The Empty Parsonage
Because of the nature of my business, I drive through many towns and cities. I always take note of the churches; what flags are flying, the name of the pastor, the denomination, when the next chicken dinner or rummage sale is, and what message, if any, they choose to communicate to commuters. You can tell a lot from just driving by.
The other day, I drove by two parsonages I had been in when I was a boy. Both parsonages were once filled with the pastor and his family. They both were purchased or built for a mother and father and several children. One parsonage had a pastor, his stay-at-home wife, and three tall boys of Texas and Dutch descent. I slept over in that parsonage many times as I was friends with the youngest boy with the Biblical name of Thomas.
The other parsonage once had a family consisting of the pastor, his stay-at-home wife, and four vibrant children. I myself lived in several parsonages with my stay-at-home wife and my young children.
Now, these parsonages, and most other parsonages, are either empty or house a single person with cats and dogs or an old couple without children or they are sold or rented out to help defray the costs of keeping a symbol of bygone times.
Psalm 127:3 states:
Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
If you go into any number of churches on a Sunday morning, you, for the most part, will not see any children. That's because the congregation is filled with grey heads, or the seeker-friendly church strongly discourages parents from having children attending the worship service by providing “children’s church” or purposely holding Sunday school during worship. They say it is because the church wants the parents, if there are any, not to be distracted by their children. But the truth is that the pastor does not want to be interrupted by crying babies or fidgety children during his Tedtalk like self-help “sermon.”
When I was a boy, we sat with our mom and dad during worship. There were not a few times that we received a squeeze on our legs or a look that froze our blood from one of our parents if we got out of line during the service. Gone are the days when newborns were in church and scuttled out in full vibrato in the middle of the sermon.
The last church I pastored had a congregation of around forty people on a good Sunday, but most were children from newborns up to sixteen years of age. We were a family-integrated church, that is, we believed children should stay with the parents and learn how to worship God. No wonder there are hardly any teenagers in your typical church. What do you think is going to happen when you bar them from attending the service for their entire childhood? We had more children in our worship service than the largest churches in Connecticut. That is because we believed, practiced, and benefited from the blessing of Psalm 127:3.
The empty parsonage is symptomatic of the loss of God's blessing, not only here in the United States but worldwide. As our world rejects the one and only self-existing Trinitarian Christian God who revealed all we need to know for faith and practice in His self-attesting Bible, we are under the curses promised in Deuteronomy 28. We are seeing the withdrawal of God's blessing as He turns us over to depraved minds and fruitless sexual practices where procreation is impossible.
In no time and place will same-sex couples ever be able to produce a baby. Every child born will be born in the primary way God has ordained them to be conceived. While same-sex couples can adopt, foster, and even artificial inseminate, the conception of children will always attest to the God of the Bible.
Then God said, “Let us make manin our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26-28
Be as prideful as you like, the conception of babies attests to the only true God of the Bible.
Contrary to popular belief, the population of the world is declining or soon will if we keep going the way we are. As infertility increases, the population decreases. More and more couples do not want to be inconvenience with children or are too afraid to bring them in to this troubled work. As the population decreases, so does the strength of a nation. China has learned the hard way over decades of the one-child policy and aborting baby girls for far too long. The United States is declining at an astronomical rate, both in terms of morality and economical blessing.
Judgment has indeed begun in the house of the Lord and the empty parsonage is just the beginning. May God have mercy on us all!