Church life stabilizes our families because it is built on a sure foundation. It is a place where we learn to live with integrity the faith we profess. Being a part of a larger covenant community teaches our children what it looks like to grow in holiness.  It teaches us what love, self-sacrifice, and belonging looks like, beyond the boundaries of our individual homes. 

I love young families in the church.  I love hearing babies cooing and crying, the shuffle of Sunday school papers and forced hushes and whispers.  I love the delight of children as their parents dole out goldfish crackers into little eager hands, some of which invariably get dropped and crushed into the carpet beneath their feet.  To me, left behind crumbs and crayons are a welcome sign of vibrancy in the household of God.  As a mom of four, I appreciate the obstacles they had to overcome just to get inside the church doors, so my heart is glad for their presence.
Another sound I love to hear are the testimonies of young parents who express their desire to raise their children in the church. Outwardly, I cheer these parents on with a genuine smile, and inwardly, I pray that the Church can meet the expectations that are inherent in that good, well-placed desire.  What is at the heart of my prayer for these young families?  I pray because I know something these young, sweet families may not know yet: Church can get hard.
I write that statement with much sadness because I love God’s church.  As a young child, even as an unbeliever at the time, God’s church was a special, reverent place for me; a haven of respite and safety.  Years later, when I came to a saving faith in Christ, my love for His church grew deeper because I had come to know and love the God who dwells there – the One who gave His life to establish it.  Early in our marriage, as we dreamed of what our family life would be like, my husband and I both held strong convictions that being part of a covenant community was a sacrificial act of worship according to Romans 12.  Our family was all in.
As our child-rearing years are coming to a close, my prayer for these young families is not offered with cynicism.  It is offered with hope that as young families start out, they will build their family’s goals with biblical expectations towards the church.  Biblical expectations are essential to understand the relationship between the home and the church so we learn how to live covenantally with our church family.  Often times, the lack of biblical expectations is the source of the disappointments that families experience as they grow up.  We need to look to God’s word to see what God intends for the church and family as the symbiotic, stabilizing relationship it is for family life and the covenant community.
God, in His wisdom and prerogative, gave to the family the primary responsibility of raising a child in the way he should go. But, also in His wisdom and prerogative, He gave us the Church – a free gift, given at the moment of our salvation – which God defines as His household, a blending of redeemed individuals and families whom He is building into a spiritual house, a holy dwelling place for His Spirit.  As in any household, there are expectations.
In Ephesians 2:18-22 we learn about the expectations of His household:
For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
God’s household is a place where we are one people together, built on a sure foundation of Jesus Christ, where the body of Christ to grows in holiness together.  These are essential expectations God sets out for His household.
God chose the imagery of a household to help us think about what a commitment to a local church looks like.  As women, we know what it takes to run a household:  it takes all members, doing their part, to maintain a God-honoring home. It’s a lot of work! Our homes do not run themselves and are far from perfect. They are organic and we adjust our schedules, wallets, and own needs to help each member flourish according to God’s principles. In the same way, God’s household is a place where each family has a place to flourish, to learn and grow, to be valued and included.  We adjust our lives to make room for those in our covenant community. God has an expectation that we are to be a family together, living and growing, working and celebrating, supporting and adjusting so that each living stone has a place and purpose in what He is building among us. Other than our own homes, there is no sweeter place to be than in the company of believers who want to be nurtured and grow in holiness after Christ’s own character.
Sadly, when we forget the Lord’s chosen imagery of a household together, we can slip into thinking that “going to church” is about meeting our own needs rather than living as an extended family.  Please, beloved, we need to guard ourselves from this consumer-minded thinking!  Unfortunately, I’ve seen families become disappointed in church because particular social needs aren’t met, feelings get hurt, theological pet peeves get bristly, good intentions are misunderstood or any other myriad of reasons. To be sure, some disappointments run deeper. As families struggle within their private walls, when they look to the church for help, for whatever reason, they may become disappointed with the help offered or received.  It is a true grief when a hurting family walks away.
Church disappointments are hard to talk about because we don’t expect them.  We mistake church to be that longed for place where the streets are paved with gold and lined with jewels, instead of a waystation – a home – for needy people who are only there because we admit we’re imperfect and are looking ahead for better country (Hebrews 11:16).  Raising a family in the church is to raise it among other sinners saved by grace, who humbly endeavor to reflect Christ in their imperfections.  We live together to love our God and out of that love, we love our neighbor.  That is our economy as believers, not a product-consumer economy.
It’s easy to slip into this kind of thinking, particularly as parents.  We want the best for our family, which includes a “good experience” within the church.  When that expectation isn’t met, many of us just want to pull anchor and set sail to other seas, thinking we’ll find that elusive safe harbor for our family.  The commitment to “raise the family in the church” isn’t so easy anymore and as our families grow, it can get even tougher and we’re wondering if it all is worth it. Let me say, as a member of a church for 30 years, who has raised her children there, who has been through trials, church splits, and personal hurts for myself and children:  It. Is. Worth. It.
Church life stabilizes our families because it is built on a sure foundation. It is a place where we learn to live with integrity the faith we profess. Being a part of a larger covenant community teaches our children what it looks like to grow in holiness.  It teaches us what love, self-sacrifice, and belonging looks like, beyond the boundaries of our individual homes.  And, gently put, our homes cannot teach everything a child needs to learn about life, no matter how intentional or incredible we are as parents. We need to see other families living by faith, walking the road the Lord has marked for them so that our own hearts are encouraged and strengthened.
So, dear young families, when church gets hard, when it’s not what you expected, when you’re disappointed – we still need you and you need us. Teach your children the reason we gather as God’s people is because it’s all for Him, for His glory.  Teach them the reason we come is not because it’s easy, exuberantly exciting or that everyone’s needs are met all the time. We come because God is there and we need one another as we journey on. Your family’s presence may be just what another family – young or old – needs to live out their own commitments. There is no other place like it on earth.  And somehow, ineffably, when we come together, He dwells with us, shares His splendor much like the sun spreads its sunbeams. In the warmth of His presence, I say: Put down roots. Love your extended family.  Weather each storm.  Grow into holiness. My prayer for you, as you take your vow to raise your family in the church: Be all in.
Sharon Smith Leaman  is a member of New Life in Christ Church (PCA) in Fredericksburg, Va.
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The Covid vaccine, unlike every other mandated vaccine, has a religious connotation to it. For this reason, Christians in our day need to be instructed by Revelation 13 as much as Romans 13. And I pray this essay might help us to see what is going on and to respond in freedom and faith—whatever that means for you and the vaccine.

Since the Biden Administration mandated soldiers and federal workers to be fully vaccinated, while also requiring private businesses larger than 100 employees to require vaccines, chaos has ensued. Defending the freedoms of Americans, many have begun to address the constitutional problems this mandate creates.[1] Others have begun seeking a religious exemption for this mandate based upon the fetal cells used in the research and production of these vaccines.[2] Still others object to the mandates because they have already contracted Covid, have natural immunity, and believe (with a long history immunology supporting them) that taking a vaccine is unnecessary and may be potentially harmful to their body.[3]
At the same time, other Americans, and many Christians among them, have opted to get the vaccine, even arguing for its morality. Add to this the difference between seeking a vaccine exemption on medical grounds versus moral and religious grounds, and the complexity multiplies.[4] Not surprisingly, with all of these arguments out there, people of faith are led to ask: What should I do?
To answer that question, I am putting myself in the shoes of the men and women in the military and federal government who are now ordered to get vaccinated. Some of them have willingly received the vaccine, and done so in faith. Many others, however, are not able to receive the vaccine in faith. As I have spoken to church members and other Christians about this, many are crushed in spirit at the thought of injecting a serum that has come about by the use of stem cell lines that ultimately trace back to cells derived from aborted babies. Others are not bound in conscience by the use of fetal cell lines, but are nevertheless are unable to take the vaccine in good faith. It is for this latter category, I am writing.
In what follows, I offer a twofold argument for why this vaccine mandate should lead some men and women to seek a religious exemption (not just a medical exemption). These two arguments are based upon a genuinely held religious belief that this mandate (1) eliminates the free exercise of their faith and (2) forces upon them the faith another religion. Along the way, I will show why this vaccine and its accompanying mandate is different in nature than previous vaccines. Unlike previous vaccines, like Jonathan Salk’s polio vaccine or the more recent anthrax vaccine, the Covid vaccine comes with a moral imperative that is downright religious, complete with Fauci prayer candles and vaccine jewelry.
At the outset, I admit that this argument may not resonate with everyone, and that is fine. I am not writing to persuade everyone to seek a religious exemption. Seeking a religious exemption is deeply personal and should be based on one’s genuinely held beliefs. So, I am not seeking to bind anyone’s conscience regarding the vaccine. At our church, we have labored hard to stress the liberty Christians have to receive or reject the vaccine, because we really believe that one’s health care decisions are matters of personal responsibility and liberty, not public morality and coercion.
That said, as a pastor with many members seeking religious exemptions, I am writing to Christians to offer biblical rationale for why Christians can—and in many cases should—seek a religious exemption. So, to the text of Scripture we go.
The Mandate Replaces Faith with Coercion
In the Bible, the locus classicus for liberty of conscience is Romans 14. And while the whole chapter provides a rich resource for understanding the biblical view of human conscience, the last verse provides a starting point for distinguishing faith from coercion, as well as offering a connection between conscience, faith, and sin.
Summarizing his argument on conscience and religious devotion to God, Paul writes: “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (v. 23). This simple principle needs to guide Christians at all times, but especially in moments when governing authorities are binding consciences by way of coercive actions that do not proceed from God’s truth. In fact, the first point to make is that coercion always makes faith null and void.
There are many ways to get at this argument, but one of them has to do with faith, thanksgiving, and using the good gifts of God. Here’s how Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 4:1–5,
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, 3 who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
While Paul’s words take aim at false teachers who forbid marriage and require abstinence from food, his argument stands upon a universal truth: Christians are those who give thanks to God for every good gift. While those in rebellion against God take his gifts and refuse to acknowledge him or give thanks to him (Rom. 1:23), Christians are those who give thanks to God (Luke 17:19) and praise him for every good and perfect gift that comes down from our Father in heaven (James 1:17). These gifts include, food and drink, sex and marriage. But they also include sunshine and rain (Matt. 5:45), agricultural wisdom (Isaiah 28:26), and medicine (James 5:14).[5]
Accordingly, for Christians to receive the vaccine in faith means that Christians can give thanks to God for the good gift that he has given. And more than that, Christians must give thanks to God for anything they put in their body. Not only are we called to glorify God with our bodies (1 Cor. 6:20), but if we refuse to give thanks to God, we are not exercising faith and are by definition sinning (see Rom. 14:23).
By contrast, when Christians eat, drink, or take a vaccine, they do so with personal thanksgiving to their Lord. And over the course of the last year, this is what many Christians have done. In faith, they have prayed against Covid and for a vaccine. Covid is a real threat and one that continues to cut short the lives of those whom we know and love. Accordingly, Christians have given thanks to God for the vaccine, and no one who has taken the vaccine in faith should feel condemned.
My argument here is not anti-vaccine; it is anti-mandate. Because thanksgiving for the vaccine is predicated on a free conscience, I am making the case for personal freedom to making wise choices for one’s health. Remove that freedom of conscience, by forcibly causing someone to do something against their will (and their body), and the ability to offer genuine thanksgiving is gone.[6] And without thanksgiving to God, faith is eliminated, and sin remains. Those who deny God may make light of this thinking, but for those who seek to do all things to the glory of God, this way of thinking stands at the core of their being. And this why liberty of conscience has always been protected in our nation.
Going back to the early church, Christians from many faith traditions are on record for defending the rights of individuals, Christians or otherwise, to live according to their faith.[7] Likewise, Andrew Walker, in his recent book on religious liberty, has argued that making religious choices freely is part of what it means to be made in God’s image.[8] Accordingly, religious liberty “is not a political question,” but a question of what it means to be human. Religious liberty, he argues, “arises from a theology of creation—that humanity bears a unique origin, design, and purpose in its constitution” (Liberty for All, 110). More confessionally, the Second London Confession (1689) puts it this way.
21.2. God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it. So that to believe such doctrines, or obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.
Christ alone is Lord of conscience. This is the critical point of tension in our moment. This tenet of our faith is in sharp conflict with state and health officials who exalt themselves as conscience-binding-lords.[9] They refuse to give room for religious exemptions or conscience, and thereby seek to bind the conscience which is free in Christ.[10] As state and health officials masquerade as conscience-binding-lords, we must reply: Solus Christus.[11]
Protestants have always opposed church or state pronouncements that coerce action or bind conscience. In 1769–70, six Baptists were jailed in Culpeper, Virginia for this conviction, and James Madison worked with likes of John Leland, another Virginia Baptist, to instantiate in the  Constitution of the United States (1789) a clause protecting religious liberty—what we know as the First Amendment. Thus, religious liberty has been a defining feature of America, and one that reflects the human dignity and personal freedom set forth in Scripture.[12]
Sadly, with the recent vaccine mandates, liberty of conscience has been withdrawn and in its place the state has eliminated the chance for citizens to live according to their religious convictions. As a result, many Christians, still unconvinced by the need for this vaccine, have lost the chance to be persuaded of its goodness and the chance to receive it with thanksgiving. Hence, the first reason that many Christians should seek a religious exemption is because instead of the state using the power of persuasion, which could preserve personal liberty and would lead to thanksgiving, the state has used its power of coercion to eliminate personal freedom for the sake of its religious belief that the vaccine is the savior we all need.
This is the second argument to be made, that instead of merely eliminating personal liberty and the chance to offer thanksgiving to God for this vaccine, the Biden administration and its various agencies have forced upon Christians a medical procedure that is championed as a secular sacrament. Still, before getting into that argument, the fact remains that many Christians who are called to do everything from faith and to give thanksgiving to God for every good gift, including vaccines, are not able to do that. And for that reason, those who cannot take the vaccine in faith, should not take the vaccine at all. Instead, they should seek a religious exemption and band together with others who share their convictions to stand for personal liberty.[13]
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The fact of the matter is that the Christian faith is very old, and that is what the Church has been called to preserve and transmit to future generations. Let us not get caught up in the cultural frenzy of “newness” in our Christian ministry.

New and improved! Fresh! The latest! Exciting!
You don’t have to go far in our society today to witness claims of having the newest, latest product. One would not think of buying something old, stale, and “so yesterday.”
This applies to commercial products that are marketed by clever advertisers, but, unfortunately, it also often applies to church ministry, theology, and worship. Old is bad, and new is good. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard otherwise conservative people tell me, “We just need some fresh, new music in our worship.”
Why is it that we automatically assume new is better, anyway?
C.S. Lewis addressed this question in his 1954 De Descriptione Temporum on the occasion of his appointment to the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University:
Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect.
How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word “stagnation,” with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called “permanence”? Why does the word at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort. . . .
Why does “latest” in advertisements mean “best”? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin’s theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier…
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