The Shaping of a Christian Home

Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. PSALM 127:1

In 1992, when she was in her sixties, Elisabeth Elliot published a book about the house she grew up in. The Shaping of a Christian Family is partly a memoir and partly a book of counsel. It describes the home of Philip and Katharine Howard — first in Germantown, in Philadelphia, and then in Moorestown, New Jersey, with summers in the hills of New Hampshire — where six children were raised on Scripture, hymns, order and prayer. She wrote it, in part, because she believed that the ordinary disciplines of a Christian home were being forgotten. It is one of the warmest of her books.

A house ordered by Scripture

The Howards’ home was not elaborate. Her father edited a Christian weekly. But the house had a shape, and the shape was given by the Word of God. There were times for meals and times for work, times for bed and times for getting up, and the children were expected to keep them. There was family worship each day, at which the Bible was read, a hymn was sung and the family prayed together. The children memorised Scripture and learned the great hymns of the church verse by verse, so that by the time they were grown they carried a store of both in their heads. She believed that this storehouse had served her well in the jungle, in grief and in old age, when there was no book at hand and no one to pray with.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. DEUTERONOMY 6:6–7

This is the first lesson of the book: that faith is passed on less by occasional effort than by daily habit. A child learns what matters to his parents by watching what they actually do every day. If the Bible is opened every morning, the child learns that it matters. If prayer is a matter of course, the child learns that God is near. Nothing in the book suggests that habits save anyone. But habits make room, and God is pleased to work in the room they make.

Hymns and the memory

She gave special attention to hymn-singing, and it is worth pausing on it. The hymns sung in the Howard home were, for the most part, the older hymns of the church, with their doctrine, their Scripture and their many verses. Learned in childhood, they became a lifelong theology. She found, again and again, that a line from a hymn came back to her when she most needed it. One she often recalled was How Firm a Foundation, with its promise from God to the believer passing through deep waters: “The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow.”

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. COLOSSIANS 3:16

The counsel for families today is simple and practical. Sing together. Choose hymns with something in them. Sing all the verses. Let children learn them by heart before they can understand them, as they learn so much else. The understanding will come.

Discipline and courtesy

The book is honest that the Howard home was strict. Disobedience was corrected, sometimes firmly. Children were expected to be courteous and to do their share of the work. She did not defend this as a matter of temperament but as a matter of love: parents who do not correct their children, she believed, are not kinder than those who do, only lazier. The aim of discipline was not to break a child but to train him, so that obedience to parents might become the school of obedience to God.

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. EPHESIANS 6:4

She was equally insistent that order is not the same as coldness. She described a home in which the children knew they were loved, in which their parents’ marriage was visibly happy, and in which laughter and music and the beauty of the outdoors had their place. The long summers at the family cottage in Franconia belong to the picture as much as the rules.

An open door

One feature of the house seems to have made a particular impression on her. It was hospitable. Missionaries on furlough, visiting preachers, students and strangers sat at the Howards’ table, and the children grew up hearing of the work of God in many countries from the people doing it. Their world was larger than their town. It is not hard to see a connection between that open table and the fact that more than one of the six children went on into Christian work in other lands.

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. HEBREWS 13:2

Hospitality, in her teaching, did not require money or a large house. It required a willingness to let others into ordinary life — to set another place, to share what there was, to let guests see the family as it really was. It is one of the simplest ways in which a Christian home can serve the church and the world.

Weighing it

The book can be read in two ways, and only one of them is right. It can be read as a formula — do these things, and your children will turn out well. That reading is mistaken, and she did not intend it. No method guarantees faith; children raised in godly homes sometimes wander, and children from chaotic homes are sometimes found by God. Parents who have done their best and grieve over a child should not take this book as an accusation.

The better reading takes it as a testimony and a stirring. Here is what one family did, by God’s grace, with very ordinary means. Some of its customs belong to its time and place. Its principles do not: that the Word of God should be at the centre of a home, that faith is learned by daily habit, that love and order are friends, and that the door should be open.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. 2 TIMOTHY 1:5

But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. JOSHUA 24:15

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of the home you grew up in. Give thanks for what was good in it, and bring to God what was not.

2. If you have a household, choose one daily habit of Scripture or prayer that you could keep together, and begin it this week, however small.

3. Choose one hymn with real substance in it. Learn all its verses, and teach it to a child.

4. Ask whether your home has order without love, or love without order. Pray for what is lacking.

5. Set an extra place at your table this month for someone who would not otherwise be invited.

A PRAYER

Lord, unless You build the house, we labour in vain. Build ours.

Put Your Word at the centre of our days, and make our habits a room where You are pleased to work.

Give us love that corrects and order that is kind. Give our children hearts that know You for themselves.

Open our doors to the stranger and the weary, and let our homes be places where others meet You. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Amen.