“If the church could just recapture that vision and embrace God’s design for family,” says Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, “we could revolutionize our society.” Daly says that was the thinking behind Irreplaceable, Focus on the Family’s new documentary film (and its companion small-group experience, The Family Project). When his team first started work on these initiatives, they had three concepts at the forefront of their minds: recover, renew, and reclaim.
I recently corresponded with Glenn Stanton, co-author of both Irreplaceable and The Family Project and director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, about these projects and the current state of the family.
Focus on the Family is not known to be in the film business, but you are now. Tell us about what your film Irreplaceable is and why Focus decided to create it.
We realized there is a great need in evangelicalism for a fuller, more robust theology and anthropology of family. And this is what we hope to accomplish with this project—Irreplaceable, a feature-length documentary released in theaters. This film serves as the introduction of the 12-part small-group DVD curriculum entitled The Family Project. We have been working on this film for about four years, so this release is the culmination of great deal of hard work. I had the honor of serving as the co-author of the film and curriculum with my good friend Leon Wirth.
How would you describe the state of the family now, and where does Irreplaceable and The Family Project engage this?
Few would disagree with the fact that family has undergone tremendous change in the past four or five decades, perhaps more than all the millennia prior. And only a few think these changes have been good save for those who believe anything that challenges the “mom-dad-and-the kids” model is a positive development. These folks are few but unfortunately influential. Their fruit has spoiled.
What we do know, indisputably from the social sciences, is that none of these changes with the form of family—divorce, cohabitation, fatherlessness, sexual expressiveness—has provided personal or community well-being like the married mother/father model does and has. In fact, they each fall far short in dramatic and harmful ways. This is not acceptable for anyone who thinks the “love your neighbor” ethic of sociability is desirable.
We start by examining the most basic needs for every human—intimacy and the need for a sense of significance—and how these are clues to understand both God and his gift of family. And we hope people will learn much about God, themselves, their neighbors, and families from there.
The big intellectual push these days is that the traditional family is just one of many forms of family. Why does the traditional family need to be fought for as the model in society?
Indeed, an a la carte approach to family rules the day—take whatever appeals to you, disregard what doesn’t. Nothing except personal desire matters, to thine own heart be true. Culturally, this view is absolutely novel and experimental. And Irreplaceable, which appears in local theaters across the country for one night on May 7, tells the story of how dramatic these changes with family have been and the troubling effect they are having on our collective human and social health. The film offers both a stark and educated wake-up call, but also hope.
The messages given by both projects are essential because we need to know that the “irreplaceableness” of family is first a God-based reality and therefore a sociological and anthropological one. The current and long-term health of any nation, village, or people is directly correlated to the health of its families. It is as sure a natural force as gravity, and our recent history is just one bit of evidence among many proving the fact.
What did you learn in the making of this film and of the curriculum that changed how you see your own family?
It has been an incredibly rich process and experience for all of us who have worked on the project. Beyond increasing my conviction on how much family matters and why, it gave me a needed kick in the pants to fight for my family and those around me. And in an encouraging sense, I learned that the best kinds of families are those who live honestly with their warts, bruises, and struggles. This is where God does most of his greatest works in our lives. The worst kinds are those who pretend and want you to believe they have it all together. They are not only living a myth, but also a deception. “Perfect Christian families” are oxymoronic. They have no need of Jesus because they have no need for redemption, the very business that Jesus is in.
God’s heart is not for perfect families, but for those limping—if not being carried—along the path of redemption, forgiveness, hope, and grace. Who doesn’t need that good news today?
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
