Archive for the ‘Transgenerational Faith’ Category
NJ housing crisis? Meet ADUs
Posted in Housing: Problems & Strategies, Political Theory & Theology, Transgenerational Faith on August 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Boomer–Zoomer Housing War”
Posted in Commerce & Christianity, Family & Family Issues, Housing: Problems & Strategies, Political Theory & Theology, Theology of Community, Transgenerational Faith on April 21, 2026| Leave a Comment »
The following article appeared at First Things, written by Carmel Richardson.
When I heard the price the retired man was asking for his home, a full $80,000 over online estimates of its value, I flinched. The market is hot in our small town, and the location was good, but was it that good? More importantly, would the bank appraise it so high? Just seven years ago, this seller had purchased the home for less than half the price he wanted for it in 2026.
My husband and I were in a spot familiar to many in our generation: trying to scrape together enough cash to buy a house from an older couple, who neither needed nor wanted the space, yet priced it extraordinarily high. Another retiree in our neighborhood recently listed his home, a three-bedroom house with a modest yard, at $100,000 over its estimated value. A third home in town has been relisted at least twice, as the retired woman selling it refuses to lower the price, despite knowing the home needs thousands of dollars in mold remediation and electrical updates. When we offered a number below her asking price, and above the home’s estimated value, she accused us of trying to fleece an older woman. It has since remained on the market for more than a hundred days, but she’s not in a hurry. She owns the home outright.
(more…)“Overcoming Potential Spouse Bottleneck”
Posted in Family & Family Issues, Fatherhood, Motherhood & Childbearing, Transgenerational Faith on February 8, 2026| Leave a Comment »
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.
The promise of play
Posted in Culture, Family & Family Issues, Family Religion, Fatherhood, Moral Suasion, Motherhood & Childbearing, Paternalism & Patriarchy, Transgenerational Faith, WPE Editor on December 14, 2025| Leave a Comment »
As Reformed people, we are deeply committed to the covenant. We have a solemn responsibility to our children—who after all are not ours, but the Lord’s. We as parents and as pastors have a sacred trust. As pastors, we require solemn vows of parents as they present their covenant children for holy baptism. As parents, we take those public vows in deep, humble gratitude for the manifold grace of God in ‘spreading His skirt over our little ones.’ With faith, we lay hold of the gracious promise, yet with a real trembling for the stewardship that is ours to raise them up in the “fear and admonition of the Lord.”
And yet, while our covenant-tradition is clothed with solemnity and gravitas, the lighter side of life shines through (or, it ought to!) as we endeavor to light the flame of faith in our children. There is a place for play; and, in fact, there is great promise in it. I’m increasingly convinced after twenty years of pastoring, twenty-five years of parenting, and now almost two years of grand-parenting, that one major ingredient of parenting and, yes, even pastoring, involves play. And I believe this is all the more vital in small, first- and second-generation Reformed and Presbyterian churches who lack the longevity of larger multi-generational churches. The margins are smaller and the risk of losing our children greater. Especially in our circles, the imperative to do all we lawfully can to create a home and church environment where our covenant children will naturally want to profess faith, commune, marry, bear children, and put down deep roots in our rootless world.
But whether your church is large or small and your subculture more fragile or more robust, these children are still ‘ours to lose.’ Yes, the Holy Spirit must regenerate. Enculturation is a barren womb without free and sovereign grace. But our responsibility, in giving and taking baptismal vows, is not just to catechize and keep good order in home and church. We may and must, if I may put it this way, “win” our children winsomely. And so I say, let us play.
(more…)Motherly work, a Faustian bargain, and masculine Protestantism
Posted in Culture, Family & Family Issues, Motherhood & Childbearing, Natural Law, Protestantism & Romanism, Transgenerational Faith on December 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »
A couple of good articles here and here, promoting biblical and natural-law views of women, motherhood, and childbearing contra feminism. I have tremendously little knowledge of Taylor Swift or her music; but the analysis from someone who does only confirms my suspicions and that Swift is a tragic symbol of feminism’s Faustian bargain.
On the other side of the gender coin is this article. I’ve never read this author before, but he definitely strikes a chord with me about a prescription for solid, biblical masculinity with a healthy, and distinctly Protestant embrace of church tradition:
And as usual, standard caveats (Rom. 12:9).
Stay put, seize opportunity, live together
Posted in Family Religion, Locality & the Law of Residence, The Romance of Locality, Transgenerational Faith on October 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »
The following three articles by Frank DeVito at the Witherspoon Institute resonate with me rather deeply. He challenges conventional thinking in order to promote the rejuvenation not just of the nuclear family, but the extended family, and that inter-generationally in the localities where God has planted us. Well said, sir!
Reformed parish missions: “To the Greek and to the barbarian”
Posted in Articles, Contemporary Parochialism, Covenant Theology, Family Religion, Gospel Proclamation, Gospel Tactics, Locality & the Law of Residence, Ministerial Fidelity, Missiology, Ordinary Means Ministry, Parish in American Context, Parochial Strategy, Reformed Parish Mission (RPM) Posts, Social Byproduct, The Church in America, The Gospel & the Poor, The Visible Church, Theology of Community, Thomas Chalmers, Transgenerational Faith, WPE Editor on May 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Years back, my heart got large for missions — especially urban missions to those on the ‘other side of the tracks.’ At about the same time, I became Reformed (a high octane, old school Presbyterian no less!), putting me in a a sub-subset of a subset. My life and ministry has ever since lived somewhat in the frontiers the unlikely and the implausible. A straightlaced, tall gringo Presbyterian goes out among immigrants, trying to evangelize in broken Spanish and recruit sinners to the “outward and ordinary means” in a humble, little Reformed church 15 minutes to the south. And to sing Psalms. Without musical accompaniment. In English.
I admit that there are all kinds of problems with this model, from a human perspective. But it is actually more plausible than one might think. Yet before I deal with the plausibles, let me first set forth some principles.
The first principle is principle! Principle precedes the practical. We must first determine whether something should be done before we decide whether or not we think it is practical. We ought to go out and bring the Gospel to all. None excluded. Politics quite aside, we may and must not discriminate based on sex, ethnicity, gender, or for that matter even sexual ‘preference.’ By the mandate of our King, we must go and tell them. Yes, as Calvinists, we know that not every “all” means “all.” But “every creature” does in fact mean “every creature.” Even if they don’t look like us, eat like us, or even use our language. It doesn’t matter whether they ‘have papers’ or not, vote Democrat or not. How they got here and whether they should by law be here, is a separate issue for a different discussion (and full disclosure: I lean quite “red” when it comes to immigration policy!). But that they are here means they are here for us to evangelize. And not just gripe about and avoid them as much as possible.
(more…)Winter Cleaning in July
Posted in Articles, Sabbatarianism & the Church Calendar, Transgenerational Faith, Worship, True & False, WPE Editor on July 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Classic Presbyterianism has been enjoying a small renaissance. It seems like every day I’m encountering new people and pastors embracing the “regulative principle of worship,” singing psalms exclusively, removing instruments in church, and objecting to holy days of human origin, such as Christmas. Sacred cows are a-falling, or at least are being questioned.
With respect to Christmas, then, it’s been reassuring to see more and more voices pointing out its pagan origins, and more and more being willing to cross the personal Rubicon … and not looking back. I rejoice in these things and thank the Lord for any and all Reformation gains. But I am concerned that for some, even good fathers and brothers in the faith, certain concessions are made that I fear leave a weed in place to grow back in full force. In other words, I respectfully express my concern about the informal retention of Christmas while officially going on the record as against it.
(more…)Federal evangelism
Posted in Articles, Covenant Theology, Family Religion, Parish in American Context, Parish Theory & Practice, Parochial Strategy, The Romance of Locality, Transgenerational Faith, Visitation Evangelism, WPE Editor on June 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »
District, door-to-door evangelism done right is distinctly Reformed, being a distinctly household-oriented approach to Gospel outreach.
Follow me here. Doesn’t God administer His grace to individuals as well as to households? Doesn’t it start with the head and flow to the members? Isn’t it interested in reconciling the father to the son and the son to the father? Abraham, Joshua, Cornelius, Lydia. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31). We aim for the heads of households; and if we get them, we get the family. (more…)
The duty & art of pastoral catechizing
Posted in Audio Resources, Care for the Youth, Catechesis, Church of England, Locality & the Law of Residence, Parish Theory & Practice, Puritans & Puritanism, Richard Baxter, Transgenerational Faith on April 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The following chapter entitled, “The Parson Catechizing,” is taken from George Herbert’s (1593-1633) classic of pastoral theology, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson his Character and Rule of Holy Life. Herbert, a celebrated English poet, was a minister in the Church of England. Though a conformist, his work surely merits serious attention by the heirs of nonconformity – a definitely pre-Baxter Baxterian. May the lost duty & art of pastoral catechizing be revived and stimulated by this rich contribution! [Recorded in audio here.]
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The Country Parson values catechizing highly: for there being three points of his duty; the one, to infuse a competent knowledge of salvation in every one of his flock; the other, to multiply, and build up this knowledge to a spiritual temple; the third, to inflame this knowledge, to press, and drive it to practice, turning it to reformation of life, by pithy and lively exhortations; catechizing is the first point, and but by catechizing, the other cannot be attained. Besides, whereas in sermons there is a kind of state, in catechizing there is an humbleness very suitable to Christian regeneration; which exceedingly delights him as by way of exercise upon himself, and by way of preaching to himself, for the advancing of his own mortification; for in preaching to others, he forgets not himself, but is first a sermon to himself, and then to others; growing with the growth of his parish.
He useth, and preferreth the ordinary church catechism, partly for obedience to authority, partly for uniformity sake, that the same common truths may be every where professed, especially since many remove from parish to parish, who like Christian soldiers are to give the word, and to satisfy the congregation by their catholic answers.
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