172 Penny Edgell
This sentiment was echoed in pastor focus groups by mainline Protestant ministers
and some Catholic priests, as well. Using a larger “time-bind” rhetoric, these pastors
had developed a critique of the speed-up of contemporary life, the long hours spent
at work, the competition from the increasing numbers of other organized activities for
church-members’ time, and the materialism of a dual-earner lifestyle.
This rhetoric is not part of any church’s “official” views, but is taken from a com-
bination of popular media accounts and scholarly works such asThe Time Bind,by
Arlie Hochschild (1997). It conveys a nostalgia for the male-breadwinner family of the
past, a family remarkably like the family that evangelical pastors would find to be both
ideal and biblically endorsed. And just as the rhetoric of “brokenness” in evangelical
congregations undercuts the more progressive implications of having ministry for sin-
gle parents or divorced members, the time-bind rhetoric in many mainline Protestant
and Catholic churches undercuts the more progressive implications of their official
rhetoric about gender and the family. Across religious traditions, the neopatriarchal
nuclear family schema dominant in church life in the 1950s retains influence on either
the official or the unofficial rhetoric about family life.
Family schema are embedded in rhetorics, but they are also embedded within and
guide the routine practices of organizational life. For example, the decision to have a
Sunday School says something about the importance that a church places upon the
religious socialization of children. The decision to organize the Sunday School into
age-graded, gender-specific classes with women teaching the girls and men teaching
the boys says something additional about the gender ideology of the congregation.
The routine practices of ministry in a congregation, the programs that are in place, and
how they are organized, are a location for the production of family ideology (cf. Marler
1995; Demmit 1992).
Table 13.2 gives information about the practice of ministry directed to families in
these congregations. Most offer babysitting during meetings and other congregational
activities. Focus groups suggest this is largely in response to dual-earner couples who
have a hard time managing multiple and conflicting family schedules in order to have
one parent home for childcare on a weeknight. It also helps single parents participate
in congregational life. Intergenerational ministry is also common, and so is informal
marriage and family counseling.
Table 13.2 also shows some differences between the religious traditions. Daycare is
offered by Catholics and mainline Protestants, while Catholics and evangelicals have
done the most to experiment with the time and timing of family-oriented programs,
and evangelicals do more programming for single parents. In analyzing the combined
rhetoric about the family and the practice of family ministry, it is apparent that each
religious tradition has an overall style of family ministry.
Conservative Protestants embrace a patriarchal rhetoric of the family that favors
traditional gender roles and an emphasis on obedience in children. They construct
the heterosexual, nuclear, intact two-parent family as an ideal. Focus groups with
pastors show that gay and lesbian unions are not recognized as “families” in evangelical
Protestant congregations.
Evangelical congregations have some typical ministry practices. Flexible about tim-
ing and organization, they experiment to find a way to make programs fit members’
schedules. And they target men as part of an explicit rationale for strengthening the
family, seeing ministry to men as the key element in keeping families intact. Men’s