The Domestic Captivity of the Church

Why do churches easily distance themselves from issues of work, politics and ideas? Why do churches focus on “family values”?

Why are churches better at evangelizing families and friends than evangelizing the wider society and nation?

Why do churches flourish in the suburbs, and find ministry and witness in the city or the work-place more difficult?

Why do people find that they are living in two different worlds, and find it hard to make links between the two?

Why is childcare an increasingly difficult issue for our society?

Suggesting an Answer

The answer is the massive effects of the Industrial Revolution, which
began in the 1750s. Here was the birth of centralised, mechanised and
specialised work-places for the production of goods. Prior to this
individual potters worked from their homes; after you had mechanised
potteries. Prior to it you had a miller grinding flour at a local
flourmill: after you had a big mill, serving a larger area. Before you
had a baker for a village who would bake at home; after had a big
bakery, with up-to-date machines.

Furthermore, this centralising
also increased the need for transport. People now needed to leave their
homes and travel to factories and then home again; the raw materials
had to be transported to the factories and the finished products
transported from the factories.

Before the Industrial
Revolution, people worked where they lived, and lived where they worked.
‘Home’ and ‘work’ was the same place and ‘work’ was often a family
business in which members of the family all participated. Sometimes
servants or apprentices were received into the family to help with the
business.

However, after the Revolution, ‘home’ and ‘work’ were
separated. While initially women and children went off to work at
factories as well as men, eventually it was mainly men who left home
each day to go to work. So for the first time there was a general and
significant separation between ‘home’ and ‘work’. This separation was
made more complete when there was an increasing separation between
suburbs for homes, and industrial suburbs and city centres for work.
People lived in the suburbs, and men went to work elsewhere.

The Impact of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution had dramatic effects upon society:

Men
went off to work—to a different world, with different issues and
pressures. They became absent husbands and fathers (‘just wait till your
father gets home’), and were valued for the money they brought home as
the result of their work.
Women stayed at home, became domestic,
and became the effective parent. They did not earn money but became
responsible for running the household. They were concerned with family
and domestic matters, not issues of the workplace.
Children were
raised mostly by mothers (with the help of aunts, and grandmothers).
Child-rearing became women’s business, and children suffered from the
absence of fathers.
Churches flourished in domestic suburbs,
because that was where people were on Sundays. So they focused on family
issues, on domestic matters, and on issues of sexuality because of its
power to break up families. As a result, women felt increasingly at home
in churches while men felt an increasing gap between work issues and
their local church, and so less at home in church.
Churches,
because of their domestic focus, became increasingly distant from work-
place issues and from non-home and family issues in general. They
thought of evangelism in terms of suburban locations, and neglected
wider society and its issues.
This post-Industrial Revolution
picture of the roles of husbands and wives came to be regarded as the
Christian norm, despite the wonderful picture of the wealth-making woman
of Proverbs 31! Moreover, Titus 2:5 where wives were to be ‘busy at
home’ was read as reinforcing this view, even though originally to be
’busy at home’ would have included working at the family business.
Conservative Christians became socially conservative, but only as far back as the post-Industrial Revolution age!
People
who work, men and women, sometimes felt when they came to church, that
they were in weekend, non-work mode, and that the last things they
wanted to do was to have to think about work issues, about how
Christianity impacts the workplace and society. They may have been
influenced by the home-work separation that is inherent in their lives
more deeply than they realise.

A Recent Significant Development

A
recent but significant development has been that women have gone into the
workplace. However, this change has not changed the basic structure of
the post-Industrial Revolution age. There is still a massive separation
between home and work and that gap is no easier to cross for women than
it is for men. Moreover, the problem is not just absent fathers but also
absent mothers. Who is left to look after children? The effect on
churches has been that most of their major work-force, women, have
disappeared with increasing work-hours exacerbating the problem.
Churches still tend to focus on domestic issues, and to forget issues of
workplace and society evangelism.

What Should We Do?

It is not likely that we will be able to diminish the home-work dichotomy in the way we live, even if some people are able to work from home, and some live in cities. However, we need to find ways to minimize the harm.

We need a vision of the Christian life that embraces home and work, the church and the society, the neighbourhood and the world.
We need churches to address issues of work, society, and the world as well as issues of home and church.
We
need churches to escape their suburban captivity, tackle workplace
issues and workplace evangelism, and to value the daily work that people
do.
We need specialist ministries to focus on ministry in the workplace, witness in society, and witness in the world.
We need patterns of work that do not consume people.
We need a solution to the daily care of children, when parents are working.