ARE YOU A HOME DIVIDED or UNDIVIDED?

I had just finished this movie Divided a few minutes before running out with my daughter —to select her wedding gown. What should have been one of the greatest memories as a mother and daughter was now tainted as my mind was on the message of this movie. I was consumed with what I just heard. I felt like everything I had ever believed was now wiped away after just viewing an hour and a half movie— showing a destructive model of our family— by tradition I had been following. I remember pulling over to the side of the road and while my daughter ran into a store —sitting there in the car feeling like “Oh boy, I think I have to gut my family culture and rebuild it from the bottom up. How am I going to do this?” This movie, if I chose to accept the message, would mean “I would start over with everything.”

So how would I do this? How did I begin? The first thing I did was call a family meeting. We watched the movie together — those still in the home, and decided that we were not attending any longer those things within the church that did not have Christ at the center of it. We decided that programs would only be used secondary to our needs as a family —not as a crutch in teaching our family. My husband decided he would take on his role stronger and not outsource his responsibility any longer to the church. We began our journey of “learning together” starting with Sunday School. Young Men and Young Women were not just something they attended any longer. Now, each week my daughters would check in with their leaders to see what the activity and purpose of the activity would be, and from there they would decide if it matched the family’s new vision or our daughter’s needs in their own spiritual growth. Slowly, programs and activities diminished as there just wasn’t anything they could attend that was in alignment with their standards it seemed.

This was a hard time in our family, but at the same time it pulled us together much closer, and I believe this was the beginning of the restoration of our home. This was how we became a family no longer divided but undivided with a new focus on bringing back our disconnected family— including a new son-in-law, even tighter.

Watch this movie— see if it makes sense to you and if it causes you to pull your family in closer, and let us know if you become a home ‘undivided’ too!

MOVIE DESCRIPTION

There is a crisis. Christian youth are rapidly leaving evangelical churches for the world. This well-recognized disaster has been the topic of significant discussion in recent years for both church leaders and modern new media. DIVIDED follows young Christian filmmaker Philip Leclerc on a revealing journey as he seeks answers to what has led his generation away from the church. Traveling across the country conducting research and interviewing church kids, youth ministry experts, evangelists, statisticians, social commentators, and pastors, Philip discovers the shockingly sinister roots of modern, age-segregated church programs, and the equally shocking evidence that the pattern in the Bible for training future generations is at odds with modern church practices. He also discovers a growing number of churches that are abandoning age-segregated Sunday school and youth ministry to embrace the discipleship model that God prescribes in His Word.