Infusion Church: Escondido, CA

  by John Alwood

Balancing all of life's priorities is hard. My 3 month emergency sabbatical last year is proof of the fact that I have not figured this all out, yet. However, I do believe God has shown his grace to my wife and I by agreeing on the priority of valuing our family time and attention, even in the midst of so much ministry. There is a great temptation to use ministry and doing good as seemingly righteous excuses at our family's expense. We have had to make a conscious decision that we will not sacrifice our family on the alter of ministry. The primary way our thinking has changed to achieve this end is that we do not compartmentalize family as separate from my ministry, but rather as the most important priority in our ministry. If I don't love my wife and kids, then I cannot love my church, and I certainly cannot love my neighbors. believe that all Christians who have been given the blessing of a spouse and/or kids need to better understand their role as ministers to and in their family.

Here are just a few reasons behind my passion for placing my immediate family as my priority in ministry:

1. Our cultural problem: I have had 14 so-called Christian friends and colleagues in 7 years end their marriages due to infidelity (an average of 1 per 6 months for those of you who struggle with math). This is an epidemic. The Christian family ought to be the example of beautiful, redeeming, authentic Christian community in our world, not following suit in our culture's personal sense of entitlement.
2. A gospel expression/example of community: John 17 is a passage I've been using for a few weeks, now, to teach about Christian unity. The idea of Jesus' prayer in this text is that believers in community together reflect the perfect community God has with himself (Trinitarian community) as well as community as it was created in Eden (Gen. 1-2). When the world sees us loving one another with the love of Jesus, they can't help but be attracted to it. This is made possible only by Christ, who stated that "the love with which you [the Father] have loved me would be in them [Christians] and I in them." We are promised that Jesus' love would be in us and that through this love the world would believe. Ephesians 5-6 teaches that this community of love in the church is most significantly expressed in the context of the marriage relationships, particularly in the way a man loves his wife. Men, do you love your wives with the love Christ has for the church? Will you lay down your life (your work, your Xbox, your porn, your mistress, the computer, sports, your overeating, yourself, etc.) for your wife and kids, then, please? (I could go off on the ladies here, too, but I'll save that for a later date. Just read Proverbs for now).
3. A right definition of masculinity. I often tell men that they are the pastors of their families. My friend, Mark Driscoll, wrote a great book about this subject. Masculinity today has become either severely emasculated and effeminate, or errs on the other extreme of machoism/male chauvinism/misogyny. Where are the strong, godly, loving, repenting, compassionate, zealous, providing, giving, sacrificing, leading husbands and fathers who cherish their wife and kids as Christ does the church? Where is the man who has the cause of the Gospel he is willing to die for? We need men who are willing to stand up and show their families enough grace to teach them the truths of the gospel. We need men who are willing to see their families as the "church in their own house" of which they are the pastor. 

What if mission stemmed, first, out of families? What if we held our Christian leaders accountable to first love and pastor their wives and kids, so that they can adequately love and minister to us? What if all Christian families saw themselves as missionary families in the "mission fields" of their neighborhoods? What if Christian families started serving their neighbors and loving the "less of these" together? What if we re-ordered our lives so that we could actually teach our kids scripture, how to love our neighbors to Jesus, and how to pray (of course, we'd have to learn how to do it ourselves, now, wouldn't we?). Don't you think the rest of the church would see something beautiful and follow suit?

As Christians, we are called to love one another and build one another up (along with hundreds of other "one another" commands). This starts with the church you've been given right in your home.

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