Reclaiming the Urban Family - Christianity Today

The City of Philadelphia called recently and asked for the names of some “good families” they could honor. I knew we could give them hundreds of names from our church. I don’t know why we hadn’t had a special day to honor these families before.

Every year we recognize men on Men’s Day and women on Women’s Day. The whole church nominates people who are living a godly life. All those nominated are recognized, but the ones who are at the top we name “Mighty Men of David” and “Women of Great Price.” We give our congregation examples to follow. And now we’re doing it with whole families. Our church has become known for growing “good families.”

In fact, our church has a near-zero divorce rate. Only one couple that’s taken our family ministry training course in the past twenty years has divorced.

We’re training men to be strong husbands and fathers. Our church membership has been as high as 48 percent male, that is until the single women started hearing about the kinds of men we produce!

The pregnancy rate among our teenagers is much lower than the average, and our children are significantly less involved in drugs and gangs.

These statistics would be outstanding for any church. What makes them more amazing is where they’re happening—in urban Philadelphia. As our name suggests, our church has become a stronghold for the African-American family. And we’ve done it by teaching people the biblical standards for marriage and family life before they get married, by training couples to minister to couples in trouble, and by honoring those who live a godly lifestyle.

Team-teaching a new standard

Family has been an important focus for us for over 35 years, but what we call “family” has changed a lot since I founded the church in 1966. In our society, there has been such an emphasis on being single that many people don’t know how to be married. And with the commercial reinforcement of the single lifestyle, many people don’t know if they want to be married. Many churches don’t have a real strategy to train and develop families, so the single and divorced people don’t have anyone to turn to for help.

As a former mechanical design engineer, I wanted to bring some structure and planning to this problem. Marriage is more complicated than anything I’ve ever done in engineering, but over the years, we have developed training courses and counseling ministries to teach our people how to have good marriages and strong families. We have ministry teams for single mothers and blended families, hurting teenagers, widows, and families affected by drugs and poverty. We have 57 ministry teams in all.

We’re into prevention as well as restoration, and the church is a training center for Christian families. On Sunday afternoons, we offer the Bible Institute with several tracks. There are Bible studies and courses for preparing people for life issues. And we have a two-and-a-half year, university-level course in counseling to teach our church members to counsel others.

Each week my team and I also teach pastors from churches in our area how to start family ministry teams in their own churches. I advise them to start with an assessment of their congregation’s needs. What kind of training do they need first? Let them tell you. In a smaller church, the pastor may be the only one leading family ministry, but if the pastor is committed to it, he won’t be the only one for long.

Family ministry with proven results

Our church is located in a low-income neighborhood, but our members are mostly middle-class. The reason they are in the middle class is because of the way we train them.

A sociologist from Eastern College in Philadelphia studied our church about ten years ago. She found that within three years of joining our church, most people are out of debt, out of poverty, and are often moving out of the neighborhood. But they continue to worship and minister here, because we’re committed to evangelizing the inner city, leading people to faith in Christ and teaching them a better lifestyle.

We have high expectations of the people who join our church. With 4,400 active members, I tell the pastors I work with, “Don’t worry about demanding a high level of accountability from your members. The church may be the only place that makes any demands on them.”

New church members join a six-person discipleship group. Over the next nine months, we teach them about following Christ and sanctification, the roles of husband and wife and the sanctified single life, and about men not exploiting women and women being honest with men. We deal frankly with sexual issues and relationships.

We begin by training single adults about marriage and about the mate selection process. So many problems can be avoided if people will simply find the right mate. Even if both of them are Christians, it may not be a good match. I refuse to marry any couple until they have been courting for one year and until they have completed our 16-week premarital training class.

I make a few people mad, but with only one divorce from all the couples who have completed the course, it’s worth it. We want to develop families that are good families from the beginning.

We also retrain dysfunctional families. With so many out-of-wedlock births—more than 60 percent in the African-American community—many women bring children from other relationships into their marriage, even their first marriage. Then that becomes a new problem area. Blended families do not function at all like regular families. The highest divorce rate is in blended families that don’t blend. And they won’t blend unless we teach them ahead of time what to do.

Our classes for blended families are well attended, but often the people who most need help don’t come to the classes. That’s when we do the “wrap around.”

A holy SWAT team

Typically the wife is the first to contact the church. A friend tells her about the services we offer, and so she calls for a counseling appointment. The counselor learns that there are many problems involved, and so he or she calls a team of people together from our different ministries, usually a team of four to eight, and they surround the family to teach them and encourage them. They’re a kind of holy SWAT team.

If they didn’t graduate high school, we help with GED classes. If the husband is out of work, they help him work through some issues and get work. If the teenagers are getting into trouble, we connect them with our youth ministry and begin to hold them accountable for their actions. And we teach the family domestic budgeting and how to get out of debt.

I recall one couple that was very undisciplined with money. The husband was stubborn and impulsive. He would waste money on questionable investments on the Internet.

The couple came in for one session, and the counselor could tell there was something unspoken going on between the couple. After a while, they stepped out of the room to talk. When they returned, the man confessed that a relative had loaned them $10,000 to help get out of credit card debt. The man had planned not to tell the counselor about it, and instead to invest it in something speculative. He knew the counselor would not allow that.

As part of our financial training, the couple must agree for the counselor to decide how their debts are paid off. We require a high level of accountability.

Before we begin working with them, we ask, “Are you willing to do what the counselors tell you as they try to help you? If you stop submitting to their leadership, then you’re on your own. Will you give me your word?” Once we get the commitment, then we almost always have the accountability.

This was a breakthrough for this family. When they submitted to the person on their team who is an expert on money, they began to submit in other areas, too. They began to see how God was blessing them and getting them out of debt.

Another family I remember came to us affected by drugs and depression. Both the husband and wife were underemployed. Their story is typical. We brought them into a relationship with Christ, worked with the drug and depression issues, taught them how to get and keep jobs, and how to handle their finances. Within three years, they purchased their own home under a program we support for low-income people.

Setting blessing in motion

I recently preached a twelve-part series on family curses—as the Bible puts it, “The fathers eat grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” I wanted the congregation to see how habitual sin is handed down from one generation to the next, and how the effects are felt for many generations.

I dealt with dishonest gain, immorality, children born out of wedlock, incest, drugs, and depression. There were shocked looks on some faces, but folks were sitting up. I warned them in advance when I would be preaching on subjects they might not want young children to hear, but they brought them anyway. The services were packed and attendance grew during the series, because people wanted their families to break free from the strongholds of the past. And from our experience, they know it can be done—with prayer and repentance and training.

Next I’m going to preach on the blessings of family life—how God blesses those who are obedient to his Word, and the blessings of fidelity in marriage and a two-parent family. From looking around our church, they know that it’s true. We have lots of “good families” and we’re growing many, many more.

Willie Richardson wrote Reclaiming the Urban Family (Zondervan, 1996).