"Start Your Family" released

Since we last posted here, we've added another baby to our family and two books to our shelf. Actually, we've added many, many books. But two in particular stand out -- the ones we wrote. The first one, Get Married: What Women Can Do to Help it Happen, made it's debut last January (2008) and has been encouraging single women to pray boldly, seek out mentors and, among other things, live like they're planning to marry.

The newest release, Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies, will hopefully be of special interest to readers of this blog.

Starting a family is a soul-shaping, world-altering experience. Unfortunately, in a culture of competing values and protracted timelines, couples are increasingly backing their way into parenting or missing it altogether. By the time the average couple tries to have kids, they are often beyond their late twenties and surprised to learn they're sliding past the peak of their fertile years.

Start Your Family encourages couples to be intentional about their timeline in the early years of marriage and to trust God to help them boldly launch their families. Responding to the most common doubts and hurdles, we offer biblical inspiration for the questions, "Why have kids?," "When is the best time to start?" and "How can we fit kids into our lives?"

The books explain our move away from Why Family, to the book blog sites. Please join us there. For single women, and others interested in helping them marry well, it's www.helpgetmarried.com.

For couples considering babies, and their community of support, it's www.startyourfamily.com.

Drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.

It's Nearly a Year!

It's hard to believe next week will mark a year since we starting blogging at Boundless. Blogging for the Boundless Line has been a trememdous experience. Thanks to all the readers here who started reading us there. And thanks to all the participants, that's the best part. We've had over 14,000 contributions since we opened up comments on the blog.

If you haven't visited the blog, please take a minute to read today's posts and leave us a message.

Thanks,
Steve and Candice

New Blog on Boundless.org

Not sure if you heard the news, but Boundless.org launched it's blog, The Line, today. We hope you'll take a minute to check it out. And if it looks like our activity on this blog is a little light in the near future, that's because we're contributing over on The Line. We'll still post here: there are some things that just fit better on whyfamily.

Hopefully we'll see you in both places.

Steve and Candice

It's Not About the Career

Michael Noer is either an incredibly courageous journalist, or an incredibly stupid one.

His article this week in Forbes has raised quite a stir. (Incidentally, after day one, a counter-point was added to the website, written by one of his co-workers.) Entitled, "Don't Marry Career Women," the article shows extensive research that supports the idea that a career woman may be a less ideal choice for a spouse if what you're after is faithfulness in your marriage and a happy mother for your children.

All furor aside, I think he missed a vital point. Whether a woman has a career is not the issue. Her priorities are.

I'm concerned about the implications for single Christian career women who exude so much confidence and self-actualization and independence that they leave single Christian men with little to offer them. If a 25 year old career gal earns enough to pay her way, she doesn't need a provider. If she's fit and strong and maybe a black belt to boot, she doesn't need a protector. There's a strong cult of independence, so strong in fact, that I worry it will render a lot of single Christian women unable, or unwilling, to ever become interdependent enough to want or even be capable of Christian marriage.

I'm not saying the single gal should limit herself to knitting and waiting for prince charming, but what her attitude says about her priorities goes a long way toward determining if she'll ever be getting married or forever staying single.

Does she want marriage? Does she want children? Is she open to or planning on quitting her high-powered job to raise her family when they arrive? Then she should make sure that part of her is as obvious as the driven-career woman part.

Plenty of Men to Go Around!

This week's boundless webzine features two articles of interest to our blog readers. The first revisits my homeownership series, only this time from a purely financial perspective. The second, reflected in the title above, debunks a myth that's lately gained steam. Namely: the belief that Christian single women outnumber the men and therefore doom many to unwanted, lifelong, singleness.

Thanks to Mike Theemling (see comments) for taking the stats even further. He did a little research on his own and found that not only are their more single Christian men than women, but there actually more of them -- the men -- in church. I know that won't square with what a lot of the female readers are experiencing; it's not true in every church, but it's encouraging to know it's true overall.

I suspect part of the anecdotal evidence that furthers the perception that women outnumber men comes from mainline churches where, according to journalist Allan Dobras, the pews are filled with older, more female parishioners. In "Men at Church," Dobras blames the exodus of young people, including men, on

the denial of the authority of Scripture which gave rise to an apostate clergy and the "cafeteria Christian" who selects from the Bible those portions of scripture that he/she chooses to accept.

Once Scriptural authority was compromised, it served as an opportunity to rethink human sexuality and introduce the legitimization of homosexuality, which has become the most divisive and polarizing issue in the modern church.

I'd add to that the redefining of the roles men and women play; leaving both sexes confused about how to initiate, function and progress in romantic relationships.

I'll be coming back to this issue in next month's Boundless column.

Till then, I think the best encouragement is that the perception of too few men is a fallacy and the more biblically sound your church is, the more likely it is to appeal to men and more accurately reflect the numbers.

More on Celibacy

Thanks to Jake for pointing out that the link to MacArthur's teaching on 1 Corinthians 7 was incomplete. Following are the links to the rest of the series:

1 Corinthians 7:8-16
1 Corinthians 7:17-24
1 Corinthians 7:25-31
1 Corinthians 7:32-40

I think you'll see from the full series that the verse explaining why every man should have his own wife and every woman her own husband ("since there is so much immorality," v. 2) is at least as strong as the reason young virgins should remain that way.

One look at our culture is weighty confirmation that the immorality problem remains.

Also, a word about gortexgrrl's exegesis. This is the first I have heard about the word idios in the context of 1 Corinthians 7. I have previously only heard the Greek word charisma. Not being a biblical scholar myself, I tend to defer to trustworthy experts or tools. For the sake of clarity and accuracy, it would help to know the origins of your interpretation on this one.

I did do a quick search in a Greek Lexicon for the word gift. There are nine versions in the New Testament. Though none of them are idios.

Finally, a word about the question of whether a gift of celibacy equals the cessation, or at least significant lessening, of sexual desire. It's incomplete to read 1 Corinthians 7 without also studying what Jesus said in Matthew 19. It seems to me that His choice of the word eunuch is so graphic as to be significant. If being celibate was not dependent on some lessening of the sex drive, why use a word that means "to castrate or neuter a man." He's talking about being cut off (literally or figuratively) from the sex drive.

This is a reminder that we all drift toward proof-texting -- it's just easy to stop searching the Scriptures and be satisfied when we find a passage that proves our point. What's needed is the full counsel of God's revealed Word.

Unpacking Celibacy

It's great to see such a lively and engaging discussion going on among our faithful blog community. Thank you for taking the time to think deeply about these important issues and for contributing thoughtful comments. It's too bad you don't all live in the same city -- these conversations would be even better, I suspect, over coffee.

Now for the recent debate about what Paul really meant in 1 Corinthians 7. It's not surprising to see so many opinions on this passage. It's one that remains hotly debated. And why shouldn't it? There's a lot at stake based on how you interpret what he wrote.

I'd like to recommend the transcript of a CD set that we listened to recently by John MacArthur. This well-respected Bible scholar provides the valuable service of explaining what it was Paul was reacting to (1 Corinthians 7:1 begins, "Now concerning the things about which you wrote ..."). The church at Corinth had rasied some questions and concerns to which Paul was responding. That's helpful to know when trying to make sense of what's better, celibacy or marriage. And what's the gift. And who should stay single. And what being single is for. These are important things to know given the state of our culture when it comes to marriage.

Even though I hold strong opinions on these matters, I'm prayerful that God will continue to broaden my understanding of what's true. The goal, afterall, is His perspective. MacArthur's teachings are a part of that process.