Patriarchy.org
Title
Welcome to Patriarchy.org
Description
Five years ago, when my wife and I were anticipating our first grandchild, we entered into conversations with our children and others as to what titles our grandchildren would call us. I jokingly chose “patriarch,” wondering at what pronunciation our first grandchild would arrive with it. However, about this time, as a minister I also became acquainted with a growing legalistic persuasion in some parents in the evangelical church as to how to do family, and they used the title, “patriarch”; so I decided I would opt to be called something else. Some of these folks had a set of rules that needed to be followed if you really, really were going to obey God in such things as how you educate your children or how Sunday School was to be done (if you had it at all, because it comes from the pit of hell, some contend), and how youth groups were bad, or how a wife must not work outside the home, etc. Forget Christian liberty; some had everything figured out for everyone in great detail, from birth control to courtship to whether daughters could go to college and if it could be a government school and if they could major in business, ad nauseum.
In the winter of 2003 at the direction of our elders I preached a series of sermons on the patriarchy movement. These were helpful to some in our congregation; but what I didn’t expect was the response we received from all over the United States and beyond. Emails and phone calls came from pastors who were trying to deal with it within their congregations. Folks who had been in the movement of all these hard and fast rules on how you have to do family wrote and called to thank me for the sermons or share their own story---like the woman who called after having listened to the sermons and said, “You can’t believe the burden that was lifted from me!” Hopefully the burden can be lifted from others. Maybe some church splits can be avoided and good instruction given on the family, and education and the church, and the liberty Christians have in Christ to do things differently.
As to articles printed here: 1) Within any “movement” or group there can be great diversity; for instance, those who are part of the Reformed Church do not hold to the same beliefs and practices of the faith in every respect. Therefore, issues may be dealt with which apply to the positions held by some but not others. 2) Some may take different positions from my own and other writers who appear here. 3) Some may be directly related to the patriarchy movement only and some may be profitable for all.
