PASTORAL STUDIES 5 ‘MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY’
Introduction
Here is a non-Christian woman’s view of marriage:
It’s as though I’m scanning a desert with a pair of binoculars. Everywhere I look I see bodies strewn about in various stages of death and dying – divorce, isolation, abusive and decayed relationships. After viewing this I ask myself, Why would I want to begin that journey?
Here is a true story involving people I know. A couple have begun cohabiting and are about to separate because they are finding renting together expensive. He would like to take out a mortgage together but she won’t because she has been hurt before when committing to a relationship and doesn’t want to do the same again.
Here is a true story from our church’s experience. We had long-term contact with two families. They weren’t perfect but the children attended meetings and were generally co-operative. The father in one family had an affair with the mother in the other and the children’s behaviour became difficult in the extreme. You were made to feel that any word or gesture out of place could have led to allegations of sexual misconduct.
What do non-Christian young people think about sex? A girl, who attended the church here for a short period, told me that the reason you would sleep with someone was simply to express that you liked them. It certainly didn’t imply a long-term relationship was likely or even being considered.
We are going to look briefly at some statistics on family life but I wanted first to establish something – statistics are just the background to actual human beings who are experiencing pain and are misunderstanding what is happening in their lives.
Statistics Divorce Equals 14 per thousand marriages annually in the UK – which predicts something like a 58% divorce rate.
Marriage Number of marriages in 2001 lowest since 1897.
Marriage and Divorce Compared to the 1950’s there are now 25% fewer marriages but 5 times as many divorces each year in the UK.
Cohabitation Among non-married women aged under 60, the proportion cohabiting more than doubled from 13 per cent in 1986, which was the first year for which data is available on a consistent basis, to 28 per cent in 2001/2.
Children living with their parents The proportion of all households comprising a father and mother with dependent children fell from 38% in 1961 to 23% in 2001 and during the same period the percentage of lone-parent families tripled from 2% to 6%.
Sexually transmitted diseases Infection rates amongst teenage girls doubled in the 1990’s.
What’s going on? What explains the changes especially in marriage breakdown? I would like to discuss more general family pressures but the key is in the marriages so we will concentrate on that.
Legal changes Divorce is simply easier to come by but it would be foolish to ascribe such power to change society to the law. Changes in the law are brought about by societal change and pressure as well as then impacting on societal change. The OT law offered fairly easy divorce to non-believers because of their hard-hearts and there is clearly nothing wrong in doing that.
A mobile society When I say: ‘Your family’ who do you think of? Is it your nuclear family – you and your wife or husband and children – or is it your extended family – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. Because of work and geographical mobility we now experience as pretty normal what would have been unthinkable in previous generations and other societies. The nuclear family is distant from and not tightly and regularly linked to the extended family. An example is Inskip, the Baptist church to which Margaret’s family have belonged back to the 1800’s. Tracing the family history is comparatively easily because people stayed around and are buried in the graveyard – up to Margaret’s generation when most moved away. This means that married couples have to cope with many things that would traditionally have been shared out within the wider family. This can put pressures on married couples which they are clearly not intended to bear alone.
A highly sexualised society Sexually provocative images are used to sell almost anything and you cannot completely avoid seeing them. Sexually explicit materials are widely available and anyone here with a computer could be accessing them. A recent news-item (Ceefax) commented on the increased number of people receiving counselling for ‘sex-addiction’ and said the majority were habitual users of internet porn. Now we can read about sex-addicts (I personally think that category is extremely dubious) who watch hours of hardcore pornography daily but I want to point out the more insidious effects of such a society.
In a film no-one is surprised or thinks it unusual if the hero and his girl-friend sleep together. Indeed in ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, which would undoubtedly rate as a ‘family’ film, the heroine is sleeping pre-maritally with her boyfriend (who she is going to ditch) and the hero is planning a weekend away with his girlfriend, to whom he is not seriously committed, because as a widower he is sexually frustrated. A climate is created in which sex outside marriage is thought of as ‘normal’ – as is homosexuality or lesbianism.
Recently a marriage counsellor, not a Christian, pointed out the major danger of pornography is not the ‘addict’ but the person who wants to experiment by acting out what they have viewed. Her view was that many marriages are being damaged by the effects on men, but not only men, of such practises.
A very privatised society I regularly visit churches in village situations and am concerned by the changes people are seeing. With few exceptions people choose a rural location to live in because it is less stressful and more attractive. What they do is to fail to integrate into the village community and so choose to live out their lives in such isolation that they have no interaction with anyone else. In the past society in general, and certainly the local community, exerted a very powerful pressure on people’s behaviour and attitudes but that time is very long gone!
Damage done to the children of divorced parents The evidence is overwhelming that the children of divorced parents are normally damaged by it and will be, quite understandably, less ready to commit to marriage themselves and damaged when they enter marriage.
Falsely romantic views of marriage How do Christians cope with the seismic changes in the society around them? The danger is that, instead of going back to the Bible, they end up idealising the period before the changes and this means that romantic love is idealised in a way that the Bible doesn’t idealise it. There are societies where marriages are arranged – that has Biblical precedent – and that is not in itself wrong. There are societies where family responsibility would be expected to take precedent over romantic love and again that is not wrong. The point here is that unbiblical expectations put too much strain on the institution!
Pastoral Care – Helping MarriagesTwo things we must not underestimate:-
1. The effect of the society in which we live on Christians. One writer talked about how he used to point to the effects of Christianity in family situations. Firstly: it was how few Christian couples had marriages that ended in divorce – then: it was how few Pastors and their wives ended in divorce – and then ….. well he was a bit stuck after that! George Barna researching in the States found that Christians are as likely to divorce as anyone and that divorce was actually most common in the Bible Belt States. There may well be explanatory factors and our churches may do quite well but our churches are rarely full of those saved out the world!
2. The damage already done to those who are saved before they are saved. People coming from non-Christian backgrounds are not geared to think Biblically and will have some radically non-Biblical assumptions, which are all the more dangerous because they are assumptions! However the children of Christians will be influenced by the same assumptions amongst the school community.
A book recommendation and a few quotations from the book The book is ‘Married for God’ by Christopher Ash (IVP) – he has a larger book ‘Marriage’ with the same publisher. I recommend it as biblical and as honest. He says much I would like to repeat and don’t have time to. I would suggest very strongly you get the book and read through it.
Summary Basically marriage is about serving God together in a sexually intimate relationship which will, God willing, lead to children being born. It is between one man and one woman for life and its purposes can only really be properly served if both the man and woman are believers. Now some quotes:-
Firstly: a contrast – between a Christian marriage course’s publicity:
Relationships begin when you fall in love. Relationships end when you no longer feel in love. So love is central, but is rarely fully understood. The course will show how you can give and receive the love you need. It will show you how to keep romance permanently alive.
And Christopher Ash’s Biblical rewrite:
Marriage begins when you promise lifelong faithfulness. Marriage ends when one of you dies. Faithfulness is central, but it is rarely understood. The course will show you what faithfulness means and how to be faithful in good times and bad, no matter how you feel. It will show you how to keep faithfulness alive.
He comments: ‘That would be a good deal less in tune with the age in which we live, but a good deal more in tune with the Bible.’
Each chapter in the book starts with a situation being outlined. I will give you two and we will go on to include discussion – the first is about courtship:-
Ann felt numb inside. She had put her trust in Jesus Christ just six months earlier. Tonight she was going on her first date with a Christian man. Mike seemed to have such a straightforward past – a loving Christian home, a real Christian faith for as long as he could remember, and no serious girlfriend before. And now he had asked her, Ann, out.
She found him very attractive, both physically and as a Christian friend she respected and whose company she loved. She ought to have felt excited. And yet she felt numb. Because her past was such a mess by comparison. And now it all came flooding back: the dysfunctional home with her parents’ messy divorce and her two very temporary ‘stepfathers’; the awful peer pressure at school not to be a ‘virgin’ (despicable term of abuse, how she dreaded that word); the night she was pressurised into sleeping with a boy for the first time; the gradual descent into cheap sex that made her feel dirty but that she could not resist for fear of not being loved.
By now she was almost hard-wired to expect a date to end in bed. She knew in her head it had to be different. But she was paralysed with fear and regret. ‘How can I be a Christian?’ she asked herself. ‘I am dirty, spoiled goods. Purity is a dream for others, but can never be true for me.’ And yet she longed for purity.
And so when Mike arrived at the door, instead of the happy, relaxed Ann he had known at the church twenties group, he met a tense girl with traces of tears on her cheeks.
The second is about marriage:
All through her childhood, marriage had seemed to Lydia bit like war. Her father was a domineering man, a bully really. He used to speak unkindly to her mother, and rule the home in a quite scary way. When anything went wrong, it was never his fault. If he couldn’t blame it on his wife, it must have been one of the children’s fault. Lydia’s mother was cowed into a rather pathetic shadowy existence. Lydia resolved she would never be like her.
When she went to her uncle and aunt, things were very different. Her aunt was a forceful career woman who really seemed to rule the roost. She made all the decisions and simply told her husband about it later. Although Lydia admired her aunt’s spirit, she actually found herself feeling sorry for her uncle, or sometimes despising him. He did seem such a passive and downtrodden figure.
So when Lydia became a Christian and married Tony, she came away from the marriage preparation really puzzled. The evening had been all about ‘headship’ and ‘submission’, and she couldn’t really make head or tail of it. I mean, she could see the words in the Bible. But she couldn’t relate it to the dynamics of real life. And certainly seemed to come from a different planet, so far as her background was concerned. But she wanted to learn. She could see that neither her parents nor her uncle and aunt made attractive role models for marriage, and she longed for something both workable and beautiful. But just what did the Bible mean by ‘headship’ and ‘submission’?
So we have just looked at two scenarios of courtship and marriage and seen pastoral situations that we may face.
Reminding ourselves of what we are seeking to do My definition in our first session was that
PASTORAL CARE IS THE RANGE OF ACTIVITIES BY WHICH WE SEEK TO PROMOTE THE WELFARE OF OTHER CHRISTIANS AND WILL INVOLVE A WIDE SPECTRUM OF RESPONSES AND WAYS OF DEALING WITH SITUATIONS.
We will assume the existence of clear Bible teaching from the pulpit or in formal situations. However this needs to be clear, deal with real-life issues and so will deal with things that we might feel can be taken for granted. Both Ann and Lydia know ‘what’ they want to do but they don’t how, or what shape Christian living will take in practise! We need to be biblically balanced not reactionary. Some years ago Margaret attended a lecture on Christian marriage and the speaker hammered submission, submission, submission. Rather more fundamentally, our observation of the marriages we saw in trouble was the marriage partners were failing to be friends and companions. Also our ideas of submissiveness may be more Victorian in inspiration than related to the portrait of the ‘godly’ superwoman of Proverbs 31.
How can Ann and Lydia be helped? They can be helped by seeing what they have been taught lived out, and made incarnate, in front of them. Quoting from lecture 2:
If it is not happening is it because you only see Christians in formal situations at meetings? Being willing to offer and to receive hospitality is basic and highly important.
And from lecture 1:
(C)hurch life is not a relationship where we simply teach and instruct we choose a deeper and more holistic relationship to one another. Regarding the depth of relationships involved in church life, Paul wrote (1 Thessalonians 2: 8), ‘We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had becomes so dear to us.’
The most obvious place to learn about family life is in and from families and this is a clearly the New Testament strategy. Titus 2:3-5 directly addresses Lydia’s problem about ‘headship’ and ‘submission.’ ‘Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no-one will malign the word of God.’ It is the task of someone in the fellowship, and there is nothing about it being the pastor’s wife or the wife of one of the elders, to take the young women under their wing, and then to befriend them and to help them develop a Christian pattern of life. In a situation where many young women with children are socially isolated and lonely it ought to be even easier for us than it was to the Christian women of 1st Century Crete, about whom Paul was directing Titus.
Regarding Ann, who had the scarred sexual history, other Christian women are going to need to help. As are the Christian men who she is friends with who need to behave like ‘Christian’ men! She is learning an entire new way of doing relationships and will probably need someone to share it with and to learn to think biblically with. Girls talk with girls about relationships and she maybe needs a spiritual big sister. She may well also need friendships with Christian males that are just that ‘friendships’ with a shared agreement that there will be no long term relationship. This can be very helpful for someone newly converted who needs stability and to find what real and caring friendships are about!
Further thoughts It is perhaps unfortunate that the two examples I chose from Christopher Ash’s book concern women. Many marriage breakdowns stem from men’s behaviour and I want to look at two areas which may particularly concern men.
Firstly: Communication As a matter of observation – many problems in marriages (including porn addiction and affairs) come about when (because?) the couple stopped communicating. People have to learn to communicate with one another from early on in a marriage and to maintain it. That means making time and opportunity to communicate. Men can cut themselves off from their wives and need to learn to share their lives. Why develop a pattern in marriage – which can be extremely unhelpful – where either the husband or wife stay up much later than the other and you never go to bed at the same time? Isn’t that inviting problems?
Secondly: Accountability We all have responsibility for one another - Colossians 3: 16, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom’ but alongside this goes the acceptance of accountability to one another. If we fall from the faith we will damage many – (Hebrews 12: 15); ‘See to it that no-one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root (of apostasy) grows up to cause trouble and defile many.’ If you are engaged in a pattern of behaviour that you want to break the first step may be to share with/confess to a respected Christian friend and make yourself accountable to them in that matter. This means meeting regularly and giving them the freedom to ask you directly what is happening in this matter.
Conclusion What a war we are in and how little we may realize and respond ot it.
