June 2010 – AFA Journal editor Randall Murphree interviewed Matt Friedeman regarding his assessment of fatherhood in our culture today. Matt and his wife Mary have five sons and one daughter. He is a professor at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi; radio host on American Family Radio and author of Life Changing Bible Study.

AFA Journal: How has the father’s role in the family changed in American culture over the past two generations?
Matt Friedeman: We are reaping the whirlwind of the breakdown of the traditional family. Since the early 1960s, any lay observer and certainly the serious researcher can see how the church has lost membership, crime has skyrocketed, education has suffered, sexually transmitted diseases are epidemic, societal and familial dysfunction is rampant – we are just flat in a mess.

The main driver behind “the mess” is the incidence of out-of-wedlock births. Today in my state, over half the babies are born to a mother-only constellation, and among African-Americans it is above 80%. In the 1960s, researchers would not have believed it could happen. Today, it is normalized. Add the rapid increase of divorce over the last few decades and the result is stunning. The huge increases in social digression since 1960 come largely from the children of family breakdown.

We made a deal with young unmarried mothers in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: Have a baby out of wedlock, and the government will give you money. Have more kids, we will give you more money. And the only way to turn off the spigot of funds is to (1) get married or (2) get a job. Our young people having babies outside marriage figured out that system in a hurry, and one wonders if our nation will ever recover.

Fathers have thus been marginalized and have marginalized themselves in this culture. The Great Society and the ensuing damage is the major culprit. But if the laws of the land only reflect the culture at large, as some would suggest, then the church too often stood by and let the culture slide to where we considered such egregious laws allowable.

Added to this general degradation of family life and fatherhood, the influence of popular culture precipitates further breakdown. On average, we evangelicals pump the popular culture into our homes via television for four to eight hours a day.

AFAJ: Sounds like a bleak assessment.
MF: Well, if the church is willing to have the blame laid at our feet (and we should be), the good news is we are the major change agents in making it right again. The decision is ours. If the problem was our fault, we can be a major part of the solution.

Someone once told of a store where some wiseacres slip in and change all the prices on the items on the shelves. So – the rubber ball has the price tag of a speedboat, and the speedboat the price tag of a baseball mitt. Next day, as people start filing through the check-out line, confusion reigns. Who switched the price tags?

That question is a pertinent one for our culture. And the church should, first with its own members and then increasingly with the culture at large, start getting the price tags right.

AFAJ: What are the ramifications of these changes for our nation’s future?
MF: Years ago at my 20th high school reunion, a friend looked around at the circle of people who were in discussion and said, “You know, you can tell who in this class had solid parents, and who didn’t.” We all stopped, pondered and realized how right he was; solid parents had produced relatively solid kids while other of our classmates seemed almost wired for failure, grief, heartbreak and discouragement.

God can redeem anyone, but it seems He has a lot of extra work in the absence of parents who are committed in marriage and devoted to rearing their kids, and who exhibit adequate amounts of love, discipline and family solidarity.

Local churches need to regain the sense of where families are and where they need to be.

AFAJ: What is one thing you’ve done well that you would recommend to other families?
MF: When our oldest child, Caleb, was a year-and-a-half old, I brought home some research from one of James Dobson’s books that suggested that if you hadn’t done certain things by 18 months in the child’s life, well, you had really missed it. I started reading the list to my wife Mary and she told me, “Stop reading, I don’t want to hear it.”

But we decided right then to get out a piece of paper and write down what we wanted our children to be like by age 18. What measurable qualities and characteristics should we work to instill in them? We call it our “Age 18 List.” That simple exercise gave our family direction. It told us the things we needed to change to become the kind of parents our children needed in order to become the people we felt God wanted them to be.

AFAJ: What kinds of things were on the list?
MF: Lots of things. For instance, we wanted them to give their lives to Jesus and be open to ministry as a vocation. We wanted all of them to play an instrument. We wanted them to know Latin, Greek and Hebrew. We wanted them to be athletic but not to be overly enamored with spectator sports. We wanted them to minister to the needy. We wanted them to be virgins when they married and to wed holy spouses for the glory of God. We wanted them to love their church.

That’s only a few. But as we set our sights on these things and created a culture of love and discipline in our home, God has worked in all of our lives.

AFAJ: What’s the difference between being dad to sons and to daughters?
MF: My family of origin had four boys and a girl. So I don’t pretend to be an expert on females. Interestingly enough, I prayed to God for boys. Why? From junior high through the present day, I have seen dozens of godly young ladies choose less than godly men for company and for marriage because they couldn’t find manly, holy men. It broke my heart and still breaks it.

So, I told God that if He would give me boys, I would raise them for holy matrimony for those godly girls he wants them to marry.

Mary and I have five sons and one daughter. Hannah has added so much to our family. She brings that feminine presence that makes our boys even more the young men they were meant to be. She has softened up her dad (but not to the point where she can’t be disciplined, which is rarely needed). I love her so very much, and hope that another dad out there prayed that he might have a boy to raise for God’s glory and for her hand in marriage.

AFAJ: How do fathers bring families back to a biblical foundation?
MF: Teach them the Bible. And that is primarily the father’s job.

When Caleb was eight (He’s now 21.), I asked him some theological questions that any son of a seminary professor should know. He was an incredibly bright child and knew all the biblical stories, but he didn’t have a clue about theology. So I decided to write a catechism that we could teach to him and his siblings, to instill basic biblical and theological literacy.

Mealtimes are substantial for our family. Years ago, we learned that as the Jews went into exile, they decided that without a temple, the home should become their holy place and the dinner table would be the altar. That is where they taught their children faith.

So we picked up on that. This is what we do: As we gather at the table, I read aloud a selection from C.S. Lewis or another great Christian author, or a missionary story. Then we sing a hymn together. (We bought hymn books for every member of the family.) Next, we review a section from the catechism. Then we recite together a memorized portion of both the Old and the New Testaments followed by a creed (Apostles’, Nicene or Athanasian) or one of several famous lengthy Christian quotations we have learned. Lastly, we recite a famous prayer of one of the saints, and then we pray for our meal.

That daily practice keeps the biblical worldview refreshed.

AFAJ: How does a dad teach his children values?
MF: Basic principle – just because your culture does it, doesn’t mean you have to. The culture says to shuffle off your kids to school. We homeschool. The culture says have multiple TVs in your home. We have none. The culture says experiment with dating and sex before marriage. We practice courtship and teach that the first kiss either party should experience is at the marriage altar. The list goes on.

The word in the biblical Hebrew for holy is qadosh. It means, basically, different. We need to be different than the world around us. Pollster George Barna suggests we who claim a relationship with Jesus are negligibly different in practice than the world around us. Christian families need to ask today, are we biblically and substantially different than other families who don’t know the Lord? Too often, we are not.

AFAJ: How does a dad teach children to have an impact on our culture?
MF: For Christ, the two operative words for disciple-making were “Follow Me.” You see those words dozens of times in the Gospels. It is true for parents. Whether or not parents ever actually say “Follow me,” they communicate it just by being Mom or Dad. And children generally do follow.

Jesus called disciples to Himself and then led them into a world to preach, teach, heal and take on the demons. The point for fathers is that disciple-making, which fatherhood is, means going out to the abortion clinic to counsel, or to the prison to preach, or to the nursing home to minister, or to the inner city to build low-cost housing – and taking your kids with you. Children learn by what they see modeled and internalize godly counsel that is enfleshed.

The world won’t be changed unless we intersect with it; our children won’t know they are supposed to compassionately challenge culture unless they do it with us and see the model.