Our next one is from Brother Elam Peachy. Over the years, I've heard two opposing teachings. One is we need strong churches so we can have strong families. The other one is we need strong families so we can have strong churches. How would you reconcile these two opposing views? Okay, Daniel and I were talking about this right before we went live and we both had concluded the same thing. They're actually not opposing teachings. They are very much in harmony. You need both.
Strong churches, particularly they have a lot of teaching on godly homes, order in the home, just general Christian discipleship. They're going to produce strong families, or they're going to at least help to nurture them. Likewise, godly families are strong building blocks of a church. I mean, if you have a bunch of ungodly, worldly families, it's going to be hard to have a strong biblical kingdom church. In fact, I don't think you can have it. So you need both.
A strong biblical church to nurture and build up strong families. You need strong families, in turn, help to make a strong, godly church. But I will mention one thing, and sometimes it does come down to one or the other. It shouldn't, but I saw this a lot, and it may still be around. I'm just not in those circles right now. But back in the 1990s, in home churches that often grew out of the homeschool movement, that I was living in Texas at the time.
In Texas, it got going fairly strong in the 1980s and was still burgeoning, burgeoning, growing into the 1990s and probably on. So what you ended up happening was families getting very focused on, well, a lot of them were Bill Gothard families. They went to the seminar sponsored by Bill Gothard, which was aimed at building up godly families. What would happen is the family became the main unit, and perhaps it is the primary unit. Perhaps that isn't wrong.
But these homeschooling families became so connected as a family, they disconnected to a degree from the church. They were a family first and part of a church second. And I don't think you see that in the New Testament. You see the church and you see people being part of the church. And the church, I think, was the stronger loyalty, particularly in the New Testament, a lot of the members of the extended family wouldn't have been believers. But like I said, normally it shouldn't be a conflict.
But what did happen, I saw it and experienced it in the 1990s was you'd get maybe a home church made up of a bunch of homeschool families. Well, they were families first. The family came first. And the idea of submitting very much giving up very much to the leadership of the church or to the authority of the church, they would push against that. No, this is how our family does it. And if push comes to shove, we would just change, go to another house church because, yeah, the family was the overall unit.
Well, yeah, Jesus said," On this rock, I will build my church." And so I do think the church is the dominant thing that the Kingdom of God is comprised of. Again, godly families play a major role. And normally, you know, there shouldn't be any conflict. But yeah, you can raise the family loyalty and the godliness of the family up so high that you have a weak church because, you know, no one will submit to a greater authority than the head of the family.
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