Helping Them: The Plan
Our world has a children problem! No one is having children!! Because our world has a marriage problem! No one is getting married!! What can we do? (Cue headless chicken)
The solutions to the marriage decline range from giving up, to kicking the immigrants out so the rest of us can have houses, to massive religious revival. That last will work, given the correct form of revival. But I believe that part of any religious or even cultural revival, which is fundamental to getting our marriage situation changed, will need to be changing the role of ‘everybody else’ in the ‘getting married’ process.
Introduction
This is my fourth post in my ‘Helping Them’ series. Each of the previous posts focused on a given class of person:
What does the unmarried person need to do in order for this whole ‘helping them get married’ thing to work? Well, obviously, they have to be open to being helped. Indeed, I would argue that they need to go well beyond merely ‘being open’, and actively ask for help.
The first and most important person in the chain of ‘helping’ is the fathers. It is often (and possibly deliberately) ignored, but they take primacy in the Scriptures. The father is responsible for teaching his family and, once they are taught, to arrange the marriage itself. For taking leadership and assuming responsibility.
But standing upstream of the fathers are the pastors, elders, teachers, theologians and authors who are responsible for, and have failed in their responsibility, teaching generations of fathers how to lead in this area.
In this post I am going to take a bit of a break from instructimg groups of people and lay out a basic framework of what the plan actually is. When pastors teach, when fathers lead, when the unmarried people accept help… what does that look like?
Changing Attitudes
The unmarried people themselves, parents, pastors, communities… everyone needs to change their attitudes about how we are to get unmarried people married. We need to change dozens of attitudes:
Do the Scriptures have anything to say about how we do this? Yes, they have a lot to say, and we don’t like it.
Is it the unmarried peoples job to do the whole ‘get married’ thing all by themselves? No. Nowhere in Scripture is that even hinted at.
Is it embarrassing to help or be helped? It shouldn’t be. What makes this different? We help people get jobs, find and buy a car, find and buy a house… why on Earth would this incredibly important decision and action be different?
Define Help
We need to admit/state/declare, on all levels, by all people, the ‘need to get married’ and the ‘how do we help’. What does this help look like? How important is it? Who should be involved?
Define/delegate Roles
Here’s some rocket science for you. If you are going to be helping someone get married, if someone is going to be helping you to get married, you and they both need to know what their ‘role’ is. It doesn’t necessarily need some big title… but it needs a definition. It needs a definition with boundaries and guidelines and steps.
Suppose, for example, you were to ask your best friend to ‘help you get married’ and he were to say, quite reasonably, ‘so what do you want me to do?” You need to have an answer to that question.
Define the Pathway
Or ‘redefine the pathway’ or ‘create a new pathway’… whatever floats your boats. Our current pathway is broken, badly broken, and needs to be erased root and branch and replaced. Dating and courting have failed us, we need to replace them.
Redefine Marriage
Let me hastily say that marriage is what it is, and it cannot be redefined. It was created by God, so good luck getting on the ‘Definition Change’ committee. What I mean here by ‘redefine’ is not, umm, ‘redefine’… but re-educating the man on the street, or at least the man in your pews, as to what marriage is. What it actually is, and always has been.
Destroy Dating/Courtship and Engagement
These are new ideas, and they are deadly ones. There is not a hint of them in Scripture, and there should not be a hint of them in what we do, either.
Destroy Divorce
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Matthew 19:6
Nuff said.
Conclusion
Ok, maybe I bit off a bit more than I can chew. Maybe we can’t, in one post, totally lay out the entire ‘plan’ for getting our unmarried people married. Married and having children. And getting those children married when their turn comes around.
But this is at least a start.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
Here are a few of the articles that I remember about this crisis. If you have suggestions for others, please comment and I will add them.
