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Ephesians 6:1-4 is the flagship New Testament passage on child-rearing and fatherhood. It is an extremely simple and steadying message in light of the dizzying array of advice the world gives to parents. We find four major ideas arising from the text. First, the setting: the meeting of the Church. Second, there are two simple commands for children: obey and honor (Eph. 6:1-2). Third, there are two understandable results for children: good life and long life (Eph. 6:3). Fourth, there are two dangerous pitfalls for fathers: provoking and neglecting (Eph. 6:4).

How thankful I am to be part of the reforming influence of the NCFIC in calling the church back home to foundational biblical practices. In this article I will work to identify one of the major modern problems that has come from turning away from the biblical order in the church and the home.  This turning away is vividly illustrated as in the schedule of the average church and in the behavior of the average father in his home. The Scriptures are perfectly clear: children should be trained in spiritual matters primarily by their fathers and mothers, the preaching of the word of God in the church and by gifted brothers and sisters in the fellowship of the church. Husbands should be teaching their wives and fathers their children. It is primary because the Word of God commands parents to perform this function of teaching daily, while a church’s instruction is less frequent. Fathers are commanded to teach, “when you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deut. 6:1-9). Scripture is clear: the father is a key component of the delivery system for the message of the kingdom of God. Therefore, we need to face the fact that when you bypass him or replace him, we have rejected the biblical order for the church and the home. In the modern church, we have reversed the Biblical order of priority. The Bible makes the home the primary priority for teaching in terms of frequency (Deut. 6:1-9), and the church as an indispensable secondary means in terms of frequency. The modern church has reversed the Biblical order and the result is that children get less instruction than God’s design requires. As the church has followed the world’s system, she has nearly obliterated the scriptural role of the family, and especially the fathers, and denigrated it in church life. This has paralleled what the world has done in the broader culture. Progressively, and often unwittingly, the church has taken over the fathers role and given it to preachers, women, Sunday school teachers, and childcare workers. I believe that until fathers take their jobs back as the primary preachers of righteousness, there will be no sustained reformation. Instead of children receiving a breadth of teaching from their fathers (Deut. 6) AND from gifted teachers in the church — as it should be — they normally receive little or no teaching from their fathers because the church has