[1]WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP)–Southern Baptist seminaries have an integral part to play in the process of equipping families for their ministry in the Kingdom of God, according to ethics professors at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The professors have underscored a family focus as Southern Baptists have raised the banner with the SBC Kingdom Family Rally June 16 in Phoenix.
“It is difficult to see how the Southern Baptist focus on building strong families can succeed long-term without the help of the seminaries,” said David Jones, assistant professor of ethics at Southeastern. “To emphasize the family without the seminaries will only temporarily fix the problem — akin to putting on a Band-Aid. To emphasize the family with the help of the seminaries, however, will go a long way toward actually curing the disease. By teaching biblical family ethics to the next generation of leaders, Southeastern will produce church leaders that can then teach family values for years to come.”
Southeastern began putting those concepts into practice several years ago by creating a course called Foundations of Marriage and Family Life, and then making the course part of the standard degree program for every master of divinity student.
“The reason we moved to a marriage and family course, in addition to the fact that Southeastern was already a strong advocate for godly homes, was that it has become very evident that if a minister loses his home or has a miserable home life his contribution to the Kingdom of God is badly curtailed,” said Paige Patterson, president of the Wake Forest, N.C., seminary.
“So we determined to see to it that we teach how to live a godly example in the home as a part of our ethics curriculum,” Patterson said.
Jones is the most recent addition to Southeastern’s ethics faculty, joining Daniel Heimbach and Mark Leiderbach. Heimbach, a former naval officer and White House staffer in the administration of the first President George Bush, is a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and author of the forthcoming book “True Sexual Morality and Its Counterfeits: Biblical Standards at the Flash Point of Cultural Crisis.”
Heimbach said the marriage and family course was designed specifically to meet the challenge of culture’s assault on families.
“[Modern culture] is creating a very serious crisis in the church among Christian families and this includes Bible-believing, weekly church-attending Southern Baptist families as well,” Heimbach said. “So at Southeastern we have adjusted the basic master of divinity core requirements to include special training to help future ministers strengthen the critical foundations on which Christian marriages and Christian families are built.”
The course does not teach marriage and family skills, Heimbach noted, but focuses on the biblical and theological underpinnings of what it means to be a Kingdom family.
“We need to understand the contemporary crisis is not for lack of marriage and parenting skills,” Heimbach said. “Our parents and grandparents may not have started with great skill. But they endured. They made their marriages and families work because they were convinced it was worth it, and they believed marriage was a life-long obligation assumed without conditions.
“Skills are important, but that is not the nature of the problem we are facing in the church these days,” Heimbach noted. “Marriages are in crisis because Christian families attending Southern Baptist churches are getting their idea of marriage from secular, anti-Christian culture and actually have a very weak to nonexistent theology of marriage.”
Southeastern’s concern for building strong families goes far beyond one course. Southeastern recently became one of the few evangelical seminaries in the United States to offer a master of arts in Christian ethics, a degree program designed to equip students to fight for Christian values on the front lines of the culture war.
A large part of the curriculum involves training in issues with direct relevance to family life, including marriage and divorce, child-rearing, abortion, homosexuality and euthanasia.
Jones said the program will equip pastors and church leaders to fight for families within the local church, as well as equip those who work for SBC entities and para-church and public policy organizations.
Heimbach said the program offers courses on topics such as human sexuality, morality and law, and youth problems — courses that make the program strikingly relevant to everyday life.
“God is now calling many into specialized ministry focusing on various moral challenges in the culture today — ministries such as Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family and Family Life Ministries,” Heimbach said. “I am convinced the new M.A. in Christian ethics offered at Southeastern is now the best program in the world for anyone called to serve in ministries such as these.”
In the long term, these professors say, teaching foundational ethics of the family is vital to the overall health and wellness of Southern Baptist churches.
“There is no magic solution to building strong families,” Heimbach concluded. “But obviously it is essential that we remain faithful to God’s Word in everything we do. And it is also essential that we not only know what the Bible says about marriage and family life, but that we also each grow to become mature in Christ. We must practice what we believe and preach.”
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