Make Your Home An Altar
"These commandments are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road" (Deuteronomy 6). Or, for us, when you drive them to school…or to and from practice.
The Biblical strategy for intergenerational revival involves families. The primary vehicle of intergenerational discipleship is not the youth group or the Sunday sermon. It's the home. The minivan. The dinner table.
My wife wrote a book on this — Teach Your Children Well. Her thesis is that the most influential spiritual leaders in a child's life are not pastors or youth workers but parents. Parents have more time, influence, and spiritual authority over their children than anyone else. The only question is whether we'll make our home an altar.
Every home is organized around something. For many of us it's the careers of mom and dad; for others, the kids' schooling, or their sports, or the screen glowing at the center of the house. None of it is evil (except maybe the screen sometimes). But the most important question about a home is the question of what is its central organizing principle. We build the altar of the home when we have holy resolve to make Jesus the central organizing principle of the household. This is not just for the 2.2-kids, 2 parent, white-picket-fence, house in the burbs family. Homes come in every shape: twenty-somethings in intentional community, three generations under one roof, a single parent and a child. The question is the same for all of us. Will we put the presence of God at the center of the community that is at the center of our lives?
Duncan Campbell said revival falls when the fire of God lands on four altars — the heart, the home, the church, and the region — but of these, the home is the key to revival reaching the next generation. The kingdom of God is an intergenerational relay race.
Bike through Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard and you'll stumble onto something almost otherworldly: hundreds of tiny "gingerbread" cottages ringed around a green and a great open-air tabernacle. It began in 1835 as a Methodist camp meeting, riding the crest of the Second Great Awakening. A revival had swept Providence in 1820, and fifteen years on, thousands upon thousands of converts from my city were among the thousands streaming to the Vineyard each summer. These converts now had children and they wanted to raise them up in the fear of the Lord - so they organized their summers around Jesus. They came to camp together, study Scripture, sit under preaching, and worship, and they pitched their family tents close to the pulpit so their children would be formed in the same fire that formed them. The tents eventually hardened into those whimsical wooden houses. The whole village is evidence of a generation that decided to build the altar of the home - refusing to let revival die with them.
May we have the same resolve — so the revival we're praying for goes multigenerational. And hundreds of years from now - may evidence of our resolve be left behind for future generations.
Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England