the last century, churches around the globe have traded the biblical doctrine of family life for worldly pragmatism. This change has led to broken homes and dysfunctional families. To reverse course, the next generation must understand and reclaim what God created the family to be. Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss a new catechism designed to help families in this quest. Using a simple question-and-answer format, it gives robust but concise definitions of what a family is and how God designed the home to function. Foundational Scripture verses are given for each topic, along with family discussion questions and a suggested hymn and memory verse.

Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I want to tell you about a book we just published. It's available. It's a catechism for diagnosing and restoring the Christian home. It's called What is a Family?

I hope you go out and get that book. And Jason and I are going to talk about it. Hope to see you at the conference. So Jason, two or three years ago, one of the pastors in our network called me up and he said, I think you should write a catechism on the family. I said, what?

I've never seen a catechism. I've seen catechisms for the family, but not catechisms on the family that actually declare that Doctrine so I thought I'd like to give that a shot so I started working on it 200 and 200 one day questions and answers later. You have produced it. That's why, he said, because there's really not one that we're aware of, but there's ground that has been lost. And it's been our work together to try to claw back that territory.

Yeah. And I wanted to put this together really for a new generation, okay? And it really... It's a catechism for restoring and really diagnosing the Christian home. So I hope people use it for that.

They'll diagnose their own understanding of what family life is all about. So this gives families, parents teaching their children about families, a way to lay down a firm foundation for how to think about families, how to prepare to have a healthy biblical family. So this is about foundational things that has been lost, even among Christians, and needs to be reclaimed, especially by Christians. Foundational and also the deeper matters as well. Here's why I think this is an important work.

There are moments in history when people forget who they are and they forget how they're supposed to function And that definitely has happened in our times. In the last century and in this century still, even in the church, we've traded biblical wisdom for pragmatic, culturally driven ways of going about family life. And I so appreciated this brother who asked me to do it because I thought this is a way to drive a stake in the ground on all the particulars of family life, to recover it. Church of Family Life in many ways has always been a Trojan horse for the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. In other words, we've been focused on church and family life and those associated issues.

But what we've really cared about is setting forth the Bible as sufficient for all matters dealing with doctrine and practice for the people of God, both inside and outside the church. And so this is a way to call parents to trust the Bible with all their hearts on the building of a family. And why is that important? Here's why it's important, is because this period of history will go down as one of those times when we really departed from a sufficient scripture. And the family has become a house of inventions, man's inventions.

And so the doctrine of the family was largely forgotten in the 20th century. And it continues on today. Being recovered though, actually, being recovered all over the place like we've never seen it before. So it isn't all bad news. I think there really is a reform movement of the family afoot today.

If you have men and women who are leading family worship, it almost never happened in the 20th century. Scott, we've had a hand in working on translation work in Malawi, Africa. And one of the amazing things that we've experienced from that is hearing tales back from our brethren in Malawi about how they hear from people who have gotten their hands on these translated works, and they have no idea how that book could have gotten to that person in that place. And that makes me think about this catechism. You know, we're in sort of a small pond in some ways, but American Christianity is much larger from that.

And we'd be delighted if we would hear in years to come that this catechism has made it to places that we wouldn't expect it to among people that we wouldn't expect it to. Because honestly, these things, these fundamental things about family life are needed so much beyond just our... They're needed in our small pond, but needed so much beyond the borders of our... The people that we normally interact with. I hope we'll hear stories and wonder how this could have possibly made it there.

Yeah. Hey, everywhere in the world, the family is broken. Every culture has distorted a biblical picture of family life to some degree. And you mentioned Malawi. I mean, the distortions are legendary, actually.

But they're legendary everywhere. All you have to do to reform a culture and its view of the family is just open up your Bible and it'll correct that culture. And I'm concerned that a new generation is taught, either taught again what they learned or they thought they learned, but taught maybe the things that their parents and their grandparents missed. You raise children, You think you communicated everything that you believed and the truth is you didn't right We weren't as thorough and clear as we thought so the next generation is always in play the next generation Always needs to be brought back to the fundamentals And so I hope the catechism is used by even families that have experienced significant reform that they would go back and say, okay, let's recheck this and let's help our children recheck this to make sure that we're still on target. So Scott, there's this paper, there's this thing, this catechism.

What are some ways it could be used? Well, I mean, I think my original vision for it really was for fathers and mothers to use it in their homes, pastors particularly to clarify the doctrine, but I want it to be a practical tool. That's why we We've broken it up into various kind of helpful sections. There'll be a series of questions in a category, and then we ask some reflective questions. And then we make some suggestions for parents, help for parents on how they can deal with this and then and we also present discussion questions, specific discussion questions for the family to talk about.

So I think there are different ways we hope it's used. So dads and moms, the dinner table can be about a lot more than just dinner. What if you had this catechism and you rolled out a question and an answer a couple of nights a week and then just kicked it around, meaning just discussed, discussed it. You asked the question, you gave the answer from the catechism, and then you talked about why these things are so and how it should be applied in your own family, and how other people should be applying it. Just use it as a discussion topic a night or two a week.

By the end of the year, you'd be done with it. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'm hoping that's how it'll be used around a dinner table. And a father or a mother, they can open it up, read a few questions, and say, how does this diagnose our family? How do we come out with what the Bible says about our family and the way they're functioning.

Are we in line with scripture or not? So I hope it's like you say, I hope it's a companion at the dinner table. Just takes a few minutes. The questions are short. They're very clear.

Lots and lots of scripture proof for each one of the questions. And it takes on the most controversial matters of family life, of gender and sex roles and things like that. You're a pastor, I'm a pastor. Have you given some thought to how pastors could make use of this catechism? Well they could teach from it.

You know, you can preach from this catechism. You really can. There are catechisms like that, Fisher's Catechism. You can preach from it. There's a doctrinal category, and the bullet points are so clear, you could actually preach remarkably clear doctrinal messages from Fisher's Catechism.

You can do that with this too. A pastor could do a whole refresher course for his church and preach through the points and he would have all that he would need. And then he would need to apply it, of course, to his local situation. How was this organized? How did you divide it up?

Well, it's, of course, it starts with men and women created in God's image and the fact that they were created for different roles. There is a sameness, but there's a very, very distinct difference in the roles, and even the makeup and the nature of men and women. And I think we need to understand that. The culture of androgyny is so misleading, but God made men different, God made women different, and it's actually a very beautiful thing. Yeah, it's good.

It's not something to be resisted or eliminated. It's actually something that we should be celebrating. You know, one of the sections is just the fact that it was God that created the family. And what is the purpose of a family? Well, it's to be a builder and a caretaker of the earth.

We aren't just born here to go get jobs and eat and live and die. We actually have been put on this earth to be caretakers. And you have the whole dominion mandate. You have husbands and wives working together. The head, the ruler, and the helper, all of that is communicated.

The distinctives of biblical manhood and womanhood are really, really clearly stated. We actually have one question. We have a question, what is a woman? What is a man? We've seen over the last couple of years how many people can't answer those questions or will refuse to answer those questions.

So you answer it. We talk about what the Bible says about preparing for and pursuing marriage. We talk about the duties of a husband, the duties of a wife. We talk about the blessing of children, the contours and commands and principles about fatherhood and about motherhood. We even, we go into bringing up children, because the Bible has a lot to say about bringing up children.

So we hit on grandparenting and the family in the Lord's day. We talk about family worship, you know, all kinds of things like that. Scott, it's hard to think of a category where the good is so good and the bad is so bad than the family. A healthy, biblical, loving, A healthy, biblical, loving, grace-filled home is a little heaven. And an unhealthy, toxic, judgmental, harsh home is a little hell.

A home is a little world, and God wants it to be a little heaven. So this is sort of a theology that helps you get from here to there. And it's really critical to understand that because families replicate families. Right. You grow up a certain way and you create patterns and you continue those patterns in your own marriages, the way you raise your kids, the way you function in the church.

And what we want out of this, I guess, ultimately is kind of like what you said, that our family was a little creation of heaven, that God, He taught us how to have a family in 201 questions, right? And I really want, I want to urge families to rise to the task, repair the family. When you repair the family, repair the church. When you repair the church, you repair a nation. The family is really the central functional output in the culture.

And so it's important that we pay really, really close attention to it. And this is the need of the hour. And I pray that families will really take to heart the doctrine of the family and use this catechism to diagnose actually how they're doing. So what happens if a father and a mother just float on the current, they end up with a little hell. When you build your family on modern conventional American wisdom, It's all so awfully logical, built on all the wrong premises.

So you get the premises wrong, and then you take the logic from wrong premises, and it leads to unhealthy toxicity. And we see it all around us. Well, the Bible actually will keep us out of that world. And this is an attempt to teach what the Bible says about fathers, mothers, children, our obligations to one another in the home. Well, I'll one up you on this one.

How many families have we known who've turned around midstream and God really blessed them? A lot. A lot. Yeah, it's a big number. It's a really big number.

So let's see what might happen if a new generation stands on the firm foundation of an all-sufficient Word of God for the family. Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. This book is out now. You can get it online or, better yet, come to our national conference in May. You can get a real copy.

And I might even be able to sign it for you if you come. Thanks for joining us. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com