Is your family Bibleworthy? - Interview with Jeremy Pryor
Hello and welcome to Bible Worthy. I'm Blair Lee. And today, we're joined by Jeremy Pryor, author of How Ancient Wisdom Can Heal the Modern Family. And he's also the co founder of the organization Family Teams, which encourages families to see themselves as multigenerational teams on mission. And Jeremy is also a podcast making machine.
Blair:So he has the Family Teams podcast, the 1000 houses podcast, and the Jeremy Pryor pod podcast. Jeremy, welcome to the show.
Jeremy:Hey, Blair. So good to be with you.
Blair:So, Jeremy, so you spent about 2 decades raising a family of 5 and living out the principles you've written about in family revision.
Jeremy:Is that
Blair:about right?
Jeremy:Mhmm. Yeah.
Blair:So could you share a pivotal moment from your family journey that first made you question the traditional Western view of family?
Jeremy:So my first inkling that maybe there was a different way of viewing family happened when I spent a semester abroad in Jerusalem. I was 23 years old, a single guy. At the time, I was living in Seattle before that and in Seattle and Portland and doing youth youth ministry and family had seemed like a experiment that had somehow gone off the rails. There was just so much destruction especially with the public school kids that I was working with. So, I wasn't actually that excited to be a father.
Jeremy:I was that optimistic about the way that family was designed and, I was very excited to study the old testament and that's why I was in Jerusalem. So I was there for a semester abroad. But while I was just learning Hebrew and, you know, spending time walking around the city of Jerusalem, I just kept seeing the scene of, fathers with children and it confused me and, you know, I I really wasn't having a lot of direct connections with a lot of the, people living in Jerusalem mostly just with other students at my school But I just kept seeing this scene and I I remember it culminated one day in just seeing a group of dads pushing strollers with their little kids in tow and I was just like, man, that's that is weird. I've never seen like a daddy brigade. I've seen mommy brigades but not daddy brigades.
Jeremy:So I started to get to know a few Jewish fathers and just asking them questions. I I knew 1 or 2 heir fathers as well and there was such a, sort of consensus on where they were getting their interest in having kids and being dads and that was from Abraham. And so I I didn't know I didn't really understand what it meant to to be in a a truly Abrahamic culture, where the ideas about family, about fatherhood, were being so culturally, kind of derived from the stories about Abraham. And I started to ask this question that I've really never gotten over and that is, okay, as a more of a Western Christian, if I were to really take seriously Abraham as kind of a cultural, pillar and I would start to think about family from the perspective of the way Abraham saw family, where he was just obsessed with, you know, building a multigenerational family and working with his family and receiving and passing blessings down to his family. Like, all those things you see in Genesis 12 through you know, 25.
Jeremy:What what what kind of family would come into existence? And and as I played that thought experiment out and really began to learn from some of these cultures that were Abrahamic, I just something woke up inside of me. I don't know what else I mean, I suddenly desired to be a father. I wanted to found a multi generational family line. And, what seemed like to me at the time, like, almost a primitive way of viewing family, I suddenly adopted and saw this as as very practical, and very possible.
Jeremy:And, yeah, I've I've just I have never gotten over that.
Blair:Wow. And so, I guess, before we kinda zero in on this Abrahamic, family culture, what did you discover was the core problem that Christian families are having that, this this solves?
Jeremy:Yeah. So Christian families have a vision of family that is very recent, and they don't know it. Like, they they believe that family is a a nest, or a simple way to say it is maybe a good family is designed to be a springboard for individual success and this is almost the universal philosophy of family in the West and it's a very recent and historically unusual way to view family. So in most parts of the world, most times in history, people saw family as a multi generational team. You would you would live your life with your family, you would you were inheriting a whole, legacy of of ideas and practices and identities from your family line and you were very interested in preserving those things and passing them down to your children and grandchildren.
Jeremy:And whereas, the Western family, you know, has about an 80 year memory. If you ask most Western people to name their great grandparents, they wouldn't be able to even tell you their first names. They don't know who they are because they're not relevant to their lives. They're not attempting to pass on or create any kind of continuity generationally with their, family line. And, you know, you might think, well, you know, is that a really a big deal?
Jeremy:How much does that really change the way that people live. But in my experience, it looks like we're enduring a profound identity crisis in in Western culture. Individuals don't know who they are. They're extraordinarily confused. Family has become, so fragile.
Jeremy:You know, the divorce rate of 50% that exists in most Western countries is absolutely historically bizarre. Like, today, for example, in the nation of India, the divorce rate's 1.1%. So that's more normal. Like, if you understood what a family was, like, that's that if you understood the roles and the and the and the nature of family, the multigenerational, it's a very, very good design. It's highly functional.
Jeremy:The Western family is is predictably dysfunctional. Even the 50% that stay married, it isn't like they're experiencing flourishing family life. I mean, that that that's almost a punchline in western culture. And so either family is a terrible idea or our ideas about family are terrible. And I really think it's the second.
Jeremy:So we need then to somehow get access to an ancient blueprint of family, if we're going to actually get back to a functional design. And, you know, when you see and read scripture, you know, this sort of Abrahamic idea family that you get in the New and Old Testament, it's so clear that it's, number 1, totally different than the way that even Christian, families function and it is highly functional. It works. It works beautifully. But, man, if you try to adopt this in the modern western world, even in the modern western Christian world, you will look weird, because this this idea of family is not culturally normal any longer and so you have to sort of sign up for, you know, trying something radically different than what most people grew up with or have maybe even seen.
Blair:So I've read the story of Abraham many times. I didn't come to this understanding of Abraham till I started hearing people like you, but I never made the connection that this is somehow an example for me as a father. So what was that moment for you like?
Jeremy:Yeah. Well, that's very understandable. I I had a similar experience. I actually you know, ironically, the semester before I was in Jerusalem, I was studying at a seminary under the man who's arguably the greatest Abrahamic scholar in the U. S.
Jeremy:He wrote an incredible book called the Pentateuchus Narratives. His name was John Salehamer. Doctor. Salehamer was basically writing books where he was interpreting the Old Testament strictly through the character of Abraham. Anyway, I I was in an intensive there's only 8 students in this intensive with doctor Silheimer.
Jeremy:I was so I I was studying Abraham exclusively for an entire semester.
Blair:Okay.
Jeremy:And never once did we talk about Abraham as a father. And so, it's not surprising that you can not only be familiar with the Abrahamic narratives, but you can study them for decades as a scholar and never see the connection. And I think it's sort of like it's difficult to see things if you're not looking for them. And you kind of look past Abraham's sort of lens of family and fatherhood because you just simply and what I did before I was in Israel, I just categorized it as an element of his sort of, primitive culture. So Abraham, you know, he was a camel trader.
Jeremy:You know, doesn't mean I need to be a camel trader. Abraham was obsessed with building a multigenerational family. It doesn't mean that I need to be obsessed. And so, as soon as you sort of categorize a part of the narrative as cultural, you you basically, you know, neutralize its ability to transform your life. And so, you have to be really careful with that move.
Jeremy:And so, what I started to do when I was in Israel was I began to ask the question, maybe Abraham's family philosophy was preserved by the Holy Spirit intentionally because I I saw these the cultures that were, deeply Abrahamic had highly functional families and the cultures that were abandoning Abrahamic ideas of fatherhood and family were experiencing dysfunction in families at a astounding level. So that that was kind of sort of a clue to look there, but there are other clues that I think are really useful. Like, one is just in the name Abram or Abraham. Right? If you if you read Abram Abraham's name originally was Avraham, right, in Hebrew, which means in Hebrew exalted father and Okay.
Jeremy:Omeda father. So if you're reading it in Hebrew, you're constantly saying every time you say his name, exalted father, exalted father, you're emphasizing the fatherliness. In other words, is is his name Avraham? Because just like the name Adam, Adam, means humanity. So when you're actually studying, you know, Genesis 1 through 3, you could think about Adam strictly as a historical, human and interpret every part of that story as totally unique to a time in history and interesting historical information, or you could see it as a pattern for humanity.
Jeremy:And I I think that we're intent and we're intended to interpret scripture, particularly Genesis narratives, in both ways. But, people do that with Adam, you know, by and large, but they don't do that with Abraham. So and the clue is often in the in actually the the name itself, Avraham, so exalted father. He's he's not the perfect father. He's the perfect description of the way God interacts with the essence of fatherhood.
Jeremy:He's the meta father. He's the father where he's the he's the one through which we understand fatherhood, from. And it's interesting, you know, when when Jesus referred to Abraham in the Gospels, I just was reading this the other day in in, Luke 16 in the parable of the rich man of Lazarus, he calls him father Abraham and this was the way that Jesus and and all the people in the 1st century thought about Abraham. They thought about him as primarily as father Abraham. They didn't think of him the way we do as, you know, sort of the historical individual Abraham or as, like, doctor Silhamer was primarily teaching us, Abraham, the man of faith, which I think is certainly part of the way we need to understand Abraham.
Jeremy:Paul talks about that in Romans 4 in detail, but he's also father Abraham. So that's a big question. And cultures that see him as as a father, they they tended to see these connections. But cultures that see him as a historical, like, figure or strictly maybe a theological example, they might not see Abraham as a father. One of the things that Paul says theologically that's really interesting is in Genesis 3, he says, you know, to the Gentiles, you are all children of Abraham.
Jeremy:And one of the arguments he's making, the whole point of the book of Galatians, in part, is for him to explain to Gentiles that they have become a part of this Abrahamic family. And so, everyone listening to this who's a believer in Jesus, Abraham is your father. You're either a part of his ethnic family because you're Jewish or you're adopted into his family because you are in Christ who was Jewish and now you're a part of of the Abrahamic family line. And so, he's your father as well and his patriarchal vision is is over you and over your family and you can draw as much or as little sustenance and vision and mission from your father Abraham as you would like, but what's interesting about both Jews and Muslims is that they both have embraced that entirely. Like, they they see their lives through the vision of developing, and furthering the vision and mission of their father, Abraham.
Jeremy:The least Abrahamic of all 3 Abrahamic religions is Christianity. Christianity has found a way to systematically separate ourselves from Abraham and it's not a sound theological move, not only because of the whole point of these narratives in the Hebrew scriptures in the Old Testament, but because of what's said about them over and over again in the New Testament and the painstaking ways the apostles were trying to help Gentiles understand their connection to Abraham, which has been ignored in favor of, basically, a New Testament kind of faith that adopts the culture of the country or ethnicity that you're from as a Gentile Christian while ignoring any of the, cultural elements that I think ought to be adopted through understanding what it means to adopt an Abrahamic kind of culture. And I think until we repent of this move and choose to, to accept an Abrahamic culture, especially in the area of family, I I don't think we're gonna stop seeing the dysfunction of the family.
Blair:Right. Right. And so the phrase multigenerational team on mission is, something that I hear. What is this? What is this thing?
Jeremy:Yeah. So I've tried to figure out how do you how do you articulate to a modern western person the definition of the biblical family? So I would I would say the definition of the successful Western family is a springboard for individual success. Right? And the best way the analogy we have for that is the the word nest.
Jeremy:So we just naturally think think about our families like a nest because nests basically exist for 1 generation. You kick the chickies out and then it restarts, you know, every generation, completely new. And that's that's the modern western philosophy. So then, I was I was wondering, well, how could I describe, you know, the biblical definition of family in just contrast to the springboard for individual success kind of family? If it's not a nest, what is it?
Jeremy:And I think the simplest way I know of describing it in the fewest number of words is a multi generational team on mission. So the analogy is a team instead of a nest, and it's not a springboard for individual success. It's a multigenerational team on mission. And, you know, you can
Blair:When you say multigenerational, you mean, you don't just mean, like, from young to old, like, many generations under the same roof.
Jeremy:Yeah. What I mean is the s like, the actual family itself. What is a family? Like, every single person listening to this is a part of a family. And you're gonna think of your you you you probably if you're western, you almost entirely think about your family, as the as a nuclear family.
Jeremy:Like, you you know, it's you and your kids. You know, you might include maybe 1 generation upstream if you're unusually connected to your parents or your wife's parents. But that's pretty much it. That's the extent of the family. It's mostly a nuclear family idea and what I'm trying to explain to people is that that is not at all the way that biblical, families, thought of themselves.
Jeremy:They thought of themselves as a multi generational family or a part of a family line. So they they had over a 1000 year memory. The reason why there are so many genealogies in the Bible is because this was the universal way that biblical people thought about family. And so it was it was obvious that you would want to know, the stories going back 100 of years and that you would want every single person in your family to trace their family line way back and that all of those people and their vision and their lives and their stories were part of your life, your story, your identity. And so, when you thought about yourself as a family, you primarily saw that you were stewarding one branch of a line as opposed to the, the sudden coming into existence of a brand new one generational family the way we do we think of in the west.
Jeremy:So the essence of what they thought family was was a was multigenerational. It was a is a part of this family line that you're stewarding, you know, one one link in that chain as opposed to, you know, something that's a single generation.
Blair:So and why why the word team? I mean, that that's not a word you find in the bible anywhere, that I'm aware of. Right, you know, there's there's other words like household or I mean, there's the word family too. So why team?
Jeremy:Yeah. Great question. So, you know, language is tricky. You always want to make sure that you can use words that, most clearly represent to the hearer in their language what the original, person would have meant. And the word team is extremely useful for understanding the essence of what the way that ancient families thought of themselves and they didn't use that word, but I think it's the closest word that we have in English to what they actually were doing.
Jeremy:So, an example and where I derive the whole phrase multi generational team on mission comes from Genesis 128. So, if you look at that verse, it's, you know, theologians have this thing they call the principle of first mention which is the oftentimes, it's the first time a new concept is being introduced in the Bible. Oftentimes, you also get along with it, its essence being defined, its purpose, you know. And, and so you have in Genesis 128, god making the first family and then he tells the first family, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue, rule. And so this 5 part mission that he gives the family is interesting.
Jeremy:The first thing that you can say about it is it's not given to 1 generation. He he tells them to fill the earth. He tells you know, this can't be done by Adam and Eve. This can only be done by a family line. It can be done by a family line.
Jeremy:And so, clearly, the mission is multigenerational. Therefore, the entity that he's speaking to is not a single generation. He's speaking to something that's multigenerational. Now, the the actual commission to this first family begins with the words, he blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue, and rule. So in other words, he's giving this 5 part mission to the multigenerational group.
Jeremy:And so when you give a whole group of people an assignment and tell them to work together to accomplish it, the English word for that is team. Right. And so what he was bringing into existence was a team, and and so he expected them to to work together. Now, in ancient times, they all saw a family as a team and so it was redundant to use that kind of English word. It would be unnecessary.
Jeremy:But today, we don't actually think of our families that way at all. We do almost nothing together. We don't do productive economic activity together. Most families just don't do anything like what you would see a sports team or a business team, a group of people, working together. And so because of that, I think it's necessary to explicitly call out the fact that that God designed the family to work together.
Jeremy:So the husband, wife, son, daughter, these roles that exist, you know, uncle, aunt, cousin, all of these things to us, when you think about them, you're you know, most Western people, they they think about these roles and they have reactions to them that are almost entirely sentimental. They're not actually functional. And so, even when the Bible starts to talk about the importance of roles in the home, husbands do this, wives do this, children do this, as if these roles are all functioning in some kind of unity to accomplish something, we almost have a knee jerk negative reaction to that. We're like, well, that seems weird. Like, you're telling these people that they have to do these things because in our culture, you know, we don't actually need to do those things because all that all of that teamwork and all of those roles exist in other entities in our culture.
Jeremy:They exist in the business world. They exist on this, you know, in the sports world. They don't exist in the family world anymore. And so people are endlessly confused about the way that the new testament, for example, talks about the family because it assumes everyone knows that it's a highly dynamic team and that the survival of the members of the family actually depend on the highly functional way that the team, works together in this dynamic process, by people adopting, understanding, and living out these the the unique roles of the team. And so that that's why I think it's really important to actually explicitly say, hey.
Jeremy:It's a team. And it's it's interesting that, you know, nobody has a problem when there's roles on a team. Right? So if if if you were to have a you know, in a sports team, you know, tell somebody, hey. That's not your your job.
Jeremy:You know? Here's your job because you're the quarterback or, you know, whatever sport you think of. This is this is the kind of role that you need to play. Everyone understands that a coach is going to enforce that and and ought to enforce that. But as soon as you do that in a family context, people get extremely frustrated and nervous and they feel like it's it's violating somebody's individual, freedom and individual identity because they don't think the family is a team and I think that they're right.
Jeremy:If the family is not a team, it's inappropriate to, suggest that people need to somehow play out pre existing roles in a skillful and diligent way. But if the family is a team, all of a sudden, all of those roles start to not only make sense, but become essential, that we understand what they are and that they also, the family, it would be very blessed if those roles were universal because that way we can train the next generation in the way that that they could function in those roles so that their families can flourish. So we've lost all of that, and and the only way to recapture that is by restoring the understanding that the family, at its very essence, is a team.
Blair:Okay. Okay. And and you said that's because it's not so emphasized in the New Testament is because it was assumed.
Jeremy:Right. Yes. Yeah. Every and you see that in every single example of a family. There there was the the word for family in Greek, the primary word used is oikos, which is the word for, you know, the word for household.
Jeremy:It's where we get the word economics. Oikos, is the, the word economics is basically the the order of the household. And the reason why that morphed into a financial word in, in English and in other, languages is because all of the economic activity that occurred in those centuries was centered in the home. And, you know, that's you're you're basically functioning like a team all day, every day. Everything you're doing is all the economic activity of your life is being done in and through the household, the oikos.
Jeremy:And so, yeah, to to to say that so, you know, Jesus tells a story, you know, a parable of 2 sons. And he says in the morning, you know, he the the father got up and he told the 2 sons, alright, guys. I need you to go into the field and work today. And, you know, one son said, yes, father, and then didn't do it. The other other son said, no, father.
Jeremy:You know, I don't wanna do that today, but he did go. Now Jesus' whole point was to talk about the the fact that, you know, it's not good enough to just say you're gonna do something, but you need to actually do it like the son who actually went out into the field. But what's interesting, and this is true of a number of the parables, you know, that scene was very common to them. Like, that's exactly the way everyone woke up in the morning. You know, they woke up and these were adult sons.
Jeremy:You know, they woke up and they were a team and so the dad tells them, okay, guys. This is what we're doing today. This is what we're gonna work on. And, you know, if people resisted that for whatever reason, like the prodigal son, you know, you're gonna starve like the prodigal son did. I mean, this everyone's survival was dependent on the level of teamwork within the family and this is why in the 1st century you had, I think, one of the most one of the times in human history where the household was stronger than almost any time and it was it was the 1st century household was was quite a structure to behold.
Jeremy:I've spent my I spent the last 20 years studying every kind of source material I can get my hands on on the 1st century household. It It wasn't just the Jewish household, by the way. It was also the Roman household, the patras familia. The the first century Roman household was incredibly strong and they were actually a part of the, the government. A lot of the a lot of the laws, like, if you look at the laws like in America, the Constitution, the US constitution, for example, there's not a single mention of the family anywhere in the constitution.
Jeremy:The family is not a part of the governing structure of democracies in general. However, in the 1st century, there's all kinds of laws about the family. For example, in the Roman world, you know, if you were to break a law as an individual, the person that would be civilly responsible for restitution would be the patres familia of your family. In other words, the the the patriarchal father of that of that household, that oikos, would be financially liable for things being done. There's all kinds of legislation about that.
Jeremy:And so, of course, if he's gonna be liable, he's gonna have to have a lot of authority and he did. These men had a lot of responsibility and a lot of authority. They they were essentially it's best to think of them as as they they were they were all ruling over micro governments. And many times, these households were 15, 20, 30 people in size. And so in the book of Acts, you know, where you had the conversion, there's more stories of household conversions in the book of Acts than individual conversions, because they primarily functioned as these these households and not as individuals like we do today.
Blair:Okay. Let me let me stress test this idea just a little bit to see what you say about some of these, maybe, objections, I guess. Yeah. So, Jesus, Paul, most of the apostles all lived and died single. I mean, Paul even seems to promote singleness as a per as preferred, you know, in 1 Corinthians 7.
Blair:And so let you respond to that.
Jeremy:Yeah. So one of the things that's really unique about the New Testament is that in the Old Testament, if you didn't if you weren't married and you didn't have a family, you were considered cursed. And you can see that all through the stories of the Old Testament. It was there there was no redeeming narrative for the single life or the lifelong single person that did not exist. And and so you turn the page to the New Testament, and and so you have all this theology of family in the Hebrew scriptures, but there's no mention of, like, a redemptive sort of single narrative until you get to the New Testament.
Jeremy:There's only one exception to that that I know of in the Old Testament. It's actually a prophecy in Isaiah 54. It's a really interesting prophecy. So most people are familiar with Isaiah 53. It's probably the chapter in the Bible that that, like, articulates the gospel better than any other chapter of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Old Testament, you know, where it talks about Jesus and his crucifixion.
Jeremy:And so, what's gonna happen after Jesus, you know, you have this Messiah figure who comes and pays for our sins as described in Isaiah 54? Well, if you turn the page to Isaiah 54 after Isaiah 53, what it describes is a single person who is suddenly having more children than married people. It describes the single woman and it said she's so blessed. She's gonna have to expand her house because because the single woman, the barren woman, is having more children than the woman who has a husband. And so this explosive reproductive life of the single person was prophesied by Isaiah, as this thing that's gonna come after the Messiah, you know, redeems humanity.
Jeremy:And so I so you turn the page of the New Testament and you see this incredible story of, like you say, Jesus living, a single life and instead of getting married, he takes on 12 disciples. Right? And he trains them like you would train a son, and apprentices them, right, to go and make disciples and then at the end of his life after the resurrection, he then commissions them to go and do likewise and so you see this eruption and Jesus even says, you know, in Matthew 19, that he says, look, the disciples are asking about marriage and he said, you know, that, basically, divorce is absolutely off limits and they start freaking out and saying, well, who then should get married? And Jesus says to them, you know, well, that some have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of God. The one who can accept this should accept this.
Jeremy:And that's really the the root of what Paul then tells the Corinthians in 1st Corinthians 7 when they start asking him what these betrothed single people should do. Should they go ahead and get married? Should they stay single? And Paul basically says, look, you know, it's incredible for you to stay single as I am because you can be, and his words are, you can be wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord. You can you can live this totally undivided life where you are making disciples and, you know, Paul was having, you know, spiritual babies left and right.
Jeremy:He called Timothy his son, the other people. Like, he was clearly, very involved. He saw himself primarily as a father. Just before 1st Corinthians 7, 1st Corinthians 4, he says to the Corinthian church, you have like 10,000 guardians but you don't have many fathers and and I became a father to you. So he saw himself as a father of each church.
Jeremy:He saw himself as a father of the, people he was discipling in the same way that Jesus did, as well. And so and so what I what I see is happening in the New Testament is that there are 2 narratives. It used to only be one narrative. There's the family narrative. You get married.
Jeremy:You have kids. You know, you raise kids. In in the Isaiah 54 prophecy, you have the fulfillment of that prophecy through the decision to renounce marriage, and as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, to receive this gift, of being single for life in order to live a wholehearted devoted life to the kingdom of God and to be making disciples. And so it's still a father fathering and mothering vision. It's just that you spend your entire life fathering and mothering spiritual children as a single person.
Blair:So do you do you see, this idea of multigenerational team on mission, a contradiction to, being a missionary married couple and then, I don't know, having a family of missionaries?
Jeremy:Yeah. Yeah. I think I think the the confusion that I am concerned about is that because we don't separate the single narrative, which Paul does in very stark relief. He says in 1st Corinthians 7, these are not the same. These are different gifts.
Jeremy:Do not envy the gifts of the other person. If you're married, you live a divided life. You need to be thinking about how to please your wife. If you're single, you are wholeheartedly devoted. You should only think about how to please the Lord.
Jeremy:And so, what what I'm concerned about is because we're not talking about these narratives and very stark difference, what you have is you have married people living like single missionaries and people that are single living like married people. In other words, you have married people who are going on the mission field and they're not living a divided life. They're trying to figure out how to how to live like a single missionary. And it's it's it's really dangerous because first Corinthians first Timothy 5, for example, starts to describe really the heavy responsibility given to married people. He and he says to them, like, for example, if you have older people in your if you have widows in your family, if you do not provide for your family, you have you are worse than an unbeliever.
Jeremy:I mean, it's like you've denied the faith, Paul says. It's really important that we articulate the the responsibilities of a father and mother to their children and grandchildren and to the upstream generations of their their parents. However, when you're a single missionary and you've renounced marriage, you have this ability to to just give yourself, you know, mind, body, and soul in an undivided way to the lord and to and to the mission. And so, what happens often though is you have people that are single that are taking out mortgages and, you know, like living in in this complex life. One of the things that Paul is describing in 1st Corinthians 7 is the level of simplicity that a single person gets to enjoy so that they can wholeheartedly devote everything to the Lord.
Jeremy:And so, I just wanna see us, like, separate these narratives much more starkly and say, okay. The the person who has children, they they need to be very careful to, fulfill the responsibilities of a father and a mother. And we're not articulating those very well because oftentimes, what they're patterning their life after is a single, man like Jesus. And, I don't think that that honors, Jesus. I think that I think that one of the one of the best places, I think, to understand the distinction between the single narrative and the married narrative is is a passage like Luke 10.
Jeremy:So, in Luke 10, you have these single missionaries going out 2 by 2 and Jesus tells them that they are only to go to towns and villages in which they find this person of peace and then describes what this man of peace is like. He's got a house, he can feed them, he can house them, and he becomes the platform from which they announce the kingdom through healing and through their preaching. And so it's never articulated that the person of peace, this this man of peace, should leave his family and follow Jesus like a single missionary. You know, he's he's he stays put. I mean, in fact, you can't even reach that village if he doesn't stay put.
Jeremy:And so you have this dynamic I call the out the army and the outpost. And so the the Jesus' strategy was that the single missionaries were the army of the kingdom and that the married couples, the married families were the outposts of the kingdom. And so just like in any kind of feudal situation where you have castles in various places, every single married, believer, their house is a forward operating outpost of the kingdom of God and their job is to facilitate the army, the the movement of the single missionaries who go out 2 by 2, not as individuals, but but in these groups and then they come back together as teams, as Jesus brought all the disciples back together, the 12 and then the 72. And so, we need to really somehow, reignite the army and the outpost. But, again, you have this weird dynamic where you have, people in the army feeling like they have to build outposts, you know, because they're not being properly facilitated by the families and then you you have the the dynamic of families living as if they're a part of the arm.
Jeremy:This doesn't happen as often today but, man, there's there was a 100 years of the missionary movement from the late 1800 to the mid 1900, where you had this movement of married couples going on the mission field, sending their kids into boarding schools, and just creating massive generational destruction because they were living like single missionaries. Somebody should have articulated more clearly, like, if you wanna live that life and go to very dangerous areas, it's important that you stay single and that if you choose to get married, you can't just offload, you know, the next generation on some kind of missionary school and think that you're following Jesus in any in any kind of real but I think that mistake occurred because of this misunderstanding we're we're describing. People were not studying 1st Corinthians 7 closely enough, because I don't see any evidence in the New Testament that every married person is supposed to live like a single person, in in the way that they're they're missionaries. You you really see the the opposite. You see a very different kind of lifestyle, being, advocated for and I personally think all the disciples were single.
Jeremy:I don't think that we have a single example. By the way, one of the things that's kind of interesting is there's there's not a single child mentioned in the entire New Testament, of, like, of a person who's a believer. Like, we don't we don't have, there's no second generation in the New Testament and the New Testament, as you said, was is a narrative of of single missionaries, primarily. The narratives themselves are virtually exclusively single missionaries. The only time people sometimes will quibble is that they think maybe Peter was married when he was following Jesus.
Jeremy:I I think that's highly unlikely. The reason people think he was married was because we know he later was married. Paul mentions his wife, you know, 20 or 30 years later in first Corinthians, And we're told in the gospels that he had a mother-in-law, which for most people, that's solid evidence that he was married. People don't usually choose to have a mother-in-law unless they have to. However, what people don't understand is in the 1st century, most children had mother in laws, and Paul really is talking about that.
Jeremy:In 1st Corinthians 7, when he's describing these betrothed people, in 1st century Jewish culture, when you were betrothed, you were married in kind of a contractual in a contractual way, but your marriage was not yet consummated. And so, there was a 2 part process and that's really what 1st Corinthians 7 is primarily talking about because Paul's talking about these betrothed people and how they're, you know, basically, he he describes their their kind of inappropriate. Or if you find yourself burning with lust and and you're treating your, your fiance inappropriately, you're betrothed, then you should go ahead and get married. It's kind of his his advice. And so I think that, you know, certainly, Peter was at least betrothed.
Jeremy:He might have been he might have consummated his marriage, but it it would be extremely unusual for Peter to have, a consummated marriage and to live the way he did in the gospels, for 3 years without his family. I think that that's that's that's very unlikely, and if the only evidence we we have is that he had a mother-in-law, like I said, that's that's not actually very good evidence that he he actually was, in a consummated marriage.
Blair:And so would you say that's the biggest challenge you have to your multigenerational teams on mission concept?
Jeremy:I wouldn't call it a challenge. I I think it's actually incredibly complimentary. Like, we we actually have a ministry as a family, 2 singles. We we often will do, like, singles weekends. Like, we we need to promote this single lifestyle.
Jeremy:I'm I'm a I told all 5 of my kids as they got into adulthood that I wanted them to live like single missionaries and not not, function. And so, all of our kids went on, you know, various mission fields, when they were, you know, 18 and, you know, our kids that are, getting to that age now, they're preparing to to leave on on mission as well. So, I think I think it it complements the, multigenerational, idea family. But the thing that would challenge it is once once they get married, that's when I'm like, you need to, like, it might feel like whiplash, but you've got to go from, you know, wholehearted devoted to Lord, all the things that Paul says in 1st Corinthians 7, living on mission, living the simple life, and now you've got to prepare for those kids. And I think that because of contraception, there's a lot of confusion about the nature of, of family life.
Jeremy:So, anytime before, you know, very effective contraception, of course, as soon as you got engaged, both a husband and wife would basically understand that that an unknown number of children are gonna emerge, you know, and preparing for that would become extremely critical. Right? So you would you would never recommend that a couple that's not engaging in contraception would not need to be doing the kinds of things to prepare for frequent births of children and raising a family of unknown future size, right? So it's really contraception that I think ultimately completely reengineered the way we see family in the West and but also in the church. And so the idea that a missionary couple with reliable contraception could continue to figure out exactly when to have kids and how many kids, that would certainly allow them the power to live like single missionaries as a couple.
Jeremy:Right. And that that's an unusual opportunity that that, you know, couples today have. We don't encourage our kids to think that way. We encourage our kids, like, in fact, my son was on the mission field, when he was right after he was married and he was with his mission. He and his wife, they were in Africa.
Jeremy:They were going to a really poor country that you know, where you had to get the yellow fever vaccine. And so the team was basically, you know, trying to pressure them to go on, you know, birth control in order to take this vaccine, which you're not allowed to take if you're pregnant or even have the possibility of becoming pregnant. And, you know, he had already told the team, look, we're we cannot wait to have kids. We we wanna have kids as soon as the lord would bless us with kids. And it was very controversial on their team.
Jeremy:They're like, what are you doing? Like, I mean, we're we we you know? And it was it was a really interesting kind of situation. We went we actually went to Africa. We were already planning to go and visit them and they ended up having to leave the mission field because of it and Wow.
Jeremy:It's just such a widespread, yeah, misunderstanding, I think, that we have this strange tension that exists today between assuming that married families can live like this the same way missionaries would live and use all these technologies to sort of force an unusual lifestyle on the family so that they can prolong that missionary experience. Whereas I think the way you do that is you stay single the way that Jesus and Paul advocated for.
Blair:In terms of challenges of implementing the multigenerational team on mission, what have been your biggest challenges in in doing this?
Jeremy:Just, like, practically in trying to, implement it?
Blair:Yeah. Implementing it.
Jeremy:Lots and lots and lots of challenges. I would say the one of them that was, emotional unavailability or or distance between the generations. So, I I think, culturally, people of European and Asian descent, in particular, have a pattern of we really don't know how to develop deep connections between the generations emotionally. There's a pattern of of emotional disconnection that I personally struggle a lot with, and so I really like being emotionally very independent and unavailable just in my flesh, to my kids and it's a pattern that I'm I'm very comfortable with and it is just just wreaks havoc on a multi generational family when a father does that. So that's taken a lot of healing for me to try to like and you don't see that in other cultures like in Jewish cultures or Arab cultures and, you know, Latin cultures are better at this but man, like, people just don't wanna be around their moms and dads oftentimes, when they get into adulthood because there was a pattern of emotional disconnection and unavailability, particularly from the father, but sometimes even from the mother that is, I would say, just a cultural pattern in in certain parts of the world and in certain ethnicities in particular.
Jeremy:And, man, it's tough. It's tough to overcome that. It's tough to heal that. Yeah. It's been one of the greatest challenges for me.
Jeremy:That's just one example. I could I could go on.
Blair:Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's good. No. Thanks for sharing that.
Blair:Just one final question. For families ready to reimagine themselves as multigenerational teams on mission, what would be one small but maybe significant thing they can do, like, this week to implement this kind of vision for their home?
Jeremy:Yeah. I I think that my favorite, like, first tool is to establish a multigenerational family meal. It's it's really incredible. If you can develop a practice where and this really heals, maybe more than anything else, the emotional disconnection too. To have a time during the week and there's a lot that is said about kind of a weekday meal that people have, you know, where they're quickly eating together or kind of connecting before they all go back to their individual activities, which I think is critical.
Jeremy:Certainly, it's important for families to eat together frequently. But it's also important for it's not just quantity, but it's also quality. Like, you need to have one meal a week where you have nowhere better to go and that there are deep traditions and a spiritual kind of pattern or liturgy that is developed around that time of blessing of of of really those deep connections. So, we spend a lot of time training families how to develop a multi generational family meal that is super fun and that your kids will want to bring their kids to or your grandkids someday could enjoy that meal. So that pattern is always my favorite place to start because if you actually pull that off, if you develop a kind of family meal that is so meaningful and enjoyable that your kids will bring their kids to, I don't think you can stop a multi generational family from, you know, developing out of a practice that is that rich.
Jeremy:I've seen it over and over again. We saw it in Middle East. This was, like, the absolute bedrock of the Jewish family. I think it's the one reason why Jewish families more than any other family, any other ethnic group that I know of, will maintain a multigenerational ethos even in the west, and it's really these Shabbat dinners they do. And so Okay.
Jeremy:Yeah. I would always recommend, man, that that practice is so powerful.
Blair:That's great. It's great. So you said you train families. Where could, listeners find out more about that kind of training?
Jeremy:Yeah. You go to family teams.com. We're constantly training in various tools. There's a course on there called the 7 day family where we go into detail on how to establish a multi generational family meal. You can also if you if you go to a family teams weekend, we actually demonstrate, you know, these kinds of, meals and so that people can, you know, take couples away for a weekend and and help them establish some traditions and walk them through how to do this because this is, yeah, so so foundational.
Jeremy:So those are some ways you can get information on that.
Blair:Sounds great. Well, everybody, we've been very deep into the Bible and theology of this, but the book Family Revision is a deeply practical book as well. So go out there and get it if you wanna find out more about these, practices. So this is I think that's one of the practices in the book too.
Jeremy:Yes. Yeah. We we do go deep in the book about the, how to establish a a meal. So, yeah, you can you can find that in the family revision.
Blair:Cool. Thanks, Jeremy. So, Jeremy, is there any other place, for people to find you online?
Jeremy:Yeah. I'm I'm all over the, socials. So either family teams, Jeremy Pryor, 1,000 houses are the 3 kind of, handles that I'm constantly posting, tweeting, podcasting around. So, yeah, you can find me in any of those places.
Blair:Okay. Great. And, well, Jeremy, thanks for joining me today.
Jeremy:Absolutely. Thanks, Blair, for having me.
Blair:Well, alright, folks. That's it. I'm Blair Lee, and join me again next time for Bible Worthy.
