The “Little Church”: Raising A Spiritual Family With Jonathan Edwards

By Peter Beck

Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules. [1]

The spiritual nurture of the family, God’s “little church,” Jonathan Edwards reminded his auditors on his last day as their pastor, is of greater import than even the ministry of the local church. “Family education and order,” he told the rebellious parishioners in Northampton, “are some of the chief means of grace.” Failure to raise one’s children in the grace and admonition of the Lord tends toward weakened spiritual efforts on all fronts. Faithful diligence, however, feeds greater works of grace in every other area of life. [2]

Today, Edwards is known for many things. Commonly recognized as America’s greatest philosopher, his reputation as an exemplar theologian is well deserved. Likewise, his acclaim as a preacher and promoter of piety is well founded. Over the 250 years since his premature death, much has been said about Edwards’s thought. Thousands of books and articles of varying lengths have seemingly touched upon every conceivable area of his life and thought. Yet, much remains left untouched, just below the surface of an overwhelming sea of sermon manuscripts and unpublished material. One such piece of the Edwardsean puzzle that has been heretofore glossed over is his views on the family and the spiritual role of the family unit. [3]

This essay will attempt to unlock some of the treasures of Edwards’s theology of the family for the purpose of teaching another generation that which the great Puritan knew so well: the parent’s greatest duty is to seek and promote the salvation of his child. Said Edwards, “If you love your children, it concerns you a great deal more to take care and pains that they may be safe in Christ and have God’s seal set upon them, than to provide earthly things for ’em.” [4]

Spiritual Life In The “Little Church”

A Christian family is as it were a little church and commonwealth by itself, and the head of the family has more advantage in his little community to promote religion than ministers have in congregations. [5]

In the Edwards home, the birth of every child was marked carefully in the family Bible, a wedding gift to Jonathan and Sarah. Every child was thus, from birth, dedicated to the cause of Christ, to the worship of the one and true living God. In Edwards’s mind things should be no other way. “’Tis most suitable that men should begin their lives with God and dedicate the first of their time to him.” “Hereby,” he continued, “the whole life is given to God.” [6]

Using the church as his model, Edwards saw the spiritual functions of the “little church,” the family, in terms of the same purposes assigned by God to the larger gathering of the saints. According to Edwards’s model, those things that God has ordained for His honor on Sunday are to be done for His honor the other six days of the week at home. The duties and the chief office of this intimate gathering were those of the greater assemblage of God’s people. Under the headship of God’s appointed leaders, the church, both the large and the small, was to be dedicated to the making of disciples and the worship of their God.

The Parent As Pastor

While it is well attested that Sarah managed the household finances and daily operations of the home, the mantle of spiritual leadership of the Edwards family rested on the shoulders of the father. As such, Edwards shepherded his family in the same way that he shepherded his church, with an eye ever toward the glory of God and the good of those children entrusted to him by the heavenly Father. Yet, in his household, both parents bore the responsibility of their children’s spiritual well-being. Hand-in-hand, Jonathan and Sarah worked toward one common, greater goal—the salvation of their children.

Edwards expected no less from the other parents in his parish. Fulfilling the office of pastor in the “little church,” he told them in the sermon “Living to Christ,” parents, both father and mother, enjoy the opportunity to do “a great deal for Jesus Christ.” Parents faithful in this charge “are under the greatest advantages” to make an eternal difference in the lives of those “under their roof.” The reason, Edwards posited, is that parents are “always with [their children], having them at continual command, and having always opportunities of instructing them.” Thus, Christian parents operate with advantages greater than even those enjoyed by the most profound theologians and most powerful preachers. Their children are theirs and under their direct supervision and influence. If only parents would capitalize on this gift, Edwards concluded, “multitudes of souls,” the souls of their loved ones, “might be saved by their means.” [7]

Yet, before the parent impresses upon his or her child the advantages of the gospel, he must ensure that the gospel has had its effect on his own heart. As Edwards argued in “Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” before God brings revival to the home, or the church, he must bring revival to the parents. “After a dead time in religion, ’tis very requisite,” said Edwards, “that religion should revive in heads of families and those that have care of children.” [8] If not, all that the parents do brings great offense to God. [9] Parents who wish to influence their children positively for eternity must first “seek a revival of religion in their own souls.” They must, as pastors of the “little flock,” lead by example. Those who don’t are guilty of the worst kind of child abuse. “Those that [haven’t been] lively in religion, they will neglect the souls of their children.” [10]

Worse yet, parents who neglect their own souls may find themselves guilty of leading their children to hell with them. Children, Edwards contended, are easily molded, taking the shape of those that exert the most influence on their minds. As he warned in the sermon “Don’t Lead Others into Sin”:

As an infant sucks its mothers breasts, the child is, as it were, naturally molded and fashioned by beholding its parents, by what it sees them do from time to time and hears them say, by seeing what they like and what they dislike. By being constantly under the influence of their judgment, inclinations, and ways, the child grows up from a state of nonentity under these things, and under the influence of them conforms naturally to them like wax to the seal, as it were; they naturally grow into such a shape and are cast into that mold. [11]

Parents, because of the impressionable nature of children, lead those children one way or another by their own example. Thus, a Christian example becomes the duty of Christian parents. They hold the eternal destiny of their children potentially in their hands. Edwards writes:

It may be that your children are yet unconverted and unawakened. Might it not probably have been otherwise, at least some of them, if you had done your duty towards them?

It may be that some of your children are dead, and they died without giving any probable signs of conversion. And you have reason to be afraid whether or not they have gone to hell. And if it is so, haven’t you reason to accuse yourself for having a great hand in it? Or, if your children should die in a Christless state and condition, and so be damned to all eternity, would there not be reason for you to condemn yourself in that you and the devil joined together to forward your children’s damnation? [12]

Or, as Edwards said on another occasion:

There are many that contribute to their own children’s damnation, by neglecting their education and setting them bad examples, and bringing them up in sinful ways: they take some care of their bodies, but take but little care of their poor souls; they provide for them bread to eat, but deny them the bread of life that their famishing souls stand in need of.… Seeing therefore you have had no more regard to others’ salvation, and have promoted their damnation, how justly might God leave you to perish yourself? [13]

Those who neglect to care for the souls of those in their care do so to their own peril.

The Parent As Evangelist

Having attended to the needs of their own souls, parents must turn to the spiritual nurture of their children. Such care begins with the process of making disciples, calling their children to the Savior. The process, however, does not stop with conversion. The parent as a maker of disciples—by the blessing of the Holy Spirit—must also tend to the cultivation of those tender hearts, seeing that they become ever more like the Savior.

It is most reasonable, Edwards believed, that those parents who love their children would long to see them converted. While Edwards himself believed baptism to be a means of grace for those children who receive it, something to which he called all godly parents, conversion came only by means of evangelism, through the faithful efforts of the parents and the Spirit’s application of God-appointed means. He writes: “Let parents be hence exhorted to be very painful and diligent in instructing and educating your children, that they may be some of God’s sealed ones.… If you love your children, it concerns you a great deal more to take care and pains that they may be safe in Christ and have God’s seal set upon them, than to provide earthly things.” [14]

The evangelistic process, according to Edwards, begins with the parents’ tender hearts, hearts broken over the condition of their children’s young souls. Rather than being a singular effort to share an over-simplified plan of the gospel, some theologically starved cure all, the evangelization of children takes on many forms in Edwards’s estimation. To William Pepperrell, Edwards wrote that “in order to promote the salvation” of children, several key means of grace were available. The first of those relates to the function of the larger church, the community of saints that gathered on Sunday: public worship. The others, family worship and catechizing, are the province of the “little church.”

Family worship, Edwards felt, plays a crucial role in the spiritual vitality of the home and the church. Spiritual deadness, he said, can be traced directly to the lack thereof, for such robs “God of that honor he expects.” [15] On the other hand, family worship strictly practiced honors God and adorns the family. [16] Modern readers are not left without Edwards’s example when it comes to family worship. Samuel Hopkins helpfully described worship in the Edwards home as he observed it during his own stays there. On Saturday evenings, once the business of the day was complete and the distractions minimal, the Edwards family would gather together. There they would sing a song of worship, drawing upon the book of Psalms. Together the family would pray. “Care and exactness,” Hopkins noted, were applied to this “holy time,” as the Edwardses set the eyes of their hearts on the day of worship ahead. [17] For, in Edwards’s mind, the life of the “little church” touches upon the life of the big church, working together in God’s economy for the salvation of the saints.

Thus, corporate worship was seen to function in tandem with family worship. Hearts prepared on Saturday were tender to the gospel preached on Sunday. There, in his powerful and blunt sermons on the nature of the human soul and their future estate, Edwards reminded them that “God don’t excuse ’em because they were in their youth.” [18] There he would call them “to seek earnestly that they may be converted and that God would fill their hearts with love to Christ now while they are young.” [19] In this matter, he exhorted, they were to be very earnest. [20] While their parents longed for their salvation, Edwards warned the youth, the day would come when they would “praise God for His justice in your damnation,” if they continued living in their sinful ways. [21] A personal interest in the Savior was paramount.

Worship alone, however, was not to be seen as the sole means of evangelism. Another important foundational step in this process of raising up another generation of Christians is education, the introduction of biblical truths that change young lives. “Family education and order are some of the chief of the means of grace,” Edwards counseled parents. “If these fail, all other measures are like to prove ineffectual. If these are duly maintained, all means of grace will be like to prosper and be successful.” [22] Such education seeks to inform the child’s mind, influence his heart, and direct his practice. [23]

The family education for which Edwards advocated includes several didactic methods. The teaching of children to read is one such approach. They should be taught, he argued, their mother tongue that they might read the Bible and “learn [the Christian] religion.” [24] Edwards also felt that teaching of stories from the Bible and church history could prove very beneficial to children as they learn of God’s gracious works throughout history. [25] On any given day, before the Edwards family attended to the tasks of the day ahead, the great pastor would read a chapter from the Bible for his children and then ask the “children questions according to their age and capacity.” Explaining the greater truths of the text, Edwards challenged his children to apply those principles to their lives. [26]

The use of catechisms, however, stands chief among efforts to raise Christian children. “Let us endeavor to retrieve…the ancient good practice of catechizing,” Edwards once appealed to his Scottish friend James Robe. [27] Of Edwards’s own family practice, Hopkins observed, “He took much pains to instruct them in the principles of religion; in which he made use of the [Westminster] Assembly’s Shorter Catechism.” Great care was taken, he further remarked, to make certain that the child did not merely learn the answer by rote. Rather, the children were questioned to make certain they understood the biblical concepts, Edwards taking time to explain the matter more clearly, if needed. This was done typically the night before the weekly gathering of the church to prepare his children for the day of worship ahead, thus “sanctifying the Sabbath.” [28]

Because Edwards was convinced that “there is no other way by which any means of grace whatsoever can be of any benefit, but by knowledge,” he called all parents to join him in training their children, preparing them for future gifts of God’s saving grace by educating them in the ways of the Lord. [29] He encouraged parents to be “very assiduous in instructing the principal means of grace,” teaching them the gospel, the necessity of faith, and the reality of the new birth. [30] Such teaching, aided by good counsel, might just result in their salvation. Edwards’s parental advice, however, didn’t end there because he knew that true conversion did not end there. Yet one more vital element was needed, something for which Edwards never tired of reminding them. They needed to pray for God’s merciful grace.

Let heads of families earnestly cry to God for this blessing. Let concern for yourselves and compassion for your poor children, that you have been the instruments of bringing into the world, stir you up. If God should not any more remarkably pour out his Spirit upon us, in all likelihood most of your poor children, the bigger part of the rising generation, will burn in hell to all eternity. Consider [that] you have been the instruments of bringing children into the world in a miserable state and condition, under wrath, and will you not earnestly seek a blessing by which they may be saved? [31]

So, pray, he told his parental peers, “travail for them.” [32] “Pray to God to give ’em new hearts and make ’em truly religious.” [33] The conversion of their children, he firmly believed, is the greatest task to which parents are called. Theirs is the “little church” and salvation their great concern.

The Parent As Shepherd

The final piece in Edwards’s family plan, one that both precedes and follows the conversion of children, was that of discipline. “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules,” Edwards preached. [34] Thus, parents are to shepherd his or her little flock, to preserve order and to promote piety. Done well, discipline might lead a child to Christ. Done faithfully, discipline would help a child to become more like Christ.

Heads of the family, Edwards preached, were to dedicate themselves to “teaching, warning, and directing their children; bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” This process was to be begun early and practiced with due diligence and resolve. While the task could be expected to be difficult, those that do so guard “the religion and morals of the family.” [35] Godly discipline promotes the gospel and protects the “little church.”

Family discipline also touched upon church discipline at large. As Edwards knew from personal experience gained so painfully during the Bad Book Affair, the discipline of children impacts everyone in the community. In that instance a number of young boys had acquired a midwife’s manual, using their newfound knowledge to harass the girls of Northampton and, ultimately, to question the pastor’s authority. For that reason, Edwards called on parents to join him in disciplining the youth for the benefit of all involved, to “not allow of those things that directly tend to frustrate the most faithful labors and endeavors of a minister.” [36] Here, too, one sees the close affinity between family worship and public worship as Edwards encouraged his flock to guard their family gatherings for the betterment of the communal. “I would therefore earnestly entreat parents,” he begged, “to restrain their children from improving the Sabbath evenings after such a manner, and not suffer them to make it a time of going abroad, and diverting, and company-keeping.” [37] Such was the duty of the parents. Such Edwards expected from them.

As Hopkins observed firsthand, strict discipline was practiced in the Edwards home. He remarked, however, that such careful governance was not a burden for the Edwards children but the source of their respect for their father. Discipline was administered in accordance with each child’s age and ability to learn the lesson taught. The lesson would be applied until such a time as the child learned it and his willful disobedience broken. Done with prudence and calmness, corporal punishment was rarely needed in the Edwards home. Instead, with tenderness and resolve, Edwards established “his parental authority” while producing “cheerful obedience.” [38]

While the good folks of Northampton eventually questioned their pastor’s integrity in matters of church discipline, they could not impugn his preaching of family discipline. That which he called them to do concerning the late night escapades of the town’s youth, he exercised in his own home. “He allowed not his children to be from home after nine o’clock at night,” Hopkins noted. Likewise, Jonathan and Sarah did not permit their children to have company in their home past that hour. In the case of the older children, when suitors came calling upon the Edwards girls, the male guests were to introduce themselves “handsomely” to her parents, consult with them, and were then provided a comfortable place in the family home for a social visit. However, even these adult-like visits were constrained so as to “not intrude on the proper hours of rest and sleep, nor the religion and order of the family.” The spiritual health of the child and the family always trumped every other concern. [39]

Conclusion

Every Christian family is a little church.... [40]

Christians, Edwards taught, are to “use all possible endeavors and improve all opportunities God puts into [their] hands for promoting the kingdom and interest of Jesus Christ amongst men.” [41] The “little church,” the family with Christian parents, has a unique opportunity. The godly parent, he continued, enjoys the great responsibility and blessed hope of fulfilling this ministry in his or her home. Doing so, he argued, allows them to do a “great deal for Jesus Christ.” Their children, their little flock, dwells with them, ever present and ever ready to be instructed, raised in the way of the Lord. Doing so, he said, was beneficial for the family and for the renown of the Savior. “If parents did what they might do this way,” he believed, “multitudes of souls might be saved by their means, and a great increase and addition might be made to the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” [42]

Edwards believed these things and acted upon his convictions in his own family. While one might debate the relative spiritual merit of the individual members of Edwards’s household and his descendants, one cannot discount the impact that this one godly parent had on his children and succeeding generations. As Samuel Hopkins observed in the family home, thanks to Edwards’s “careful and thorough government of his children,” his children “reverenced, esteemed, and loved him.” [43] Better yet, Samuel Miller noted, “Almost all his children manifested the fruit of his pious fidelity by consecrating themselves in heart and life to the God of their fathers.” [44] Thus, in Edwards’s “little church,” “heaven and earth were near together.” [45]

As Gilbert Tennent noted on the occasion of Edwards’s passing, “Though dead, [Edwards still] speaks with wisdom and warmth, in favour of truth and holiness.” [46] The question that begs to be asked of this generation is this: Are we listening?

Notes

1. Jonathan Edwards, “A Farewell Sermon,” in Sermons and Discourses: 1743-1758, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards [Works], ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 25:484.
2. Ibid.
3. Very little has been written concerning life in the Edwards family home. Elisabeth Dodds’s Marriage to a Difficult Man: The “Uncommon Union” of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971) and Edna Gerstner’s Jonathan and Sarah: An Uncommon Union (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1996) both do so by looking primarily at the marriage relationship of the Edwardses, the former from a historical perspective, the latter from fiction. Likewise, every major biography written in the last 120 years has spoken briefly of the Edwards home. It was the early witnesses to that home life that spoke most often of the relationship between father and children. For example, see Samuel Hopkins’s The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Northampton: Andrew Wright, 1804).
4. Edwards, “God’s Care in Time of Public Commotions,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742, eds. Harry S. Stout, Nathan O. Hatch, Works 22 (2003):363.
5. Edwards, “Living to Christ,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720-1723, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Works 10 (1992):577.
6. Edwards, “The Beauty of Piety in Youth,” Works 25:106.
7. Edwards, “Living to Christ,” Works 10:577.
8. Edwards, “The Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” Works 22:451.
9. Ibid., 452.
10. Ibid., 453.
11. Edwards, “Don’t Lead Others into Sin,” in To the Rising Generation (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 2005), 127-128.
12. Ibid., 129.
13. Edwards, “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742, ed. M. X. Lesser, Works 19 (2001):370.
14. Edwards, “God’s Care in Time of Public Commotions,” Works 22:363.
15. Edwards, Letter “To the Rev. Thomas Prince of Boston,” in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, Works 4 (1972):553.
16. Edwards, “A City on a Hill,” Works 19:558.
17. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 47.
18. Edwards, “The Beauty of Piety in Youth,” Works 25:107.
19. Edwards, “Children Ought to Love the Lord Jesus Christ,” Works 22:177.
20. Ibid., 180.
21. Edwards, “God Is Very Angry at the Sins of Children,” in To the Rising Generation, 59.
22. Edwards, “A Farewell Sermon,” Works 25:484.
23. Edwards, Letter “To Sir William Pepperrell,” in Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn, Works 16:409.
24. Edwards, “The Things That Belong to True Religion,” Works 25:574.
25. Edwards, Letter “To Sir William Pepperrell,” Works 16:409-410.
26. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 46.
27. Edwards, Letter “To the Reverend James Robe,” Works 16:280.
28. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 47.
29. Edwards, “The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth,” in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, eds. Wilson H. Kim­nach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 31.
30. Edwards, “Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” Works 22:454.
31. Edwards, “Praying for the Spirit,” Works 22:222.
32. Edwards, “Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” Works 22:454.
33. Edwards, “The Things That Belong to True Religion,” Works 25:574.
34. Edwards, “A Farewell Sermon,” Works 25:484.
35. Ibid.
36. Edwards, “Heeding the Word, and Losing It,” Works 19:54.
37. Ibid.
38. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 47.
39. Ibid., 48.
40. Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, Works 4:487.
41. Edwards, “Living to Christ,” Works 10:576.
42. Ibid., 577.
43. Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend, Learned, and Pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 47.
44. Quoted in Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 446.
45. Dodds, Marriage to a Difficult Man, 214.
46. Quoted in Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards, 447.