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The American family is changing, and it will never be the same.

The New York Times recently ran a lengthy feature about “The Changing American Family.” Every pastor in America should bookmark this article. It’s a gold mine of information and insight about where we are and where we’re going as a culture.

Reporter Natalie Angier divides the article into a few different sections that spotlight significant trends, which include falling birthrates, the “gayby boom” (the increase in kids raised by same-sex couples), cohabitation, immigration, the American achievement complex, incarcerated parents, and “voluntary kin.”

Here are some quick highlights, quoted from Angier’s article:

• “The rise of the cohabiting couples is another striking feature of the evolving American family: From 1996 to 2012, the number jumped almost 170 percent, to 7.8 million from 2.9 million.”
• “We lavish $70 billion a year on weddings, more than we spend on pets, coffee, toothpaste and toilet paper combined.”
• “The facts have voted, the issue is settled, and Paycheck Mommy is now a central organizing principle of the modern American family.”
• “Sixty-two percent of the public, and 72 percent of adults under 30, view the ideal marriage as one in which husband and wife both work and share child care and household duties; back when Jimmy Carter was president, less than half of the population approved of the dual-income family, and less than half of 1 percent of husbands knew how to operate a sponge mop.”
• “Gay parents are four times as likely as straight ones to be raising adoptees, and six times as likely to be caring for foster children, whom they often end up adopting.”
• “American families are outliers in their fixation on children’s needs and children’s success.”
• “In a telling sign, ‘Sesame Street’ recently introduced a Muppet named Alex, who looks as glum as Eeyore and is ashamed to admit why only his mother shows up at school events: Dad is in prison.”

A challenge for the church

The post-Christendom world comes with innumerable complex challenges for the church. Why does this matter? Because whether or not we reach America, our goal as the church of Jesus Christ is to reach Americans. To do this we have to know who they are, know how they live, and figure out how to connect the timeless gospel to timely issues.

As a husband and father of five, I am certain the church must be for strengthening marriages and families. But, with the majority of adults now single and the trends indicating growing complexity around the social ordering of people’s lives, the church has to be more and do more in order to reach more.

 

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For more on the changing culture and how the church can respond, read A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future? by Mark Driscoll. Copyright © 2013.

 

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