer to scripture. Like, what does God tell me about this? But what does traditional mean?
So biblical when it comes to family is tricky because the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are full of all kinds of things. If you’re looking for a place where God just directly tells you what your family is supposed to look like, it’s not there. We have to piece it together from the narrative of the text. The majority of the families you find there look like the families of their day. They look patriarchal and patrilineal, and that’s a fancy way of saying the oldest male living relative is the head.
Rather it seems as though God gives insight into how to live better or more justly within that already existing structure. How to live faithfully, like Christians, within that existing environment. So that’s a really long-winded way to say, when we say biblical, we have to be careful what we mean. If we mean what the Bible portrays families to be like, there’s lots of different kinds of biblical family. But if we mean biblical, that God has directly told us in the Bible what our families should look like, we don’t really have that. And that’s a troubling thing when you’re a modern person who just wants a formula.
Where’s my checklist?
What’s the checklist for success? But unfortunately the Bible doesn’t do that for us.
The phrase you started off with in our interview today was an invitation to apprenticeship to love. That’s where you learn it from someone who’s good at it, and hopefully we learn that from God. And then the way to ask, How will Jesus by his spirit teach us to love today? And boy, could there be a better question to ask ourselves any day?
Again, it’s not a to-do list for our daily life as a household, but it’s okay. This remains our primary focus. Learning how to love one another, love ourselves, love God. Sometimes we learn by failing and have to ask for forgiveness. But sometimes you do learn something that’s positive that you can share. And so, if we find that work difficult, the work of being apprentice to love, it’s because it is. We’re always living in that tension between the ideal and the actual, and that’s just the nature of the human experience, and it’s okay to have to accept that.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full interview at https://www.byuradio.org/episode_300.
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Steven Kapp Perry, host of the In Good Faith podcast, talks with believers of all walks of faith. This podcast aims to highlight the personal experiences of believers, collecting stories of hope and inspiration.
Art by Gustav Wentzel (1859-1927).
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