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I’ve recently become a stay-at-home-dad. I was “let go” from my job without warning despite the fact that I was regularly meeting my sales goals. Since I had been doing well my wife, a physical therapist, was able to cut back to only a few days of work a month – which she did mainly to keep up her license and pay her school loans. When I was fired I looked for other work, but there were no openings for a hearing aid consultant in our area. Jessi contacted her manager – there was a full time position with benefits available for her right away. She had no desire to go back to full time work; she desperately wanted to stay home with our daughter Cosette, but her going back to work full time was the only way we could avoid going into even more debt while waiting for me to find another job. Jessi was heartbroken but we watched God swiftly provide.

Perhaps I am too picky. I should just take any job I can find, right? Some will wonder why we didn’t wait and trust God to provide a job for me instead of her. Let me give you a brief sketch of my more recent job history. My formal education is in biblical studies and I have decided to be a bi-vocational pastor in non-traditional ministry. When I graduated from seminary I had a chance to help start and manage a coffee shop in Portland. The recession killed that. I thought I could make a living in the construction industry; I’ve got plenty of experience there. But, of course you know that went bust as well. As a result I was out of work for nearly two years after we moved to Medford. I applied for just about any job I could, most of them very low paying. I took the first job offered to me, which paid only $9 an hour and had no benefits. Then just before Jessi’s maternity leave was up, in a very (seemingly) random manner, I was hired to be a hearing aid consultant. In a short time I was able to make as much as Jessi had been making. We didn’t think that was ever going to happen, especially in this recession. We thought Jessi would always have to work at least part-time. But, finally I had a job I liked that paid me well and Jessi went on-call to stay at home with Cosette. We didn’t need her grandmas, who also work, to watch her so much. Then I suddenly lost that job.

If I were to go back out there and just get the first job I could, I would most definitely receive a job that paid so little Jessi would still have to work. So instead, Jessi took the position available and went back to work (did I mention she’s pregnant?) and in the mean time I’m staying home to take care of our daughter. I’m also working on starting my own business so that Jessi can once again be at home with Cosette and our next child in the future – that’s what we both want. But, it requires us to switch roles for a while. We don’t like it, but we don’t believe there is anything wrong or immoral with the decision we have made. We feel that God has allowed this season in our lives and we are trusting that He will provide what we need, not just what we want.

Some of our friends have decided that the switching of traditional roles is the best way for their families to function – as far as I know these arrangements are indefinite. This is because the wives have training, skills, and credentials which allow them to easily get jobs and make more money than their husbands. Even if the husbands were to work, they could not support their families on the husband’s sole income and the wife would still have to work at least part time. So, they’ve decided that the husband will stay at home and take care of the children. Others have decided that they both still need to work and the child must spend some time in daycare. And most of these friends don’t live anywhere close to extravagant lifestyles, they have sacrificed to make even that situation work. Are they living in sin? Do they need some good old fashioned church discipline?

Some pastors – such as Mark Driscoll – think so. These pastors would have us believe that the idyllic American 1950’s arrangement – the husband leaves the home and goes to work, the wife stays home and “manages” the household, is a biblical mandate. Of course they would like us to believe that their interpretation of the Bible is not culturally conditioned, but is instead simply the biblical position. Driscoll says, “It’s not just that you do it in a 1950’s traditional way. What the Scriptures say . . . [is that men and women] are different with different roles and tasks – that she is primarily responsible for the homeward orientation and he provides and protects for his family.” He relies upon 1 Timothy 5:8 for support. This is his paraphrase of the verse: “If you cannot provide for your family, you are not a man.”[1] But, does it really say that? No. It says: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” First it says anyone (which is the Greek), not just a man. But maybe Driscoll would like to argue that although it might say anyone, it actually refers to men. Okay then, it goes on to say “provide for their relatives”. If Driscoll wants this verse to mean a man is solely responsible for the financial support of his wife and kids, it must also mean the man is also responsible for the financial support of his relatives. Now, I don’t expect Driscoll to support his cousins, or siblings, but I would hope that at least he is supporting his parents and in-laws. If he does not then he condemns himself with his own interpretation of this passage. His only other option is to ignore what Scripture plainly teaches. Or, perhaps this passage does not mean what he and so many other people would like to think it means.

Some people would like to use 2 Thessalonians 3:10 as proof that men are sinning if they choose to remain at home and take care of their kids while their wife makes money at a job outside of the home. Verse 10 says: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Boy this verse gets abused and misused in all sorts of ways which I will not go into here; I’ll stick to the point. Let’s look at the context. Paul is telling the Thessalonians – all of them, not just the men – that they should be living productive lives, avoiding idleness and disruptiveness (v 6). So, this would mean any man (or woman, for that matter) who lazes around the home doing nothing, or who spends their days causing problems for other people should be punished and does not deserve food. Yet, is this what stay-at-home-dads do? If a person doesn’t think being a stay-at-home-dad counts as work then that would seem to imply they don’t think being a stay-at-home-mom counts as work. I hope they don’t really believe that.

There are many ways in which a person can work and contribute to the benefit of their family and community – remember most cultures have believed and do believe that the family is bigger than just dad, mom, and kids; “family” includes extended family. The early church thought it included fellow believers as well; “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (Acts 4:32). So maybe what Paul is saying is that everyone needs to do what they can? Does doing what you can and being “willing” to work in whatever way you can best serve your family and community count as working and entitle you to be able to eat? There are some lazy men in this world. This does not describe any of the stay-at-home-dads I know. It seems to me lazy stay-at-home-dads must be the exception, not the rule. And furthermore, any pastor who thinks this verse means staying at home and caring for your kids does not count as work better not even think of retiring and living off a passive income.

Well, someone might say, what about Titus 2:4-5? Surely this teaches us that a woman’s place is in the home. Paul does say younger women should be urged “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.” First of all I’d like to point out that this verse merely says young married women should be busy at home. It does not say that this is their primary role, or even ministry, as women and mothers. Do we think Jesus only gave his ‘Great Commission’ to men? Are women just supposed to stay at home and take care of the kids, wash our clothes and cook our food while the men take care of all work and ministry outside of the home? We don’t see that in Scripture. We see women throughout the Bible participating in many aspects of ministry, despite their low status in the societies they lived. This verse cannot be used as support for the belief that a wife is only supposed to be focused on her family.

Furthermore, Paul’s instructions to women in Titus 2 are culturally conditioned. Why do I believe this? Context. If we keep reading just a little further we come to verse 9 and 10 where Paul gives these instructions: “Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.” Thus we have two options: Paul taught that the slavery practiced by the Greco-Roman culture was a biblical mandate, or Paul taught believers to live in a way that God would be glorified in spite of their circumstances. A woman’s opportunities in Paul’s day were extremely limited; her life was probably very similar to the life of women in most Middle Eastern countries today. Do we agree with the fundamentalist Muslims that women have no business outside of the home? I hope not.

Paul instructed his readers to make the most of the imperfect situations they found themselves in. We live in a different society, but we still have to accept imperfect situations which we must make the most of. Paul teaches us all to live in such a way “that no one will malign the word of God” (v 5), those who oppose us will “be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us” (v 5) because they can only make false accusations, and “that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (v 10). I don’t believe Paul teaches that a woman’s “place” is in the home, or that it’s okay to own other human beings.

The life of a typical woman throughout history and today does not look anything like the idyllic stay-at-home-mom experience most conservatives seem to have in mind when they extol the virtues of the woman’s role at home. Most women in this world have a tough life: baking from scratch; walking great distances to retrieve water for drinking and washing; washing clothes, and everything else, by hand; helping to gather, grow, shepherd and harvest the food in both hunter/gatherer and agrarian societies – helping the husband provide for the family; making clothes; and then just maybe finding some time to give their kids a rudimentary education.

If you are a woman who has the time to spend 8+ hours a day being actively engaged in your kids’ activities you are unusual and extremely fortunate. Even richer women in the past rarely were able to spend large amounts of time with their children. The poor women got to have their kids around them, but that’s because they were either carrying them as infants, or the kids were wandering nearby, as the mother worked. What they didn’t have was time to sit around the home playing with their children; they had work to do. If they were lucky they had grandparents or relatives who could help them. Unfortunately the kids had to be put to work as soon as possible. This is the reality many women and their children still live in today. Even if they get to stay at home, they still work to produce income to help support the family. (Are they sinning?) Well, they have to do it, because what the dad makes is not enough even if he works as much as he can – sometimes working a low paying job producing goods for Americans to consume, like coffee. (Maybe they need to trust God more?) Paul would tell them, as oppressed people, to work hard, be honest and pure so that God will be glorified. (And James would say to the oppresors: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. . . (5:1)).

Throughout most of history men did not go to work and earn money to provide for their families. They hunted and they farmed – and the women and the children helped them. They didn’t go to parks and have play dates. That is a luxury we have. Still despite the hardships of life God expected both men and women to find time during the busy day to teach the children his word (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Men and women are different, but the roles and tasks they have performed throughout history have not actually been that different – except that the women got stuck with most of the crappy jobs while the men went off to hunt. Since men now do that for fun it can’t really be considered hard work. To be fair, it did also fall to the men to do the fighting; that’s not fun.

Americans live in a very different reality from the majority of other humans. In our world there are now many women who are able to get jobs which pay very well. These jobs usually require years of education, which can rack up a lot of school loan debt, making it difficult to get the job and then just quit after a couple of years when the first baby comes along. Of course this wouldn’t be such a problem if women would just live at home with their parents until they got married like they did in the good old days. But, again we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where sometimes the greatest contribution the husband can make to the support and provision of his family is staying at home and working, while his wife goes outside of the home to earn money. I see nothing wrong with this. If a woman is given gifts from God which enable her to have a career and be a mother, she should feel free to use them in whatever means necessary to nurture her family. The same can be said of the husband/father.

My dad was a stay-at-home-dad for a couple of years when I was young. Of course what he was doing was building our family’s house. (Does that count as providing for his family?) My mom was a nurse and she worked. Just about every couple I know where the husband stays at home, it’s because the wife is in the medical field and can earn more and get good benefits. The men are all college graduates, but can’t get as well a paying job. They aren’t lazy, they aren’t unwilling to work. As men they humbly accepted what was best for their family. This takes leadership and manliness, especially when people question their decisions and tell them they aren’t being men. These critics claim they aren’t willing to compromise on what the Bible teaches, as they would say I have. They think Christian stay-at-home-dads are just conforming to the wicked ways of our culture. But, do they really hold themselves to the same standard? Or, do they not conveniently ignore verses such as 1 Timothy 2:8-9 where Paul clearly teaches that he wants “women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes . . . .” How many pastors who teach that men can’t be stay-at-home-dads have wives who would be in violation of that verse if they did not shrink back from the same kind of interpretation they apply to a verse such as Titus 2:5. How many of these pastors are adorning themselves with expensive haircuts, gold, and designer clothing?

When I started elementary school, I was the youngest child, both of my parents worked full time. I don’t know how they did this, because when Jessi and I both worked full time even before we had Cosette we didn’t have enough time to manage our home as we wanted without a great deal of stress. I never want us both working full time. Yet, even when Jessi is home once again, as we hope, managing the house and taking care of the kids I will expect her to contribute something as she can to the provision of our family. I expect this of every woman who is a stay-at-home-mom. We are told in Proverbs 31 that the:

“wife of noble character . . . selects wool and flax and works with eager hands. She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. . . . She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes. . . . She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.

She’s making money by using her skills and gifts. She’s out of the house doing business on her own without her husband. This is not a woman who is homeward oriented as Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll would like to understand it. This is not a woman who just takes care of the kids, cooks and cleans and let’s her husband do all the providing and protecting. “When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet.” She did that; she provided for them and protected them from the snow. “Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.” That means he has time on his hands to sit around, because his wife helps provide for the family.

Both parents have a responsibility to provide for the family and raise their children. All of us have a responsibility to work as we can. All have a responsibility to help care for their relatives and their church community. These are not the sole roles, or responsibilities of a husband. I will agree that men and women are different and bring different qualities, gifts, skills etc. to a marriage and a family. But this does not mean that there is, or ever has been – east of Eden – a husband/wife God ordained division of labor. Each couple is free to work out in their particular situation what works best for their family. Ideals only exist in the world of ideals, we live in the realm of reality where the best possible option may not be exactly what we want. But the last thing we as Christians need is someone else burdening us with man-made laws based upon human tradition, instead of a sound exegesis of Scripture, when we are actually doing our best to love and serve our families, neighbors and Christ.

[1] http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPVxndUcHQ - clip of Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll discussing this subject