I heard an ad campaign some years ago that prompted us to ask ourselves one simple question before doing most things: “Is it good for the children?” The campaign’s motives were noble and its point was fine, as far as it went. The problem was that it addresses most problems related to the welfare of children too far downstream from the source. Unless we really do consider the “village” (government at some level) the primary caregiver and discipler of our offspring, the marriage between a father and a mother is the wellspring of most blessing and cursing sprinkled over children.

It seems missing or broken marriages are louder in their cursing than whole marriages are in their blessing. The most often cited statistics show that children are 3-4 times more likely to live in poverty if they live in a single-parent home?without regard to race or the employment status of the mother. We don’t need statisticians to tell us that. Anyone who’s worked with the complex and fragmented families of divorce or fatherless homes has seen problems even more significant than poverty. Even though beloved friends and brothers known to me find themselves in those same complex situations, the traditional and unblended family is the strong core of our congregations. And that is where churches should start in family ministry.

Yes, we do have conferences and curricula and some fine books on the subject. Go to those conferences, offer studies using a good biblical curriculum designed to build strong marriages, read those fine books. Maybe some churches out there even have ministers to marriages on their staffs. As laudable and potentially useful as good resources can be, those things are not what I mean. If ministry to children and parents can be integrated into the cellular structure of our churches, and this is an exciting thought, then we can and must do something similar to our strengthening of marriages. Here are a few that make sense to me.

Exalt the marriage covenant from the beginning?Too many people get married in church. I’ve performed those ceremonies where I’d come to understand that the happy couple understood little or nothing about God. Why were they being married in church and what was I doing in the middle of it? They wanted a traditional service in a photogenic setting and that’s it. Shame on me and shame on us. I will no longer perform a wedding for those who are not known to me to be maturing Christians committed to God’s will. If people in or outside our congregation want a religiously oriented civil ceremony, let’s not settle for that.

In service of that, young pastors should do what I didn’t?develop a theology of marriage. What do you believe Matthew 5:32 means? How does that passage and others that explain marriage and divorce impact your practice when an idealistic couple makes that initial appointment with you? Build some policies into your own ministry and into the practice of your church that don’t discourage marriage but which do make it a more sober covenant, not lightly entered into. And yes, I’ve led people to Christ during pre-marital counseling. That’s a fine reason to agree to pre-marital counseling. If that’s the plan, do at least a couple of sessions before deciding if you’ll do the ceremony. Take that decision seriously?meaning you sometimes must decline.

Exalt marriages that persevere?And let’s do more than let Walter and Nellie stand up to congregational applause on their 50th anniversary. How did they make it to 50? Some younger couple with budding relationship problems would be interested. Rather than let wise husbands and wives serve out their years of influence in the Adult XXVII Sunday School class, let them spend some time with newlyweds and 30-somethings. Isn’t that a value of multi-generational churches? They are more like families. I learned things never overtly taught from my grandparents and even some from my great-grandparents. I’ve learned things from some of my grandparents in the Lord over the years also. This can be arranged intentionally by wise church leaders without creating a new program.

Exalt the significance of covenant vows?One of the discouraging things all pastors face is hearing solemn vows made insincerely. Sometimes that breaking of vows will manifest itself as adultery, abandonment, passivity, or even abuse. Churches will often officially ignore the behavior or the problem but that’s not the same as saying no one notices. If Walter and Nellie are role models on their 50th, so are men who send their wives and kids to church each week alone. So are spouses who abandon their mates for some silly understanding of freedom or success. So are adulterers. The wandering spouses are examples and so are we who merely fidget and watch. Our children watch to see how important this is to us. Couples with problems watch to see what we do when the problems go somewhat public. Couples who don’t currently have problems watch to see how high their own views of marriage should be.

Yes, I’m referring to accountability, edification, and even discipline if need be. We’ll have weaker marriages, poorer children, and anemic family ministry so long as the things we say about marriage and during ceremonies are only theoretical. And we’ll wonder why our efforts aren’t bearing more fruit.

Exalt the significance of marriage at the end?Divorce is not an unpardonable sin. It’s not the worst of sins in its consequences. It is something the Lord hates, though. It is a sin, not just something that happens. It also has devastating consequences that go far beyond the couple in question. It is no more a part of love or mercy to be neutrally encouraging to a

GRAPEVINE?What do artwork depicting the widow’s mite and a Rolex print ad have in common? The answer lies within the one-of-a-kind Biblical Stewardship History Collection now available to Texas Southern Baptists through the SBTC Foundation.

Thanks to a partnership between the foundation and the collection’s curator, historic stewardship artifacts, art, and the largest known stewardship research library are on display in Grapevine.

Scott Preissler occupies the Bobby and Janis L. Eklund chair of stewardship at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is director of the seminary’s Center for Biblical Stewardship, and is the curator and owner of the collection.

“The collection is now available to help SBTC churches educate about stewardship,” Johnathan Gray, executive director of the SBTC Foundation, said. “Stewardship has been a part of the church for years; it’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s a vital part of how we worship our Lord and do his ministry.”

The new, 3,900 square-foot facility at Faith Christian School that now houses the collection was built by volunteers and funded through donations.

“It’s a great privilege to see how groups come together to make things happen,” Gray said.

Volunteers and special guests gathered March 14 to celebrate completion of the facility and be the first group to tour the collection.

“Every person who comes through, something appeals to them,” said Sylvia Crecelius, president of The Stewardship Alliance.

Darin Brown volunteered his carpentry skills on this project, and gained a new insight into the value of the collection.

“You see all these pieces and you think, who used this, when, and why?” Brown said. “You can bring lay people and church staff in and stir their thoughts for how to teach stewardship.”

From the wooden baskets of the old West to the centuries-old large brass alms collection plates, every stewardship artifact tells the tale of the importance of stewardship in the life of the church.

“It’s the [visual] history of biblical stewardship through the local church,” Bobby L. Eklund, stewardship consultant for the SBTC, said.

Preissler has collected stewardship artifacts for 20 years?items date from the 1500s to today. In addition to offering plates, the collection includes missionary boxes, games, artwork and an extensive stewardship library.

“We encourage groups to come and have a day-long stewardship experience,” Gray said.

After visiting the Stewardship Collection, groups are invited to the SBTC building where they will learn about how the Lord is using gifts through the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified missions funding channel.

Groups will learn “how resources come in from our churches and how they go out to reach Texas and touch the world,” Gray noted.

All ages can benefit from a tour of the stewardship artifacts, Preissler said, noting he recently hosted a second grade class. While one generation will enjoy reminiscing about missionary boxes they used as children, another will benefit from seeing the priority stewardship had in the livelihoods of generations before them.

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DENTON?The window dressing may be benign, but behind the curtain remains the dark elitism of the eugenics movement, which continues to flourish in the 21st century with a disproportionate focus on black Americans.

That’s the message of a relatively new video documentary, “Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America,” from Denton-based Life Dynamics Inc. The group’s president, Mark Crutcher, wrote and produced it and is featured numerous times in the film.

Maafa (pronounced Mah-off-ah) is a Swahili word for tragedy, in this case the continued repercussions of Western slavery that Crutcher argues led to the eugenics movement and specifically to the government’s role in funding family planning, birth control and abortion aimed at minority groups and especially blacks.

The end result: a disproportionate percentage of “family planning” clinics in black neighborhoods and an African-American abortion rate that has skyrocketed in the last 40 years.

The film begins with a scene in a slave cemetery in Denton County, then unwinds for viewers a chronological chain of events, from American slavery, the emergence of Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest and the eugenics movement that was fueled by Darwin’s cousin, the father of eugenics, Francis Galton, and concurrent social developments.

The documentary proceeds through the years of Civil War Reconstruction, a period when some American industrialists turned to eugenics as a method of controlling wealth and maintaining civil order for fear that 4 million freed slaves would overwhelm the ruling American upper class.

The founder of the American Birth Control League (later known as Planned Parenthood), Margaret Sanger, became a tool of some wealthy industrialists, as one observer in the film states: “[T]hey needed a front man and she needed money.”

Sanger is quoted in the film, from 1922.

“We are paying for and ever submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all,” said Sanger, lamenting that the resources of individuals and states were being diverted to care for them.

Hitler’s Nazi philosophy was largely influenced, the film states, by American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose book “The Passing of the Great Race” Hitler referred to as his Bible.

Throughout the film, narrated by an African American man and woman, several black pro-life activists are featured, including Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King.

The film shows the rise of the American government’s funding of family planning, most notably through abortion but also through sterilization and emerging birth control methods such as Norplant, and the correlation of rising abortion rates among black women since the early 1970s?an abrupt change from earlier periods when white women were getting most of the abortions.

The film’s criticism cuts across political lines, with elitist tendencies aimed at curbing the black population dating back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and proliferating under Republican President Richard Nixon.

The film also includes several quotes from a much younger Jesse Jackson, who at one time was unabashedly pro-life, according to his comments.

“What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a conscience?” Jackson is quoted as saying in the 1970s. “What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?”

Among the more interesting stori