Outnumbered

I have recently discovered ‘Outnumbered’ (BBC1 Saturday 9.00pm ish). It brought back memories of life in our family and friends’ families when our (now grown up) sons were young. The programme shows the unpredictability of family life and how things easily go wrong. It is a lesson in how messy family life can be. The BBC says “it captures the daily rollercoaster of family life in a way not seen before, at its most deliciously chaotic. It is a very recognisable celebration of parental incompetence, as a beleaguered Mum and Dad attempt to raise their kids (a regal six-year-old with a talent for interrogation, an eight-year-old boy with a penchant for lying, and a lovelorn 12-year-old), with the minimum of emotional damage for all concerned.”

It seems that most families like to pretend that their life isn’t messy. Christian families are especially prone to this. They feel they have an image to present to the world and to present to one another at church. No-one must know what is going wrong. No-one must suspect the areas in which individual family members (or the family as a whole) are falling short of the standard that everyone else is obviously reaching. (Except everyone else isn’t!)

At a conference recently, I heard Rob Parsons say that the organisation “Care for the Family” was built on vulnerability. Rob and the others who share and promote good advice on family issues have to be ready to acknowledge their own shortcomings. To be honest and say where they have messed up. He went on to give personal testimony to a time when he and Diane were going through a difficult time and in their church they established a “strugglers group.” This was for people who were not really coping with life, who were falling short of biblical standards, who found their faith was weak and God was distant, who were cold spiritually, who were experiencing break-up in their family. He told how they were inundated with people.

Once someone had the guts to say: “I need help” others too said they needed help. I guess there are churches up and down the land where there is a need for a “Strugglers Group” except no-one wants to be the first to put their hand up. So in our churches we carry on presenting a façade to each other instead of being vulnerable and confessing to one another (James 5:16). In our churches we are letting each other down and we fail to carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) and we continue to be messed up and failing and because we don’t have people alongside us who know our needs, to encourage us, pray for us, support us. We carry on pretending and the church becomes a shadow of what it is meant to be.

The church’s face to the world is often one which proclaims “we have got it all sorted.” We pretend to non-Christians that we have all the answers. They must find this terribly off-putting. They must feel they need to get their life sorted before ever setting their foot in our church. If we were honest about our shortcomings and the fact that we are still a “work in progress” that the Holy Spirit is still doing his work of continuing sanctification in our lives, maybe we would be more winsome, more approachable to someone outside of Christ who is ready to acknowledge that their life is messed up.