Church: The American Family Seeks What's Missing

The American family is a structure that is becoming a thing of the past. Once regarded universally as the highest of priorities, family time is often now reduced, at best, to huddling around the television for hours on end, not speaking to one another, but communicating merely by the passing of the remote. What has changed in the last fifty or sixty years? Technology, some would argue, has detracted from family time. Others would dispute that the need for increased income forces parents to work more, thereby reducing the time available to spend with family. Though these are certainly valid issues, there remains one crucial dynamic that is often overlooked or ignored: The American family is missing Church. A family that is not attending church lacks the strong moral fiber needed to hold itself together through times of challenge and adversity. 

What constitutes a strong moral fiber? Dictionary.com defines it as: (strength of character, firmness of purpose). (Character is defined as: the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing.) Simply put, a family’s moral fiber is defined by the strength of who and what they are. In an age of disposable values and interchangeable virtues, finding solidarity within the family is a challenge. The only place to find the virtues a family needs to survive in a difficult world is the Church. Here, a family can learn the value of a strong support system, the challenge to adhere to traditional family ideals and the truth about positive influence. 

Trying to dismiss the value of a family-based support system is like arguing that the foundation of a skyscraper has nothing to do with its stability. These massive buildings, extending some several hundred feet into the air, are composed of many tons of glass, steel, wood and a myriad of other composite materials. While the weight of most cannot be readily determined, the fact remains that the density of the materials alone could cause the structure to collapse. The potential damage could be devastating to all inside the building, as well as many around it. 

Church: relevant, or antiquated?

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