Family Brokenness

This blog post will look into one of the most neglected areas of brokenness in the church and Christian organizations.

As I was sitting in a class on Entrepreneurship and the Mission of the Church, my professor asked, “Where is there brokenness in the world?” We took almost the whole class to focus solely on this question. The normal answers came out, all the addictions: drugs, alcohol, phone, and sexual addiction were all talked about, then it moved to groups of people who are in more marginalized communities: the homeless, elderly, inner city kids, and immigrants. Those were exactly the answers I thought of, because these are the very things and people that the church and Christian organizations care about and support. These are good things that the church should care about because the prophets also cared about them. The three areas they address are idolatry, social injustice, and ritualism.

But it was not until my professor slightly changed the question to “What areas of brokenness do the church and Christian organizations not address, or do we do a poor job of addressing?” that I finally had a new thought. That an area of brokenness we as Christians are failing to address is family brokenness.

Single-parent families, children who have passed away before their parents, divorce, miscarriages, parents who have walked away from the faith, children who have walked away from the faith, physical abuse, sexual abuse, same-sex parents, transgender children, etc. The list goes on and on; these are just some ways that families are broken, broken meaning not the way it was originally intended to be.

But how could this not have been mentioned by my classmates, yet it is so obvious? I think that is the very problem, it is too obvious, or in other words, too normal. It’s so normal that we sometimes forget this isn’t the way the nuclear family should be.

For example, about 40-43% of first marriages end in divorce. The rate is higher in subsequent marriages: roughly 60% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. These statistics are staggering; of course, no one has mentioned this because it is the very air we breathe. And not only is it the air we breathe, but because it is normalized, we assume it is not that biga deal. Oh, how it is. We may recognize that this is an area of brokenness, but it is just too hard to deal with.

Take this scenario for instant, a husband and wife who have struggled with fertility find out they are going to be having their first child in 8 months, they start praising the Lord, “God for you are good and faithful, we praise you for all our days, for you have gave us a child,” but 4 months later they find out that they have had a miscarriage. How do you respond? Is God no longer good? Does he not deserve their praise anymore? This is just one example of how hard it is to care for people in a state of family brokenness.

I think this is one reason why we shy away from caring for those going through family brokenness, because it is difficult, and most times, very difficult. But it is in these times that the church or Christians should take a step back, but we should be walking through this with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

This blog post is not intended to be a prescription for how to solve the problem, but to remind the church and to provoke innovation in Christian organizations to draw near to this community with the gentleness of Christ, by the power of the Spirit.