Written by David C. Innes |
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Fathers have their job in the home. But they must also do their part as free citizens of a free republic, and keep your government limited to its proper sphere, limited to the good for which God gave it. What is that good? It is protecting the conditions for moral thriving, family thriving, wealth creation, as well as the happy life of Christ’s church and its advance. That is to say, it is protecting the moral environment (for each and for families), the opportunity economy, a church-positive society. Faithful government will protect the life of liberty, the life of a free people.

Note: This article was delivered as a speech at the 2023 ACCS Regional Conference at Bloomfield Christian School, Bloomfield, MI, October 7th, 2023
There is a crisis of fatherhood in this country. The U.S. has more children being raised by just one parent—23 percent—than any other country. The U.S. also has far-and-away the highest incarceration rate – 614 per 100,000. The United Kingdom has 147 and Canada only 109. Child Trends 2016 found that, for the country, between 1990 and 2016 out-of-wedlock births went from 28 to 40 percent of all births. There are communities where kids do not know what a father is. For them, “fathers” are the stuff of literature, and they do not read literature. However, in 2022, Pew Research reported 47 percent of U.S. adults say single women raising children on their own is generally bad for society, up seven points from 2018. Forty-three percent say it makes no difference. But ten percent of adults say it is good for society! 
These trends are not just bad for “society” – violent crime, economic drag, etc.; they are bad for the kingdom of God and for the democratic self-government of this free people. God made us for love and for community. How do we know this? We are made in the image of God. Not just any God, not some unitary monad, but the one Trinitarian God, Yahweh – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God – who is One God, not three – exists in three persons. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another. The Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit loves the Father and the Son. Because of this, the Bible tells us not only that God loves, but that he “is love.” For this reason, we who are made in the image of this God are made for love. We are made for community with each other.
Some try to encourage young people by telling them, “You’re an individual,” as though this was the most important moral truth about them. Not so! Maybe the most important moral truth about you is not what is unique to you, but what you share in common with others! Of course, you’re a separate person. But it is noteworthy that each one of us came into this world through another person, out of another person, physically attached to that person, into and wholly dependent on a family of people. Properly speaking, we are creatures of love and community, born into love and community, for a life of love and community. That love and community is seen most perfectly in the church, the kingdom of God, the city not made with hands, whose ruler and builder is Christ.
But in this world, that spiritual community requires civil government. The Apostle Paul exhorts Timothy to pray for his government “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (I Tim. 2:3). This governing can be done well or done badly. The best form of it—the form best designed to support people in a good life: their material, moral, and spiritual flourishing—is a democratic republic, a modern constitutional system of popular self-government. 
Fathers are key to this.
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Written by David C. Innes |
Thursday, November 3, 2022
The reformation of Christ’s church includes more than gospel thunder. It requires cultivating a healthy church life of avid prayer, devoted worship, deep community, mutual service, and Christian education, all centered in Scripture. Knox thundered as he did because he prayed as he did. Mary Queen of Scots said she feared the prayers of John Knox more than all the armies of England. For the church’s worship and community, he gave her The Scots Confession. He also insisted in The First Book of Discipline that churches provide schools for Scotland’s youth. “Every church must have one schoolmaster, able to teach grammar and the Latin tongue.”

You may have noticed that evangelicals are divided today over “tone,” the way we address the world around us and how we address our moral, social, and political issues. Should we lead with disarming winsomeness or combative confrontation? The Trump divide is only a tributary of this “conversation” that is sometimes more like a verbal brawl over how we are to present ourselves to the public.
Until very recently, Europe and the Americas were self-consciously Christian societies. Everyone, or so it seemed, had some church affiliation and was either baptized or was expected eventually to be. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his D-Day radio broadcast prayer, described the war against the “unholy forces” of Nazi Germany as “a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization.” It’s how we understood ourselves.
But this is no longer so. Through television, film, and advertising, Americans are represented as godless and getting by. Currently, 60 percent of Americans identify as “Christian,” a figure that includes evangelical and mainline Protestants, Pentecostals, and Roman Catholics. Twenty percent say they have no religious affiliation at all, and this figure is rising. So, there is much need not only for evangelizing the lost but also for calling the wayward home and the ill-taught to spiritual reformation.
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