Family Religion

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

Baxter held a conviction that runs through his entire practical theology and that he stated as bluntly as he could: that the reformation of the church depends on the reformation of families, and that a nation of godly households would need very little else. He was not being rhetorical. In A Christian Directory he devoted an entire part to the ordering of households, and he wrote a separate volume for poor families who could afford nothing longer.

The household as the first church

His argument was that God has arranged the world so that most religious formation happens at home, whatever the church does. A person spends an hour or two a week under preaching and the rest of his life in a household. If the two contradict each other, the household wins. Children raised in a home where religion is professed on Sunday and absent from Monday to Saturday learn, accurately, that it is a social observance.

For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord. GENESIS 18:19

Baxter noticed that God’s commendation of Abraham is not about his faith in the abstract but about what he would do with his household. Similarly, the qualification for an elder turns on the same point.

One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (for if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?) 1 TIMOTHY 3:4–5

The head of the house as its minister

From this Baxter drew a conclusion that many Christians still find surprising: the head of a household has a genuinely pastoral office within it. He is to teach the faith to those in his care, pray with them, examine what they understand, correct them, and set the example. Baxter regarded this not as an optional enthusiasm for the unusually devout but as a plain duty attached to the position.

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

Note both halves. The instruction is commanded; so is the manner of it. Baxter was firm that harsh, hectoring family religion produces the opposite of what it intends, and he warned parents that a child driven to resent the faith may carry that resentment for life.

What it actually looked like

He was practical about the shape of it, and the shape is simple enough to adopt this week. A fixed time, kept daily, so that it does not depend on anyone remembering or feeling like it. Baxter favoured morning and evening; one is better than none. Everyone present — children, servants, lodgers. The household means the household. Reading, a short passage, read aloud. Instruction, brief and pitched at the youngest person in the room rather than the oldest. Baxter was emphatic on this. A father who conducts family worship at the level of his own understanding is talking to himself. Prayer, short, specific and audible — covering the day’s actual business rather than generalities. Singing, where the household can manage it. Above all, brief. Baxter warned that long family devotions produce children who dread the hour, and that a short exercise faithfully kept accomplishes far more than a long one abandoned within a fortnight.

That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children. PSALM 78:6

Where the household is divided

A qualification Baxter’s own century needed less than ours does. Many readers are not in a position to institute family worship. A believing wife with an unbelieving husband, a young person in a hostile home, a single person, a worker in someone else’s household — the pattern above assumes an authority they do not have. The New Testament addresses exactly this situation, and its counsel is not to force the issue.

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives. 1 PETER 3:1

Without the word — won by conduct rather than argument. A believer in a divided household may pray privately, live consistently, take whatever opportunity is given, and leave the rest to God without concluding that they have failed.

The long view

One further encouragement, since family religion is the least immediately rewarding thing most Christians do. It is almost entirely invisible. Nobody applauds it. Its results, if they come, appear twenty years later in the character of people who will not remember where they got it. A parent conducting a short reading and prayer with distracted children on a wet Tuesday evening has no evidence that anything is happening, and usually feels faintly ridiculous. Baxter’s answer was that God has appointed means, and that we are responsible for the means rather than the outcome.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. GALATIANS 6:9

If your household has no regular time of worship, the useful thing to take from this chapter is not a conviction but an appointment. Choose the time before you put the book down.

The whole household

A word about the word household, because it meant something broader in Baxter’s century than it does in ours, and the breadth is worth recovering. The households he addressed included servants, apprentices, journeymen and lodgers — people who lived under the roof and worked in the business without being related to anyone. Baxter’s instructions to heads of households cover all of them without distinction. The apprentice was to be taught and prayed for exactly as the son was.

A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway. ACTS 10:2

Cornelius is commended for the state of his whole house, and when Peter arrives he finds a room full of relatives and close friends assembled to hear. The modern application is not obvious but it is real. Few readers employ live-in apprentices. Most have some equivalent — a lodger, a student, an elderly relative, a neighbour’s child who is always in the kitchen, a colleague who comes for meals, an employee whose life you know something about.

Baxter’s principle was that responsibility follows proximity. The people whose lives regularly intersect with yours are, to some degree, your charge, whether or not the arrangement is formal. The practical form of this is hospitality, and Scripture commands it more often than we generally notice.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. 1 PETER 4:9

A household where the faith is quietly practised, and to which people are regularly invited, does an evangelistic work that no programme can duplicate — because what visitors observe over a dinner table cannot be staged.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Fix a daily time for household worship and start tomorrow. Ten minutes is enough. 2. Pitch it at the youngest person present, not the oldest. 3. Keep it short. A brief exercise sustained for years beats a long one abandoned in a month. 4. Check your manner. Are you provoking the people you are trying to instruct? 5. If you cannot lead in your household, do what is open to you — private prayer and consistent conduct — and do not condemn yourself for what is not in your power.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have expected the church to do what You gave to my household, and I have been too busy or too self-conscious to begin.

Give me the resolve to fix a time and keep it, and the humility to pitch it where the youngest can follow.

Guard my manner. Let me never make the faith something my family is glad to escape.

And where I see nothing for years, keep me from weariness. The seed is Yours and so is the harvest. Amen.