Sorry, this one is longer than usual, so please be patient and read the whole way to the end. What we're thinking about here is eternally important.
Right now, when your little family is just getting started and your newborn son or daughter is all a wonder to you, it seems a bit over the top to be talking about how important it is to find a good church. But watch out! Life seems to be passing slowly right now, but it's not. In a day or two, this infant will be leaving your home for college, and then comes marriage and grandchildren. Before you can snap your fingers, your children will be all grown up and the fruit of your fatherhood will be clear.
Last week, we saw that the most important food we provide our family is God's Word. Choosing a church where God's Word is preached faithfully is how we provide them that food. Yes, we read the Bible to our family at home, but home isn't enough. We must have the household of faith, and the most important mark of a Biblical church is faithful preaching. But there are three marks of a true church, so now we move to the second:
- A true church has preaching that is faithful to Scripture;
- A true church administers the sacraments as Scripture commands;
- A true church correctly disciplines her members.
What on earth are sacraments?
Sacraments are physical things God gives us to help us in our weakness...
Yesterday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos appeared before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee where 
Have at it. Everyone's put off by him so go ahead and join the haters. Loud? Proud? Profane?
Whether we speak of the "family-integrated" or "family-centered" church, there's a problem. The Church doesn't exist to please mothers. It is not the church's purpose to keep children in the home, safe and happy until they make a home of their own. If this happens and the church has helped it come to pass, that's all good, but the church has larger fish to fry.
The family-centered church movement can trace some significant part of its beginnings back to my friend Kerry Ptacek at Bethany Collegiate Presbyterian Church outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Patriarchal homeschooling enclaves are dogged by rebellion against authority. Ask me. Ask your pastor. Ask anyone.
A friend and I were talking on the phone one day when my friend told me he didn't allow his wife to attend his church's women's Bible study. I knew his pastor was good and his church was good, so I was shocked. "Why not," I asked?
You can't live in this world one sinner married to another without fighting.
Chesterton is right. Marriage is the melding together of two incompatible forces, man and woman. So there's no avoiding quarrels. The point is to keep them lovers' quarrels.
Marriage is the melding of two incompatible forces, man and woman. Quarrels are inevitable. The point is to keep them lovers' quarrels.
Until recently, fathers and mothers learned their child's sex at birth when the doctor or midwife announced "it's a boy" or "it's a girl!" Some still choose to protect this romance by telling their ultrasound technician and doctor they don't want to find out beforehand. I like that.
At first, just the weight of responsibility of marriage is overwhelming. I remember waking up the second night of our honeymoon, looking at my dear Mary Lee sleeping next to me, and thinking "the rest of my life!"
As soon as your first son or daughter is born, you'll be faced with work you don't like and don't really want to do. Diapers aren't real bad at first. A milk-only diet makes a newborn's diapers just a mild nuisance. But once your baby starts solids, dirty diapers get nasty. My brother Nathan always used a World War I gas mask. This isn't Nathan—my granddaughter Bayly standing next to me says it's her uncle Ben with his daughter Clementine. It does look just like Nathan. I'd watch him and wonder why none of his kids died of fright.
Several years ago we planted a bunch of bare root trees including a couple apple and one peach tree. Four years later none of the trees had produced a single piece of fruit, so we were quite excited this spring when our peach tree set well over a hundred little peaches. When I first saw them they were quite small—maybe the size of the tip of your pinkie. Thinking maybe I should do something to protect the fruit, I went on the internet and read that the little peaches should be thinned, leaving one every six inches or so. So up went the ladder and well over half the peaches were pinched off and fell to the ground. The peach experts told me if I let all the peaches ripen, they would be so heavy they would snap the branches off.
Until late in the afternoon the day my wife gave birth to our first child, Mary Lee and I worked together. We painted houses, cleaned carpet, and were the custodians of a church. Being together twenty-four hours a day was sweet. After Heather was born, though, things changed.
We've been saying that a father does nothing more important for his children than choosing a church. But our culture presses us into the mold of individualism, so Christians have come to think of religion as "just me and Jesus" with the church a sort of religious social club. But get this: across history, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants have all been in agreement that the Church is essential for salvation.