Once again, good stuff from Michael Foster. I’ve thought and talked a lot about these kids of issues over the years. We can’t afford not to think critically about these things and to work hard at “seeking rest” for our children, especially when our subcultures are thin and scattered.
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A lot of Reformed families have accidentally engineered a bottleneck for their own kids.
When you choose a tight theological lane, a tight church network, and often a tight geography, you’ve already narrowed the field. Then you add a long list of non-negotiables that goes beyond basic orthodoxy into very specific doctrinal alignments, cultural preferences, schooling models, and lifestyle expectations. Every one of those cuts the pool again. People who love systematic clarity tend to apply that same instinct to marriage. The result is that the circle gets very small, very fast.
Add the rural-revival impulse and it tightens further. Land is cheaper away from population centers. So families move out for good reasons: stability, beauty, generational vision, space to raise kids well. But distance works both ways. You gain acreage and lose proximity. You gain control over your environment and lose density of like-minded peers. Then you wake up with a son or daughter in their mid-20s and realize there are six realistic prospects within two hundred miles, and half of them are already spoken for.
None of this is a moral indictment. It’s math. Social math. Demographic math. Network math. If you make five or six compounding narrowing decisions, you shouldn’t be surprised when outcomes narrow too.
West Port Experiment 
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