Welcome to Generations Friends. This is Kevin Swanson with you, Executive Director for Christian Home Educators out here in Colorado. Also a pastor, but the reason I broadcast from my basement here is I'm a father of five, so is Dave. And just a couple of dads in studio trying to figure out what it is to be dad. You know, fatherhood is disappearing. 37% of kids born without fathers on their birthday, no dad, no dad on their birthday. And, you know, half of those kids are going to lose their dads because half of marriage is in a divorce throughout their lifetime. And so by the time you get a kid 18 years of age, I don't know how many kids actually have a dad. How many have a dad who turned his heart toward the home and towards his kids and began to really capture the biblical vision for fatherhood? Because fatherhood is disappearing, my friends. It's just about gone. And we're just trying to figure out what it is to be a father. So we crack the word of God. And we found Ephesians 6.4, we found 1 Thessalonians 2.11, Deuteronomy 6.7, the book of Proverbs, and we said, hey, maybe God does have something to say about what it is for a father to wrap his heart around his kids and disciple them in the Word of God. Well, that's what we're doing here on this show, just trying to find the light switch here on the side of the wall. to figure out what it is to be a dad. Now, Dave, I just got a letter last week from a listener who's concerned about what she calls the patriarchy movement. Her church is upset about it. There's apparently some people who call themselves part of a patriarchy movement. and they have really upset the apple cart in this particular church and the church is preparing a series of presentations messages whatever on how dangerous the patriarchy movements and they've you know i mean again the word patriarchy is a funny word you know i don't use it very much it means the father rules of the father's the head of the home and you know a lot of people don't disagree with that because if he's in chapter five says hey the father is the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is head of the church. So anybody got a beef with Christ being, you know, top dog, head of the church? I don't know. Anybody got a beef with that? They do. They don't like the word theocracy either, which is the rule of God. And that's another problem. Yeah, you start throwing these terms around and theocracy technically is not a bad word, is it, Dave? No, it's not. I think most people associate with a... think it's a theocracy with an ecclesiocracy, which is the rule of a church, not the rule of God. Right. What happens is they cram a bunch of meaning into the word and the meaning was not what God intended. There's nothing wrong with theocracy. God ruling? Anybody got a problem with that? The one who created the universe? Ruling the universe? Anybody got a problem with that? I don't. For one, hey, I don't have a problem with theocracy, God ruling, but you're right. When you jam a bunch of meaning into it that the Bible did not intend, as in the church rules everything, the church violates the civil area that God ordained for the civil area, for what government was to do, when we began to violate sphere jurisdictions, that's a problem. Yeah, we don't want the church violating the civil sphere. We made that mistake before in history. We don't want to repeat it. So again, let's be careful how we use our terms. I think that's the point here. That is the point. And in fact, we could say that ecclesiocracy, which people call a theocracy, is in violation of a theocracy because it's not according to God's rule. And if he's the king, if he's ruling, it's got to be according to his rule. And let's look at the patriarchy problems. Now, when this woman started elucidating the problems relating to the folks that maintain a patriarchal view of things, she developed some of the problems. She says, hey, these are people coming to the church and they just kind of mess things up. I mean, they're divisive. They don't want to... submit to elders in the church, they disrupt the worship service, you know, on and on and on. I thought to myself, that's not the patriarchy movement, that's the rude worshipper movement. That's the refusal to submit to elders movement. That's certainly not a biblical movement. That's Autonomy Anonymous. Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you know, Dave, this last weekend I was speaking on fatherhood at this conference down in Oklahoma, and one woman came up to me afterwards and she said, my husband sure appreciated that talk you gave on fatherhood. Now he wants to be king of the home and he doesn't want to submit to nobody. And, you know, he has a hard time loving his wife. And I said, well, you know, I talked at length on loving your wife to the point of sacrifice. She said, oh, she didn't mention that part. And then she admitted also that she has a hard time submitting to her husband. You know, of course, all of us have a hard time walking in God's ways. And, you know, we got to be tweaked on point after point after point. Now, I think the thing that bothered me the most about this particular fellow who Really, you know, oh, I get to be king of the home. Great. Fantastic. You know, I'll make a great king. And, you know, that just scares the living daylights out of me, Dave, because, you know, there's a lot of guys out there turning to angry patriarchs, tyrants in their homes. And effectively, they want to be, as you said, completely autonomous. And they don't want to be out from under any rule themselves and just be the unbridled tyrant of their homes. And that does scare me. It should scare you. I mean, it's one thing to get out from underneath one system of tyranny, but it's another to get into another system of tyranny. I remember Martin Luther speaking, and I didn't remember hearing him speak, I'm reading what he said, that he feared the Pope himself greater than the one in Rome because he understood the wicked hearts of men to want to become their own rulers, to want to set up their own law systems. That is a desire of all men. The hearts of men desire power. That, of course, is Tolkien. And that power will usurp the power and authority of God, given even a modicum of chance. Alright, and so the real issue here is if a man is going to be in the proper life system that God requires of us, he's got to be submitting to elders himself. See, everybody gets to submit in this system. Children are to obey their parents. Wives submit to their husbands. And husbands should submit to the elders of the church. That's Hebrews chapter 13. And so if you've got people out there who refuse to submit to the counsel and leadership of others in their lives, we've got a problem here. and the elders of the church are in submission and the civil magistrates in submission everybody's in submission to God and God's law so everybody submits everybody must do according to what the chief shepherd wants and see this is the point that I think a lot of the patriarchy movement or so-called patriarchy movement would miss is that Christ is the chief shepherd and as under shepherds you're only to execute his wishes that's right and uh... when we've got patriarchy is out there who think that somehow they get a rule everything and they don't submit themselves to the elders of the church and Dave you know this usually results in in people hopping from church to church to church and eventually just sitting there in their home and doing their own little home church all by themselves without any a jurisdictional authority over them whatsoever this is just all-out rebellion men do whatever is right in their own eyes And this is the undoing of society. This is the undoing of family, church, and eventually state as well. So we've got to be careful that we submit ourselves to the rule system that God has set up in our lives. Hopefully the elders of the church aren't going to be tyrants either. They're going to be submitting to other elders from other churches in their own denomination as well. Kevin, those who would rebel against the church and do their own thing, that's really tatamount to slapping the bride of Christ. Just walking up and slapping her on the cheek and saying, I don't like this bride that you're going to marry Christ. In fact, I think you should marry something else. And they don't understand that Jesus works through sinful men to accomplish his purposes. You know what? The elders of the church are going to be sinners. They're going to do it wrong. Fathers, you're a sinner. You're going to do it wrong. Your children still need to submit to your authority in Christ, because you're Christ's authority. And you still need to submit to the elders of the church, because they're Christ's authority. And how many times in counseling, Dave, do we counsel husbands and wives in the church, and the husband is saying, well, I'm the king of this home, and my wife won't submit to me, and he turns red in the face. You know, in all-out anger, wanting to control. Of course, anger is nothing but the wanting to be sovereign and in control of everything. It's the control freak that is in the heart of every one of us to some extent or another. And so, you know, he turns to the pastor who's trying to do the counseling and says, why can't you make this woman submit to me? And of course, I'm going to turn to him and say, Looks to me, sir, that you are not loving your wife to the point of sacrifice. I'm not seeing a lot of love in your life. So again, we've got two problems here. Yeah, OK, maybe the wife is having a hard time submitting, but we've got a husband problem here. He's not loving his wife to the point of sacrifice, even as Christ sacrificed his life for his bride. Kevin, Jesus married these two concepts. If you're going to be the leader, you're also going to be the sacrificial lover. to lead, to have that authority means that you get to lay down your life. You get the opportunity, the privilege of laying down your life for Christ's flock, whether it be your wife or be the greater church. That's what leadership is in the kingdom of Christ. All right, my friends, the problems with patriarchs. When this patriarchy thing gets out of control, we wind up with a lot of sinful people and broken marriages, broken homes as well. Let's get back into God's system of doing things. And we're going to define patriarchy in just a moment. There are some viable biblical approaches to a man being a loving leader in the home. What does that consist of? We're going to talk about that next on Generations. Kevin Swanson with you. Dave also in studio. Be back in a moment. We're back on Generations Friends. This is Kevin Swanson with you, and we're talking about patriarchy today on this segment of Generations. And I say, praise God for patriarchy. God established fathers to be the leaders, the loving leaders in homes, and he has called them heads of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church. But they, of course, are to love their wives to the point of sacrifice. And Dave, you know, fathers are not leading today. We have a extreme, wimpified society where men do not assume responsibility. We have a feminized culture, and this has produced, I think, a tremendous dysfunctionality in the church and the family and all of society. The reason things are broken down, the reason 37% of kids are born without fathers is, well, because of fornication, but also because men will not take responsibility for those homes. We have a massive problem, I think in the church as well. We have a very passive worship in our churches because men for the most part will not take their 1 Timothy 2.8 obligations. That is, God requires men to be up front raising the holy hands and praying to God without wrath and without doubting. And yet, Dave, for the most part, I would say the vast majority of men in the Christian faith today are passive. And they're not taking responsibility in their homes. They're not taking responsibility in their churches. They're not leading their families in worship every day in their homes. They don't lift up their holy hands over their families and become the intercessory priests in those homes. They don't become the prophets in those homes, preaching the Word of God and bringing their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord as they've been commanded to do in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4. These men are not shepherds in their homes. They're not taking responsibility for the spiritual well-being and the physical well-being of their families. And as a result of this, we have broken down churches. Men do not shepherd their families well. The vast majority, I'm going to say 95-98% of men across America are not shepherding their families well. If they did, we wouldn't be losing 80% of Christian kids out of Christian homes. When they walk away from the home, they walk away from the faith. We wouldn't see that happening. We would see the vast majority of children walking in their father's faith because their fathers were effective shepherds in the home. And of course, if we have a huge number of shepherds in the home competently shepherding their own little flocks in the homes we would have way more good shepherds in the church rather than the standard dictators or the university professor thing that comes out of the seminaries today. We would have loving, tender, powerful, mighty shepherds of God in the churches because we had those loving, confident shepherds in the homes. So again, the church is broken down, family is broken down, the society is broken down because we don't have patriarchs, loving shepherds shepherding their homes. Where do men learn how to become loving shepherds? Well, they're not going to learn it from pastors who are getting divorced half the time, who are losing their children, turning them over to homosexual sins. They're not going to learn it unless the leaders of the church first learn it. That's right. That's right. And so, Dave, seven years ago we established our church and we said, okay, fathers are going to be responsible for their Ephesians 6, 4, 1 Thessalonians 2, 11, and the Book of Proverbs responsibilities to disciple their own children in their homes. Now, about four years ago I get a call from Barna Institute. You know, Barna Institute, they're the organization that kind of does these surveys of Christian ministries, and they were really concerned about the 80% problem. We're losing 80% of our kids. They're walking away. We're seeing the demise of the Christian faith right in our generation. They're concerned about this, so they call me. They say, we're doing a survey on Christian churches. You got a church? Yeah, I got a church. You got some Sunday schools going on there?" I says, no, no, we haven't done Sunday schools in our church. We have not implemented a Sunday school for children in our church. All right, so what else do you get? You got youth programs? You got youth groups? You got a youth pastor there? I said, no, no, no, none of that. Haven't hired a youth pastor yet? Nope, nope. So how about youth camps? You doing youth camps? No, we don't sponsor any. You got a family camp, but you don't have a youth camp. He says, what do you got, DVPS? I said, what do you do? He says, what do you got, you got any kids in your church? I said, yeah, they're all over the place. We've got 150 of them. Every time I turn around, I'm tripping over another kid. They're all over the place in this church. He said, man, don't you care about the souls of these children? I said, yeah, I do. So I went into the Word of God. I looked up what the Word of God had to say about youth programs. I found Ephesians 6.4, and that's what we do. He says, what's that? I says, well, I look at all the dads and it says, Dads, bring your children up in the nurturing of the Lord. Teach these kids the word of God as you sit in your house, as you walk by the ways, you rise up as you lie down. And I turn to the kids, I say, honor him, love him, listen to him, follow him. He's your dad. He's your shepherd. That's what I do. He says, well, that's really innovative. Yeah, it comes from God's word. And it works great. And Dave, think about what is happening. I mean, we look back over seven years or eight years of this ministry, and it's unbelievable. It is mind-boggling what's happening when fathers begin discipling their own children. We're not seeing kids walk away from faith. We're not seeing kids fornicating at a 95% rate. We're not seeing kids fornicate at the rate I used to see them fornicate at in other churches I've been part of in years past. Nowhere near the fornication. There's honor of parents. There is beautiful courtships going on in our church. It's amazing what is happening. God is visiting our church with blessing. I think it's happening to a great extent because parents are discipling these kids. Last year, what did we have? 55 professions of faith from kids in the church? I mean, these kids are loving God. They're walking in His ways. And Kevin, we're not perfect. We haven't seen every child take up the faith. In fact, The ones that we have seen turn away from the faith first turned away from their parents. They first turned away from their father and their father's teachings. And so we've seen a strong correlation between honoring their biological father and honoring their heavenly father. And really when you get right down to it, patriarchy is nothing but taking the Trinity, how God the Father deals with the Son and deals with the Spirit, and bringing that down to application right here on earth in our families and in our churches. Dave, I think the people who reject the vision are typically the ones that lose their children. That's typically what happens. If they don't capture the vision themselves, if they're not going to disciple their own children, they're going to lose the vision. I've seen this happen hundreds of times, thousands of times throughout the homeschooling movement. And I think the power, the influence of a father who will disciple his children, tenderly, lovingly develop a relationship with his sons and his daughters in the home, and then disciple them within that relationship, I think normatively, normatively, this is the pattern whereby the hearts of the fathers turn to the sons, and sons to the fathers, and inevitably they will turn their hearts towards God. So this is the system that God has established, and we need to continue to encourage this system. In fact, promise keepers a few years ago did a study and said, what is the influence of fathers on their children? If a mother goes to church but the father doesn't, they found that there was some influence. I'm not going to minimize that at all, but it wasn't near the amount. It was like six times the amount if dad went. If dad was the leader of that household, the children carried on at least going to church, at least making that a part of their life. So the influence of fathers, and they're becoming an endangered species, but the influence of them is far, far greater than just mom alone. A unified household is a household of God. And I think the reason is, is his dad disciples his children. He's doing it because he's in submission to the chief shepherd. The children will see that submission and they will copy that submission. They will submit to their father. as they're submitting to the Chief Shepherd, even knowing their father's not perfect. And Dave, you know, I realize that the system is out there trying to salvage children as best as they can with the Sunday schools and youth groups and etc. But folks, the fundamental problem is the lack of fathering of tender, loving fathers who develop close relationships with their children and shepherd those children to the God that they love. This, I believe, is the challenge before us, and the church will continue to face dysfunctionality. That is, we will lose the vast majority of children. They will walk away from the faith if we do not have this kind of discipleship happening within the homes. And Dave, again, we're not saying here that any kind of a program, a youth program, a young boys program, Sunday school program is effectively evil or sinful. We're not saying that at all. All we're saying is, come on guys, let's focus on the kinds of things that the Bible focuses on. And it appears to me the focus of Scripture, and Dave you can correct me on this if I'm wrong, the focus of Scripture appears to be that fathers disciple their children. In fact, 1 Thessalonians 2.11 says that Paul discipled and shepherded people in the church like a father does his children. In other words, Paul uses the normative pattern of a father to establish a pattern for the pastors in the church. That is, you're not going to learn how to pastor from a seminary. You're going to learn it in your home when you pastor, when you shepherd your children. That's the normative pattern for pastors. And if pastors aren't getting that, if they're not doing it in the home, they don't belong in the pastorate. And Kevin, The pastoring of a minister, a professional minister, and that of a father are not mutually exclusive. They're supplementary. A Sunday school program, if one exists, doesn't replace what dad does Monday through Saturday. It's a complement to it. It just gives them a teaching from a different source, maybe an elder in the church or something. But if you have Sunday school without what's happening in the home, you're kidding yourself. Dave, I think the vision here is to see not 80% of kids walking away from the faith, but 90, 95, 98% of our children walking in the faith as a result of 18 years of careful discipleship as we sit in our homes, as we walk by the way, as we rise up, as we lie down. And it begins with fathers acknowledging that they are responsible before God for the shepherding. And if there is a problem with the child raising department in your home, God is not going to call the pastor of your church to the front office to talk about it. He's not going to call your wife. He's going to call you, Dad. You're the one he holds responsible for what happens in your home. You're responsible. Now you can delegate. Granted, delegation is appropriate at points. But God will hold fathers responsible for what happens in those homes. And Kevin, there's one more thing that goes with that father being a leader, and that's setting an example. If you live life in the shadow of the cross, if you show your children that you cannot be saved by your works, but it's Christ's grace and his sacrifice alone for which you are eternally grateful. That's why you're going to keep the law because somebody, God, loved you enough to die for you. If you can exemplify that in life, you know what? You're giving the gospel to your children every day. And if that child is walking beside you, Dave, and they see you stop for a moment, get down on your knees, beat on your chest and say, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. I've been angry towards my children today. God, forgive me. Forgive me. And they see your confession and humble repentance. We don't want perfect kids. We want humble, repenting children before God all the days of their lives. They see that in us because we've been walking before them exemplifying that. Praise be to God. We'll begin to see that in their lives. And that's what I call patriarchy. There you go. Ladies and gentlemen, defining the terms, hopefully biblically, on this program today, let me encourage you to pick up our book on family worship, the brand new book off the press, on the worship of God from the book of the Psalms presented in devotional form where you can share it with your family it's the Psalms family Bible study guide now available at our website just go to kevinswanson.com and folks you can interact with the program by emailing me at host at kevinswanson.com and you can hear the program anytime anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com this is Kevin Swanson And I want to invite you back again next time as we lay down a vision for the next generation.