If you, like me, do not yet own a shiny robot from Elon Musk, you probably do your own dishes, vacuum your own floors, and tackle your personal Everest of laundry. In Every Home a Foundation: Experiencing God Through Your Everyday Routines, Phylicia Masonheimer helps cast a grander vision for the endless counter wiping and meal prepping that can bury us in mundanity.
As Masonheimer describes it, our work in the home is not simply a list of drudgeries that prevent us from undertaking work of real eternal significance. Her book invites us to pursue household labor as a practice of faithful stewardship, ruling over it rather than being ruled by it.
Masonheimer is the founder and CEO of the ministry Every Woman a Theologian. She hosts the Verity podcast, as well as a conference of the same name. She has authored several dozen booklets on various topics ranging from purity culture to the end times, plus a few full-length titles. She lives with her three children and husband on a farm in rural Michigan.
Every Home a Foundation is divided into two parts: “A Theology of Home” sets the framework for how our homes shapes our lives as believers, and “A Liturgy of Home” explores homemaking systems and strategies.
In the opening pages, Masonheimer tells her story of becoming a stay-at-home mom after a decade of extensive work-related travel. Amid the culture shock of this transition, she came to realize that her identity had been wrapped up in productivity. Vanity, desire for recognition, and the influence of social media had caused her to see home as an impediment to a fulfilled life rather than a pathway to it. “Idolatry of work cannot coexist with a strong theology of home,” she candidly writes.
The truth that changed everything was a biblical theology of home. As Masonheimer describes it, this theology “teaches us God’s desire for and purpose within the places we live. … [It] is simply God’s perspective and heart for how His children experience homelife.”
Masonheimer starts where the idea of home was born: in the Garden of Eden. God placed Adam and Eve in the garden to rule and keep it. But this home was tainted by the Fall, and its inhabitants were banished from God’s presence. God then called Israel to be his special people and to live in fellowship with him. But once again disobedience brought about eventual exile.
Interestingly, Masonheimer makes no mention of the tabernacle or temple, where God’s presence specially dwelt and where he met with his people. Instead, she writes, the revelation of God’s character “was communicated to families in their homes—not in church buildings—as they lived, worked, and worshiped together.” This comment appears misleading since divine revelation happened almost exclusively in gathered assemblies, as with the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, regular rituals of temple worship, and prophetic declarations.
Masonheimer goes on to trace the history of home “coming out of the medieval era.” But these sections neglect any reference to the Reformation, which dignified ostensibly secular forms of work, including homemaking, through the concept of the priesthood of all believers.
From here, Masonheimer turns to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. This social shift disrupted patterns of investment across generations in the skilled art of keeping a home and taught women to seek emancipation through professional labor. Over time, the art of keeping a home shrunk down to the drudgery of keeping human beings fed and clothed as efficiently as possible. Today, we often view it merely as a place to recharge before rushing back into “real life.”
How can we restore the glory of homemaking in a culture that often demeans it? As Masonheimer is quick to point out, this won’t happen merely by jumping on the “tradwife” bandwagon. The crucial task, she argues, is relearning the truth that our homes aren’t primarily our own: God has entrusted them to us so we might use them for his kingdom’s sake.
“By seeing our home rhythms as an act of service,” Masonheimer writes, “we move outside ourselves to a selfless point of view. … I’m not just cooking dinner; I’m giving my time to those in need of food. The work of the home is an act of love for our closest neighbors: those who live within our walls.” By contrast, discontentment shows distrust in God and handicaps our ability to care for the home he provides. “Stewardship grows diligence, patience, and a grateful heart, she writes. “Loving the home you have is an act of defiance against discontent.”
Here, Masonheimer sounds an important note: The home lies at the headwaters of effective ministry. Through it, we minister not only to those around us but also to ourselves. “We resent the repetitive nature of it,” she admits.
But what if the repetition is exactly what we need? We despise the dirtiness of it, but what if this selflessness is the shaping of our character? We hate that it is unseen and uncelebrated, but what if this hiddenness is teaching us humility? … If all work matters to God, and God Himself is a worker, it follows that the simple tasks of our everyday life matter to Him.
In affirming this truth, Masonheimer strikes back at one byproduct of our modern secular age: its habit of hiving off God and religion from almost all of our actual living. This mindset pervades many Christian homes, which can easily resemble secular ones except for the occasional trip to church. But the God of the Bible, as Creator and Redeemer, cannot be held within such bounds. He is never absent from even the smallest details of our lives.
Only by refusing this artificial compartmentalizing of the sacred and the ordinary, Masonheimer argues, can we learn to recognize God’s presence in the work, often outwardly unfulfilling, that upholds our homes. This leads her to recommend home-based “liturgies” that can restore a sense of sacred purpose and meaning. Liturgy, as she defines it, “is a physical action leading to communion with God,” and “through liturgies of the home, we experience a deeper intimacy with God because these daily acts are a form of worship.” As she emphasizes, “liturgy is not something trapped within a church building; it is the pattern, the expected trajectory, of Christian life.”
This is clearly true in one sense. As the Reformers affirmed, all of life is lived coram Deo, or before the face of God. Yet this understanding of liturgy also tempts Masonheimer, at times, to downplay the church more than she should. At one point, she writes that reclaiming the dignity of homemaking “doesn’t begin in a church building; it begins with the rhythms of faith at home.”
She repeats this juxtaposition elsewhere, saying that spiritual discipline “does not begin in a church building or a Bible study group.” In her desire to extend Christian practice beyond Sundays and church buildings, Masonheimer risks dulling the vibrant reality of the church itself.
Though present everywhere, God chooses to meet with his people in a unique way when they gather in his name (Matt. 18:20). Most fundamentally, our callings flow from our identity as the set-apart people of God who sit under the authority of his Word. Seen in this light, the identity of any Christian family shines brightest within the gathered people of God, not in contrast to it.
The goal of the Christian home is raising up a new generation of worshipers. In this vision, our homes are outposts of this kingdom, but only the church itself is built with the living stones of faithful servants. Christ is not the cornerstone of “every beautiful thing we build,” as Masonheimer claims, but of the church, which God is building with blood-bought believers (Heb. 9:11–28).
In fairness, Masonheimer clearly affirms the church as an antidote to Western individualism. She gives readers an appealing tour of the church calendar, showing how families can mark days, weeks, and months by celebrating the history of redemption. But her appeal to church tradition, though welcome, can obscure the centrality of regular Sunday worship in marking what she calls “the sacred nature of time.”
Masonheimer’s emphasis on home routines occasionally leads her book in other questionable directions. To take one example, this emphasis can elevate matters of outward discipline and order above the posture of our hearts.
To Masonheimer, discipline is hardly a dirty word. By embracing and cultivating it, she argues, we establish something beautiful and, by God’s grace, eternal. She describes regular habits of Bible study, meditation, and prayer as bringing renewed vitality to our work, relationships, and physical health.
“When we live without boundaries,” Masonheimer writes, “we constantly experience the unwanted consequences of our actions. … Undisciplined people experience the most bondage—bondage to stress, overwhelm, fear, and chaos.” But setting such boundaries will accomplish nothing without an underlying change of heart. In fact, Jesus pointed to self-righteousness, not lack of discipline, as the most enslaving spiritual position (Luke 18:9–14; Matt. 19:16–22; Luke 5:31–32).
A disorganized home might mask disorder at a deeper level, but an outwardly organized home can be equally disordered. Masonheimer writes skillfully to those unaccustomed to exercising practical dominion in their homes. Yet structure and routines can easily become idolatry, especially to the task-oriented.
Christianity’s claim is not that better systems and routines can solve our sin but that only Jesus and his forgiveness can effect lasting transformation in our hearts and homes. If our goal is faithfulness to Christ rather than fruitfulness of our own making, we must guard against building household structure simply to feed idols of control or measurable success.
More concerning than Masonheimer’s approach to household discipline, however, is her occasional mishandling of Scripture and biblical principles. In one instance, she distills Christianity to Romans 12:21 (“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good”), which misses Jesus’ atoning work for sin. Similarly, her list of the “lasting values of the Christian faith”—which includes “compassion,” “benevolence,” “generosity,” “forgiveness,” and “hospitality”—could easily be equated with simple moralism.
Though the Bible dignifies all ordinary work, Masonheimer sometimes writes in a way that elevates it far beyond scriptural warrant. “The spiritually disciplined home life is, in itself, freedom,” she writes in one place. Elsewhere, citing Psalm 51:12, she claims that “repeated tasks, when understood through a lens of sacred purpose, restore to us the joy of our salvation,” an outrageous promise given that this passage concerns David pleading with God for divine forgiveness after his adultery with Bathsheba.
At one point, Masonheimer grants that “cleaning a home is not sacramental” in the sense of mediating God’s presence. A later passage, however, appears to describe housework as a channel of special revelation: “These daily tasks are not in the way but are the way to truly knowing God’s love, brought down in humble form to the ‘manger’ of the mundane.”
God has promised that his Word will not return void (Isa. 55:11). To which Masonheimer boldly adds, “Your effort to break the chain of unhealthy home rhythms and unsafe home cultures will never return void, and God is your cheerleader every step of the way.” Yet God gives no such guarantee to our own flawed labors, insisting instead that “unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain” (Ps. 127:1).
Every Home a Foundation is deeply personal. Masonheimer fills her pages with stories, memories, poetry, and home rhythms. The book achieves a seamless blend of the landscape, history, understanding, and personality that make her life and her spiritual guidance appealing to many.
At times, however, the book can slip too readily into the mode of modern “influencer” culture. The sheer volume of autobiographical stories and details can communicate the first part of Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 11:1 (“Follow my example”) while downplaying the second (“as I follow the example of Christ”).
Home matters to God, and it should matter to us. Masonheimer has crafted a compelling argument to that effect, even if it sometimes strikes confusing notes. Every Home a Foundation affords a valuable glimpse into her life, from her own perspective at a particular moment in time. At the end of the day, however, we are all responsible for living out the truths of God’s Word among communities of fellow believers. With their help, we can trace furrows of faithfulness in the fields given by God, in whose sacred presence we live out every moment of our ordinary lives.
Simona Gorton is a writer living with her husband and three children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mothering Against Futility: Balancing Meaning and Mundanity in the Fear of the Lord.
