MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God by Emily Hunter McGowin, PhD
• Amy Julia’s episode with Matthew Mooney about families, disability, suffering, and “the good life’
• Small Talk: Learning from my Children about What Matters Most by Amy Julia Becker

WATCH this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. 

ABOUT:

Emily Hunter McGowin (PhD, University of Dayton) is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College. She is the author of Quivering Families and Christmas, and coeditor of God and Wonder. Her articles have appeared in Christianity Today and The Week. She is a priest and canon theologian in the Anglican diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others. She and her husband, Ron, also a priest, live in Chicagoland with their three children. Follow her on Twitter: @EmilyMcgowin and visit her website at: emilymcgowin.com.

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia (00:05)
I’m Amy Julia Becker and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. If your family is anything like mine, you have an area in your house where holiday cards accumulate. I know it’s not holiday season anymore, but for us, they…

start at Thanksgiving, they pile up through Valentine’s Day, so they are on display for many months of the year, and lots and lots of very happy faces peer up at me every time I walk by them. And at a certain point, usually in March, we decide it’s time to recycle them as it happened this year, our daughter Penny decided to take all of those holiday cards up into her room and look through a few of them each day for the rest of the year. And I love.

I love those little snapshots of families and friends from around the country, around the world, but I’m also always very aware that these cards do not tell even the beginning of the whole story of the lives that are represented there. And I wonder how much those cards and the images that we see daily on Instagram and Facebook, how much they contribute to a misunderstanding of American family life.

I wonder how much they create a shiny, happy ideal that just isn’t how most of us experience family or even are supposed to experience family most of the time. Today, I am talking with Emily McGowan, Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, the author of a new book, Households of Faith. And what I loved about Emily’s book and this conversation is her willingness to challenge the ideals

of the American family and also the ideals that many Christians assume make up a biblical family. So if you think you know what the Bible says about family, this podcast is for you. And Emily does a wonderful, gracious job of exploring and explaining some of the myths of biblical families and the reality of what we find in the biblical text. There’s really deep thought here alongside

really practical wisdom for how we can live in the year 2025. I hope you enjoy learning from Emily McGowan as much as I did.

Well, we are here with Emily McGowan and Emily, it is so nice for you to be with us today. Thank you for joining us.

Emily (02:35)
Thank you, Amy and Julie. It’s good to be here.

Amy Julia (02:38)
So you have written a really lovely book. It’s like thoughtful and also encouraging and practical. I was saying before we got on here that I have been talking to my children, actually my teenage children about this book. So I really appreciate it. It’s called Households of Faith. I’m looking over at the subtitle, Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God. I love that idea. ⁓

practicing family and we’re going to talk more about it. But I thought we might start with some context for the book because you begin by describing kind of an idealized version of family life in America and some of the problems that come up because of that ideal. So could you just start there? What’s the ideal and why is that problematic?

Emily (03:18)
Yeah. So the ideal, I would imagine if folks who are listening are living in the US or spent most of their life in the US, that picture automatically fills the space in their mind when they think family. And it comes to us, I think, largely actually through television and films. ⁓ The ideal of the kind of Aussie and Harriet, mom, dad, a couple of kids in a single family home. Everyone is, of course, middle class or above, able-bodied.

and healthy, right? And that is the ideal American family. And I’m not necessarily like against that ideal, but what I’m trying to demonstrate in the book is one, that that’s a very historically limited, culturally limited conception of family. It’s only been around for about maybe 120, 150 years at the most. And also that it’s less and less present.

at least in my context, it’s less and less possible to assume that ideal and less and less possible for people to actually attain it. We now know that the middle class ideal is not attainable by the majority of the American population. And so that being the case, I think it asks us to question, well, what is family actually meant to be for me in particular as a Christian? And then what does that look like?

and how do we communicate better about what family is in light of these realities today.

Amy Julia (04:48)
And so can you give us a little background like of your particular situation in terms of how you came about doing work on families thinking about these things you know kind of who your audience is who you’re addressing.

Emily (05:00)
Yeah. So I think it’s helpful for folks to know that I’m, you know, I have a PhD. I’m trained in theology. My original interest as a PhD student was actually getting out of the abstract realm of ideas into the embodied reality of real Christian lives. And so I turned to the study of families and particularly how a certain kind of family gets embodied in US evangelicalism because I wanted to see, okay, there’s these ideals about motherhood and children.

and family, but how does it actually get lived out? And so my first written work was more academic topics, studying that reality. And so then for my next project, it made sense in my view to kind of say, okay, if the paradigm that I see at work within evangelicalism is not ⁓ the best in multiple ways, what would be my proposal to do otherwise? And then how might that practically get lived out on the ground?

And so it was an attempt to continue that prior work, but also to draw on my own practical lived experience, things I’d picked up along the way, as well as change the focus from an academic audience to just my peers in the church pews. People who were trying to do this in their daily life, ⁓ who are trying to figure out how to practice family well. And they feel like they don’t have good resources.

Amy Julia (06:23)
Well, I feel like one of the things I really loved was the graciousness and the well, and the sense that you really were not asking me to attain an ideal as a mom and as a family, but actually saying, yeah, if you are and we’ll get to this a little bit later, but one of the practices you talk about is Sabbath and you aren’t saying.

If you can’t do 24 hours with all your screens and machines off where you are contemplating, you know, together and singing kumbaya, well, then you’re done. It’s like, you know what? Sleep. Sleep is a part of it. Anyway, I just loved your both, I guess, kind of picturing the ideal, but also the very real lives and the context that we’re in and also ⁓ trusting that God’s way of being with us in the world is.

with us in this world right now, not in some idealized version of it. And I really appreciated that. And so I guess kind of picking up on that thread, one of the things that you write about early on in the book is that there’s no, in your words, biblical blueprint for families. But you also write about how Christians have assumed there is a biblical blueprint. So you’ve kind of talked about like the American blueprint, but there’s also this like biblical blueprint. So could we just zoom in on that for a minute? Where does that blueprint come from and why is that problematic?

Emily (07:37)
Yeah, so this might be, at least in certain circles, might be one of the more controversial pieces of the book. ⁓ I know, at least for me, realizing or come to this conclusion was hard. was brought up, not brought up, but I was converted to Christ within an evangelical context. And there were really strong opinions about what family is meant to be. There was a family blueprint given to me that I thought came directly from the pages of scripture. That looks a lot like the American version we just discussed.

⁓ Just more spiritualized. So the husband as the primary breadwinner, but he’s also the spiritual head of the household and so responsible for the spiritual care and shepherding of the people in his household. The wife is the partner but slightly subordinate partner and supporter of the husband and his work and given primary charge over the children in the household.

And this was by a lot of Christians in my circles assumed to be drawn directly from the pages of scripture. They found it in Genesis one and two, for instance. They also see it in kind of the pattern of the Old Testament and the Old Testament families. And then they see it especially in the letters of Paul in the New Testament being upheld there as well. And so that was sort of, you know, when my husband and I first got married, we were just given that as like, here’s God’s ideal. And if you want a happy, healthy, successful family,

you need to live out this blueprint. And so the call was, well, restructure your life, even change your own personality and way of conducting yourself in the world so that you can conform. And what I’ve come to realize over many years of grappling with this and studying it is that that ideal isn’t actually what the Bible teaches. We may want it to teach that, but that’s not what it actually does. When we take a step back and we loosen our hold just a little bit,

on this American cultural ideal. But we recognize that the Scriptures from the Old Testament to the New Testament include a lot of different kinds of family and several different kinds of family forms. And so what I mean by that is the Bible doesn’t anywhere stop and directly say, here is God’s will for your family. This is what a father does. This is what a mother does. This is what children do. Now, are there commands?

Are there, ⁓ is there wisdom? Is there teaching that are given to those who already live within existing family structures? Yes. And that’s what’s happening is we tend to confuse the descriptive aspects of the Bible, what’s being described as the lived reality of the first receivers of scripture, with the prescriptive aspects of the Bible. What scripture is actually intending to teach us and tell us what to do.

So for instance, Genesis 1 and 2, the creation of male and female in Genesis chapter 1, and then in Genesis 2, description of Adam and Eve in the garden. I think if you read that without the assumption that it must be teaching us what family is or what marriage is, you recognize that what’s being taught here is what human beings are, who God is in relation to human beings, and the vocation of human beings in the world.

I think you have to import this idea of specified gender roles. I think you have to import the ideal of like male headship. I don’t think it’s there in the text. And when you compare that creation text to the existing patriarchal structure within Israel at the time, in the ancient Near East at the time, you realize that things are being said about the human person, male and female, that were quite challenging for their day.

Yeah. That woman is in fact taken out of man, that they are side-by-side workers within the garden that is within God’s creation. And so it actually works against the patriarchal structure of their day. So something similar I would say is going on in the New Testament. So in the letters of Paul, when he’s writing to Christians who have accepted the gospel and are now trying to live it out in a Greco-Roman world, there was an assumed family form that already existed.

was called the paterfamilias. The husband, the father was the head. He wasn’t even considered part of the family. He was the head, separate from the family. And then the wife, children, and enslaved persons and other members of the household were underneath him. And that father figure had the power of life and death over the members of his family. And so Paul is writing into that Greco-Roman structure with the gospel, with the radical teaching of Jesus.

And he does so in such a way that it ends up subverting in strategic, subtle ways, the existing structure of the day. So if you’re looking for a patriarchal structure in Paul, you’re definitely going to find it, because he assumes that’s what exists. Right. Because that is what existed. Right. But he’s applying the gospel to that context in a way that I think ultimately undermines that structure if you follow it to its logical conclusion, which I think we ought to.

Amy Julia (12:50)
Well, in which it’s interesting, I the history of kind of, you know, what we might call Western civilization actually does a lot of that work. And we might say, I mean, it’s interesting because some people would argue that in spite of what’s in the Bible that we’ve ended up in society with feminism and so forth. And others would say, actually, it’s the logical conclusion or at least some aspects of it of what it means for the gospel to play itself out in human society. I’m just going to kind of this is kind of a capstone of what you just said, but I’m quoting back to you. ⁓

because I really appreciated this, you wrote, problem arises when Paul’s epistles or letters are understood to be blanket endorsements of patriarchal marriage and family. Instead of recognizing that Paul is teaching Christians how to live within already established marriage and family structures, those of Greco-Roman society, many assume Paul is endorsing the structures themselves as God willed. And I feel like that is just a really, really helpful distinction for any of us who are looking to the Bible.

as a source of wisdom, a source of authority, a source of guidance and revelation for our lives, which most Christians would say that is what they want. And yet also saying, but what does that look like in 2025 in, you in my case in Connecticut? Like, what is that? What does that actually look like? Another thing you write, which I think is helpful, you know, you’re looking at the kind of the Israelite patriarchal society, the Greco-Roman, but you also write about Jesus and

You wrote, Jesus lacked almost all the things modern people tend to think are fundamental to the good life, romantic love, sex, children, private property, profitable investments, and a fruitful career. The one exception, it seems, is friends. So will you just speak to that a little bit in terms of how Jesus messes with the or the biblical blueprint,

Emily (14:39)
Yeah, this is probably the part that was the most ⁓ challenging for me to grapple with ⁓ as a person who’s, by all appearances, sort of achieved the ideal that we talked about earlier. ⁓ And so to come face to face with Jesus once again and realize just how different he is, just how wild he was in his own day and in our own, ⁓ it was really surprising to me. So yeah, Jesus in his life,

in his ministry defied the norms of his day. He’s an unmarried dude in his 30s who is not doing what the oldest Jewish male person in the family is supposed to be doing. And he’s traveling around with his friends preaching and depending on the resources provided by other people. Luke tells us a lot of wealthy women support him. So like I was saying to someone earlier today, he was basically couch surfing with

Amy Julia (15:29)
to say, including women.

Emily (15:37)
with his friends ⁓ based on the mission that he believed the Father had given him. And so if we see Jesus as ⁓ fully divine and fully human, which I think he is, and if he is the one who reveals both who God is and who human beings are, then he demonstrates that the fullness of human life doesn’t actually require all of the things that we tend to occupy most of our time, attention, and effort with.

especially in the American culture. Everything that advertisers and businesses and social media tells us we have to have to be happy, he doesn’t really have that, except perhaps, like I said, deep friendships. And even those friendships, as we know, were fraught and weren’t easy going all the time. ⁓ So I think, yeah, he’s a shockingly outside the box person.

compared to what we would prefer to see as the exemplar for our lives. But on the other hand, I think that’s also refreshing. He tells each of us, look, you may not attain this ideal. Most of us don’t, this American ideal, but that’s not the point anyway. That’s not the point.

Amy Julia (16:54)
Well, and yeah, I he doesn’t attain that ideal, literally, in the sense of being a single man in a society that even more so would have expected him to do otherwise.

Emily (17:04)
Right, and he then is the one who embodies and brings about the kingdom of God, ⁓ the way of God’s being in the world. ⁓ And I think that should tell us something about how subversive our families, our households are called to be today. ⁓

Amy Julia (17:22)
Well so let’s talk about that because one of the things I love about this book is by no means is it a here’s what I’m against it’s very much a here’s what I’m for and you ask the question what is family for throughout the book so how do you answer that question what is family for.

Emily (17:38)
Yeah, so I think that the answer to what family is for has to come to us ⁓ from what church is for. And that has to come to us from what the kingdom of God is for. And I know that sounds like I’m being too abstract, but let me, I promise I’m going to get there. So the rule of God, so how God intends things to be. ⁓ The word scripture likes to use is shalom. ⁓ So this is fullness of life for all people everywhere.

And for the peace with one another, peace with self, peace with God. That is the end to which Christ life was pointing and moving. That’s the end to which the Spirit is guiding all of us. And so that then should be the purpose of the church. So the church’s purpose is to embody that new life. Now this is really hard because we are living in the in-between. We know the kingdom of God, according to the New Testament, has arrived in some form because of Jesus’ resurrection.

So it’s already present, but it’s not yet fully present either because sin is still rampant, powers and principalities are still at work in the world that fight against God and God’s way. So what does the church do? The church in the meantime is supposed to be a witness, an embodied witness to that kingdom that there’s a different way of life, that the new creation is being born in the shell of the old. And so we have to like stand in that gap between the two and say, we’re going to embody something different.

Okay, so that’s the purpose of the church, then the family’s purpose in light of that is to help to make disciples who can embody that way of life. And the way that I summarize that is essentially to be apprentices to love. We are to learn how to love, love ourselves, love God, love each other. And that then is meant to contribute to our ability as a church to bear witness to that way of life too.

Amy Julia (19:34)
So how does that happen? What does that look like in a family to be apprenticed to love together?

Emily (19:40)
That looks like a lot of nitty gritty daily stuff, right? It looks like ⁓ breakfast cereal and unloading and reloading the dishwasher. looks like loads of laundry. It looks like driving to and from appointments. It looks like getting up in the middle of the night with a kid who’s got a fever. ⁓ It looks like resolving conflict. You know, if you’ve got a bunch of roommates who are fighting over chores, you resolve those conflicts.

It’s the nitty-gritty of our daily life. It’s the stuff that we’d prefer to avoid, honestly. But my point is that’s exactly where the Spirit is doing His good work, is in the small stuff. That’s the small stuff where God does most of His work.

Amy Julia (20:26)
Well, let’s talk about children within this picture for a minute, and then we’ll come back to kind of the some of your practices for living this out, because you also write about how Jesus understood children really differently in his day and age. So I’d love for you to speak to that. But also, I wonder, 2000 years later.

We are in a culture that also understands children very differently than kind of in Jesus’s day, but I’m curious whether Jesus, how Jesus’s posture towards children might inform our own today as well. So I’d love to hear about both of them.

Emily (20:59)
Yeah, so in Jesus’s day, children were definitely not romanticized the way they are now. By no means were there such a thing as like Instagram child stars. They were seen as, they were the lowest on the social totem pole. I think Jewish families had a higher view of children because they were seen as the inheritors of the covenant and needed to be taught to uphold the covenant. within Greco-Roman culture more broadly,

Children just weren’t that useful to the Empire and so they weren’t considered of much help to anyone until they became of marriageable or ⁓ productive age. Okay. But Jesus, ⁓ and all that is to say whether you’re talking about Greco-Roman or Jewish culture, they wouldn’t have seen children as ideals for ⁓ the spiritual life, for wisdom.

for ways to honor and please God. By no means would they have been the exemplar. And so that’s what makes Jesus interesting to me because he on multiple occasions puts a child at the center of his teaching and directs his disciples’ attention to the child. Now we tend to in our society, think because today we do romanticize children and we made children sort of symbolic of innocence and…

wonder and beauty and carefreeness and that sort of stuff. I’m not against any of that, by the way, but that tends to be how we see children. We tend to then spiritualize Jesus. ⁓ he’s saying we should become filled with wonder and carefreeness and be innocent and that sort of thing. ⁓ And okay, again, I’m not against that, but within his social and cultural context,

Children didn’t represent those things. Children actually represented the lowest social rung on the ladder, the most unimportant in society, the least powerful, the ones who were not heard, whose voices were never heard. And so when he tells us to become like a child, I think it’s more than just a spiritual posture. I think it’s actually to take up our place alongside these who are the lowest, who are the least voiced.

the least heard. So to humble ourselves and become as a child is not just a matter of being more, you know, wonder struck with God, although certainly I want to be that. It’s actually an embodied posture of solidarity with those who are among the least in society. Yeah. And that demands a whole lot more of us. And I think it also, as you said, challenges the way we tend to see children today as cute. They’re cute accessories.

whose stories are often offered to each other for consumption, for amusement. By the way, again, I’m not pointing the finger. I tell these stories too, because they’re cute and amusing. But that’s not quite what Jesus is doing here. He’s asking us to do more.

Amy Julia (24:03)
Yeah, so I’m curious just how like, again, playing it out a little bit, the children piece in our contemporary culture ⁓ without we can romanticize children, we can kind of idolize children ⁓ like, do you think they are functioning in the Bible more symbolically as like the lowest status where actually if we’re to think about who like.

Would Jesus actually still be talking about children now or talking about somebody else with low status? Or is there a way in which like we are called to think about children differently because of the way Jesus does that?

Emily (24:43)
Yeah, I think it’s actually both. So I think both are happening at the same time. So on the one hand, I think that children do represent something within Jesus’ teaching. He says of children the same thing he says in the parable of the sheep and the goats, know, whatever you did the least of these you’ve done to me. That association of his own person with the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, he does with children. Whatever you’ve done to one of these, you’ve done to me. So I think they are symbolic.

in Jesus’ teaching in that way. But I also think He’s challenging us to see children, actual children, and receive children in a different way, such that they are our ⁓ co-disciples, co-apprentices in the kingdom. And so when He says, let the children come to Me, do not hinder them, to them belongs the kingdom of God, He’s saying we need to take our cue from them as they approach Jesus.

And so I actually think that should have an impact on how we conduct our household that have children in them, as well as our churches. I don’t have all the answers for how to do that, but I think it is a calling to change the way we relate to children, know, one-on-one in our families, but also children within our church settings too, and society as well. But that’s an even bigger conversation.

Amy Julia (26:04)
No, I appreciate that. And I remember ⁓ we were talking earlier, and most listeners know this, but we now have a 19-year-old daughter with Down syndrome. But when Penny was first born so many years ago, I remember a friend of mine saying, you know, I think that meditating on this verse might be important in terms of Jesus saying, whoever receives this child in my name receives me. And, you know, she said, I really think there’s something for you in receiving Penny.

as a child, as a child with Down syndrome and recognizing that that is God’s work in your life for you to receive her as she is. And we didn’t really know who she was at that point. I know that much more clearly now, but there was a posture of the heart that that ⁓ opened up for me, not just towards Penny, but towards essentially anyone I encountered ⁓ that led to a greater sense of

mutuality, like what do I have to receive from you rather than just seeing myself either as lower or higher than you? It kind of ⁓ changed the status hierarchy for me to look at other humans in terms of being receptive to who they are. And that started for me with that idea of receiving a little child who can’t give you anything, at least in that moment.

⁓ Maybe ultimately they would be able to, but that really did, yeah.

Emily (27:32)
Yeah, I think that that’s, I think, core to the ethic that Jesus is giving to his disciples to recognize that our ⁓ mutual healing, our mutual freedom in the kingdom of God comes from each other. That it’s not a zero-sum game where if I’m giving to you, that means that I’m better and you need, and so I’m the one who’s always giving, you’re the one who’s always receiving, but in fact, we need each other. I need to receive from you, you need to receive from me.

⁓ That I just think is applied to every person, every person. And that is the way by which we actually receive and encounter the kingdom of God here and now is through that change in our relationships with each other. It’s not easy. I’m not pretending it’s easy, but I think it’s vital to our healing.

Amy Julia (28:23)
Well, so I want to move on to the third part of your book because there are three different ways to practice what to me seems like a reimagined family going back to the title of this podcast. ⁓ And we don’t have time to unpack all of those different practices that you offer. But I thought maybe we could ⁓ kind of get a taste of those. One of the things you mentioned and I’ve mentioned already is the practice of Sabbath. But you again, give us kind of ⁓ different ways we might imagine practicing a Sabbath.

And one of the things you write about is to practice regularly withdrawing from the routines of productivity and consumption. Can you speak a little bit to that? what are some kind of practical ways we can do that? But also, why would that actually be a part of kind of practicing family in the kingdom of God?

Emily (29:08)
Right. yeah, focusing on productivity and consumption. So productivity, think the reason for the focus on that is because of our location. This is really coming out of our location, my location in the US context. And I think a lot of us have been trained, and it probably applies beyond as well, but a lot of us have been trained to understand ourselves and our worth primarily in what we produce, what we do. This is what leads to us evaluating others.

in relation to what they produce or do. Are they taxpayers or not? Are they ⁓ contributing members of society or not? And what we normally mean by that is are they giving us labor in some way? Now, I’m not against work by any means. I think that some kind of work is normally part of human flourishing in one way or another. ⁓ But this notion that we are valuable, worthy, ⁓

only based on what we do, I think is a really toxic way of thinking and living in the world that has to be unlearned by people in the church. And so detaching from productivity and saying, no, I’m going to insist upon not doing anything productive on purpose, think one is really hard to do. It’s just very personally challenging to do. But I think it can slowly begin to kind of pull the, I don’t know,

the wrapping off of us that keeps us bound up in that way of thinking about ourselves and others. And it’s something similar with consumption. I think same thing in the US context and probably beyond as well. We’re sort of, once again, made to see ourselves primarily as producer-consumers. So I produce stuff in some way so that I can then consume stuff. And I don’t know that we’re aware fully of just how much time we spend planning out

hoping for, working towards things to consume. It’s not necessarily bad, okay? Not all of it is wrong or evil. But once again, I think we are largely unaware of the way that it has ⁓ malformed our souls and malformed our bodies in relation to, well, ourselves, but also to each other and to God. And so what I’m trying to get at with Sabbath practices is are there little things we can do as a household that

momentarily take us out of those narratives or at least push back against those narratives practically. And we can say, OK, for these three hours or for this 12-hour period, ⁓ we’re going to seek not to be consumers. We’re going to seek to simply be. Yeah. That’s really hard to do. It’s really hard. Yeah. But I think.

Amy Julia (31:54)
Yeah.

really hard.

Emily (32:03)
drawing upon the tradition of Sabbath and the scriptures, I think it’s essential. I think it’s essential for us.

Amy Julia (32:09)
And it is, it’s an ancient problem. We think of it as a contemporary problem in part because of actually the ways in which Sabbath in its own Christianized form was established, you know, by having stores shut down on Sundays and things like that for so many years. But nevertheless, I look back to the story of the Exodus when the Israelites were first, you know, given the command of the Sabbath and they were.

expected to work seven days a week. Like, it’s not as though, you know, we have suddenly become ⁓ harder workers or something than people were in the past. But ⁓ yeah, and there is just a real gift, but it’s amazing. And I mean, I experienced this on a weekly basis. We try as a family to have some practice of Sabbath. And as you write about in your book, we are also like heading to soccer games and, you know, making sure that.

Emily (32:47)
right.

Amy Julia (33:05)
All sorts of things, you know, get done that need to get done. But but really, at the same time, saying, OK, like our screens are going to go in a different place on Sundays and we’re going to, whether it’s take a nap or take a walk or read a book or play a game, but just move at a slower pace and connect to each other very intentionally. And sometimes that is like almost a full 24 hour period. And other times it’s a couple of hours, as you say. But either way, it is a good

reminder of that life is not at its core about consumption and production. And we are made for more and different things than that.

Emily (33:45)
Yeah, I completely agree.

Amy Julia (33:47)
⁓ The other one other piece of the ⁓ practices that you have at the end of the book that I really appreciated was this idea of the Eucharist. You, I think, do a great job of ⁓ connecting abstract religious ideas to concrete but flexible family practices. And when I first saw that there was a whole section on the Eucharist, I was like, I don’t understand what she’s going to do with this. Like, how is this going to work?

And you eventually got to the idea of like having a family meeting which I was like, okay I never saw this coming that it you Chris was gonna get connected to family meetings But I love it and I wanted if you first of all Can you just explain there may be listeners who do not even have you know? The word Eucharist to describe me So if you can explain what the Eucharist is and also how that plays out in family life in a variety of ways and Including having family meetings

Emily (34:38)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, so Eucharist is kind of a fancy word. So if you come from a church background that doesn’t call it the Eucharist, this is also called the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. And what we’re talking about is ⁓ the Christian practice of sharing bread and wine, or in some traditions, bread and grape juice. And ⁓ it’s based upon Jesus’ own modeling for us. ⁓

Before he died, he gave his disciples this meal and it took place in the midst of the Passover meal. But he reconfigures that Passover meal that Jews celebrated and he reconfigures it around himself and says, this bread is my body and this wine is my blood and they’re the body and blood of the new covenant. And so as often as you do this, do this in remembrance of me. Now, Christians through the ages have interpreted that in a variety of different ways. And so celebrated in different ways.

My church tradition, we celebrate Eucharist every Sunday. Other churches, it’s like once a month or once a quarter. But regardless ⁓ of your individual church’s practice, one of things I’m trying to get us to see is that there’s more going on around the table than just our union with Christ, although that is certainly central. We’re invited by God into union with Him through Christ by the Spirit, yes.

But that also does something to our relationship to each other. Part of the crucial work of the table, the Eucharistic table, is to reconcile members of the body to one another. If go back to talking about Paul again, this was a key theme in his letters that Jews and Gentiles are brought together in the body of Christ. And the place where they primarily experienced that oneness was through overcoming the former separation that came through food laws.

at the table so they were now eating together ⁓ through communion and then through the fuller meal that they would share where they previously didn’t do that. So when it comes to us as families, I think one of the ways that we can embody Eucharist at our tables, wherever those tables may be, however nice or not nice those tables are, ⁓ is learning how to do the things that make for peace in our homes.

And that means regular practices of reconciliation throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout months, years together. And so one of the things that I brought up is something that our family does regularly, which is these family meetings. I’m not even sure when we started it, ⁓ but they’ve just become essential to our life together. And they, of course, have to change and morph as your kids age. ⁓ If you don’t have kids in your household, you can still have family meetings as well.

But those have become the places where if there are problems, if there are hurt feelings, if there are ⁓ just issues that need to be addressed, we take the time to do that there. And those who have the most power in the household, for us, it’s the parents, try to model practices of asking for forgiveness and apologizing and making things right. And if it’s not us that has to do it, we try to be the peacemakers between

other parties ⁓ as best we can. Yeah.

Amy Julia (38:01)
Yeah, I appreciated so many things about ⁓ that aspect of what you wrote about the idea that the people with the most power actually need to wield that power in this way of demonstrating grace, of asking for forgiveness, of humility. That was beautiful. But also the idea that the way ⁓ kind of a ritual act on a Sunday morning.

might translate into a Tuesday afternoon is by saying, I’m sorry, or by saying, hey, this really hurt me or bothered me, know, just working towards that, those places of peace, as well as I think there’s a, this is a different practice, but hospitality of thinking about the power of having people, ⁓ unusual guests together at a table is another implication. And one that I know you all as a family have also intentionally practiced in terms of having

people over literally and saying come to our table and that doesn’t mean we’re going to have a fancy meal and impress you. What it actually means is simply that we are going to say ⁓ we want to create a space where you belong with us and where we are welcoming you into our home. I just yeah, yeah, loved that.

Emily (39:12)
think it’s my husband who’s actually impressed us. ⁓ We have planted a couple of churches together. And one of the things he’s said from early on is he wants to help our people see every table they gather around, whatever their household looks like, every table they gather around as an extension of the Eucharistic table. And that’s really, I think, done some important work on my imagination. that even if we’re just sitting around our coffee table sharing tea with someone,

recognizing, okay, there’s divine work happening here. It’s not exactly the same as the Eucharistic table, but it’s an extension of it. And I think that’s just a powerful image for our daily life.

Amy Julia (39:53)
I love that. Well, this is a kind of final question that maybe or maybe not will wrap up some of what we said. But I was thinking about, the name of this podcast is Reimagining the Good Life. And you’ve already talked a little bit about how Jesus kind of subverts the ideas of the good life and how ⁓ the idealized version of family life needs to be subverted as well. And I’m wondering if you could just speak a little bit to how we can

what happens when we reimagine ⁓ family life, when we reimagine the good life according to the USA, instead of thinking about what the good life might look like in the kingdom of God as families?

Emily (40:37)
So one of my hopes with the book is to do precisely that, is to help us reimagine, because I think that it will in fact free us. I don’t think we’re aware of the ways in which the blueprint, the ideals are keeping us ⁓ just held in bondage, feeling defeated, feeling ashamed, feeling like we don’t measure up. And so if the focus of our work as a household is being apprentices to love.

That is something that’s happening in an ongoing way. It’s a journey that we’re on together. It’s not an arrival point. There’s not ever a point at which we say, oh, I’m done now. That’s not the Christian life anyway, right? If we’re meant to, as Jesus calls us, take up our cross and follow him, that’s an ongoing journey every day into eternity.

And so I feel like that is freeing to us because it says, okay, so today didn’t go well, right? The cat threw up on the carpet and I lost my keys and we’re running late and fill in the blanks. But we have tomorrow. We’re gonna come back to, are we being apprentices to love? How can we best love ourselves and each other and God in this situation? And I think that reorientation can be really powerful when we are

when we’re dealing with hard things in our life, when we can’t meet the ideal. Well, just for instance, we had Holy Week last week. We did five church services in eight days. And I was reflecting on, you know, sort of had a self-pitying moment of like, gosh, it’s so hard for pastors’ families to really observe and truly experience Holy Week because we’re having to go, go, go to make it happen for others.

And I sort of got in my feelings about that and was just aware of how much we were missing out on. And then I realized, okay, Emily, it’s a few days. This isn’t the way you want it to be. God is still present and at work. And you are checking in with your kids. You’re checking in with each other. You’re seeking to love each other well in the midst of a less than ideal circumstance. It’s not precisely what you wanted, but that’s all right.

The fact that Jesus is Lord means I don’t have to get my way. It doesn’t have to look like the ideal. And so we’re going to keep moving together toward love. And I don’t know, I’ve just found that for me a deeply encouraging thing ⁓ to keep as far as reimagining it can happen even in the midst of less than perfect circumstances.

Amy Julia (43:21)
Well, maybe especially in the midst of less than perfect circumstances, because I do think in some ways perfection or ideals get in the way of love. ⁓ There’s just a messiness that often comes with love, maybe partially because love is patient and it just takes time. there’s that sense ⁓ of

Emily (43:32)
Yes

Amy Julia (43:46)
love not being controlling or coercive, but actually being invitational. I think all of those things can give us a lot of freedom, but there is a mystery or kind of an unknown quality to living a life of love instead of a life of control in which we think we at least know what’s ahead.

Emily (44:09)
We don’t get to determine the outcome and we really don’t like that. But that’s the gospel tells us it’s in God’s hands. This is God’s work first. We get to join, but it is God’s work and that means the ends are in God’s hands too. ⁓

Amy Julia (44:24)
Well, thank you for your participation in God’s work and writing this book. ⁓ I really appreciated it. ⁓ And hopefully listeners got a taste of why, because I would commend it to anyone who is, ⁓ again, what I just so appreciated is that you are not calling us to an ideal or to perfection, but you are calling us to love and giving us some ways ⁓ to get there. So thank you for that.

Emily (44:50)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Amy Julia (44:56)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. If you are listening today for the first time, I want to invite you to take a look at other interviews in the archive of this podcast, including my most recent conversation with Matt Mooney, which is also about families, but specifically about families and disability. I’m also really excited about upcoming conversations with Mircea Wolf about his new book, The Cost of Ambition.

and with Heather Avis, founder of the Lucky Few and author of an upcoming children’s book, I Like You A Lot. If you aren’t already aware, I’ve got one more book to share. I wrote a parenting memoir way back when, and it is called Small Talk, Learning from My Children About What Matters Most. We’ll link to that in the show notes, and I thought I would just include it this week because it is a story of parenting.

in the midst of what I call the ordinary hard stuff. And some of you listening to this episode might be in the midst of the ordinary hard stuff and perhaps small talk would be a companion for you in that time and place. As always, I love receiving questions, suggestions. I love it when I see that you’re sharing these conversations with other people. Rating and reviewing it is always a way to get more people to know about this podcast. So please do join us.

in the effort to spread the word. Finally, want to thank Jake Hansen for editing this podcast and Amber Beery, my social media coordinator, for doing everything else to make sure that it happens. I hope that this conversation helps you to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let’s reimagine the good life together.