At last the world has given the Church a head start by openly admitting that their 45 year old Head Start program hasn’t worked.
Time magazine, defender of liberal, postmodern faith and practice everywhere, says in a July 18, 2011 article by Joe Klein: “It is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program’s effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work” (27).
Head Start was started to give 3 and 4 year-olds “a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them” (Ibid.). The government now confessing that taking children away from the parents God gave them to isn’t advantageous to the child gives the church a head start: Let’s not go down that road.
Oops. We’re already way, way down it. Since the church only lags behind the world by about 20 years, we started these programs 25 years ago. Heck, we actually told ourselves we were starting churches by first starting preschool programs. O that’s rich. We thought the first step in being the Body of Christ in a given place was to dismember it.
But it worked. Sure it did because that’s the way the world liked it. Still does. That’s why the trendy LCMS churches – confessional, liberal, traditional, conservative and all points in between – aren’t content with just taking 3 and 4 year olds away from parents. No, now they’re willing to do it all the way down to 6 months old. I’m quite sure if there was a way to do it, they would reach into the womb and gestate the unborn they way Huxley has the state hatching them in his Brave New World.
And look at the brave new churches doing the cradle robbing. They’re not in downtrodden areas where a mom might have to have childcare at 6 months to put food on the table. No, in the main, these programs are in affluent churches where the effluences of the world’s assumptions are inhaled deeply despite some of them having a confessional filter at the end of their e-Cigs.
What is being filtered out are words like these from St. Paul to Pastor Titus: “3 Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, 4 so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored” Titus 2). (N.B. Paul doesn’t say “only” workers at home as Dr. Laura patron saint of “weak women weighed down with sins” (2 Timothy 3:6) contends.)
Also filtered out is this Confession of ours: “Paul says that a woman is saved through childbearing. In contrast to the hypocrisy of celibacy, what greater honor could He bestow then to say that woman is saved by the conjugal functions themselves, by conjugal intercourse, by childbirth, and by her other domestic duties? But what does Paul mean? Let the reader observe that faith is added and that the domestic duties are not praised apart from faith: “provided they continue,” he says, “in faith.” For he is speaking about the entire class of mothers….This work pleases God on account of faith. Thus the duties of a woman please God on account of faith, and a believing woman who faithfully serves in these duties of her calling is saved” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXIII, 32).
In the land of Lilliput children are brought up by the State because the urges in their parents that led them to procreate involved no thought of educating them, so in the State’s view the parents were not to be trusted with the task. (Since I’m listening to rather than reading Gulliver’s Travels I can’t provide the citation from the book.) Ignoring a huge theological elephant in the room regarding procreation, at least the Lilliputians had a rational for removing children from the home other than the inconvenient truth that it is hard, not all that rewarding, and downright messy caring for children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. If William Ross Wallace was right in 1865 when he penned the poem “For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” daycare workers everywhere rule.
Although it will seem like a non sequitur to some, women opting to be one thing to many people as opposed to everything to one child, has everything to do with my daughter-in-law, nine months pregnant, not being offered a seat in a room filled with seated men waiting on their cars to be repaired. It’s no longer women and children first. It’s women first who want the freedom (read license) men have always had to neglect childrearing and above all else it’s men first who want the stuff working women can buy them. The truth is the family’s head started this downward spiral, and even though it doesn’t work, in true fallen male fashion, we will continue the plunge even when the world gives us a head start at stopping.
