Joyfully At Home: Chapter 16 - Part Three

Hello, friends!

I'm enjoying mellow spring weather here in Michigan.  My job has a use-it-or-lose it policy for paid vacation time so I'm taking this week off to use my hours before they expire.   My son and I are going to the zoo tomorrow and I am cautiously optimistic that I can get my garden ready during this week as well.

We're in the middle of Jasmine Baucham's self-help book "Joyfully at Home".  In Chapter 16, she makes a game attempt to define living as a sheltered, dependent stay-at-home daughter from after high school graduation as exactly what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to go out and make believers of all the world.

Needless to say, the result is less than convincing.

These last two posts in the chapter deal with two questions about missionary work for single women.  These two quotes are about a broad question if single women should spend the years before they marry to do work in the mission field:

I take issue with young women traipsing off to the mission field less because of my beliefs about womanhood then because of my beliefs about disciple-making. Long-term missions are far more effective than short-term, and church planting ( from my perspective) is the work of men. When entire families plant their lives on foreign soil, they minister to foreign communities in a whole new way. They impact entire families instead of just individuals. They change the tide of a culture instead of a few people.  They perform hospitality and show people Christian family life -- what are Christian culture -- looks like. (pg 192)

I agree in part with Jasmine; long-term missions are far more useful than short-term missions and the best missionaries plan to become members of the community in which they work.

We disagree with nearly everything else.  

First, church-planting is the least important and relatively easiest job in the mission field.   Running a church is pretty much fundraising, caring for members and leading worship.   All of those require some skill - but many pastors in the US essentially work as part-time ministers and have additional jobs.

The reason that long-term missions are more successful than short-term missions is that long-term missions have the time to find out from local community members the major problems the community is facing.  The missionaries, then, work at creating solutions to problems in areas like education or health.   In my church, missionaries are primarily members of religious orders who are adults who have taken vows of chastity.   The vow of chastity is to devote their energies to God - but as a side-effect - these are adults who do not have to burden a community with a dependent spouse or children.   The absence of a traditional nuclear family lets the sister or priest focus all of their career energy on their missionary work.

On that note, wouldn't it make more sense for a single man or woman who wanted to be a missionary to settle in their new country, marry someone from that culture and raise their family there?  I find it exceedingly hard to believe that a single woman missionary would be unable to find a man in the local community who was also Christian.   There's going to be more areas of tension in the marriage on paper - but a spouse who understand the local community and who can raise any children as full members of the community they live in is going to be more useful in spreading Christianity than two Americans who think that hospitality is a virtue found only in middle-class American household.....

Is the purpose of missionary work to spread Christianity or to spread American culture as interpreted by CP/QF adherents?  Ms. Baucham seems to be confusing the two and skating very close to the erroneous that Christianity comes with an obsession with nuclear family.

This next quote inadvertently points out how little a SAHD is honestly capable of helping out in her community:

Ministry in and through the home is simple. The Bible has given a clear directive for that as well: hospitality (Romans 12: 13, 1 Timothy 5:10; Hebrews 13:2; 1 Peter 4:9).   Mothers without children have opportunities to invite families into their home several times a week to get to know them and minister to them; they can volunteer at their local crisis pregnancy center, counseling other women; they can help other women in their church who have children and may need a break; they can go out and witness to the sick and aid the elderly. Wives of missionaries across the world can do the same for unreached people groups. (pg. 192)

None of the cited verses support a SAHD whose family throws a barbeque for the local church twice a year in my humble opinion.  

I don't know if Baucham's editor missed something - but why is this entire paragraph about "mothers without children?"  Did she mean "women without children?"   That kind of makes sense - but it makes even more sense as "women with grown children" - who are really not the audience of this book. 

Even in the United States, the idea of sending members of the stay-at-home daughter cohort out to do these jobs is painful.   

As an wife and mother, I do not want to go to a young single woman's house to hear about how I'm raising my kids wrong or how I'd doing my relationship with Jesus wrong.   It would be doubly surreal to be lectured to by a young woman who is living at home in her twenties while not pursuing a career or education.

I can't imagine how a single woman who has been raised to view bearing children as her entire life goal would be good at crisis pregnancy counseling; the physical, psychological and financial costs of pregnancy and infant rearing are real and having a very sheltered, very naïve young thing tell me about how great motherhood is (based on her non-experience) might cause me to lose my mind.   Or start yelling while crying; I really don't miss pregnancy hormones.

Please don't witness to the sick; they're having a hard enough time without having to pretend to listen to a spiel about Jesus from the Evangelical Glee Club.

I will accept the SAHD girls club might be passably good at giving mothers breaks and aiding the elderly in household chores and errands.    That is something my siblings and I were expected to be able to do by age 16 - but SAHDhood is mostly about preventing women from growing beyond early adolescence prior to marriage so that's a feature, not a bug.

I've been waiting for the next post for a while; Jasmine attempts to teach her readers about why famous female missionaries did it wrong - and comes across as an entitled brat rather than an educated woman.