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Foreign It's Friday, June 19, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. You know, we are surrounded by, let's just say, an avalanche of headlines just about every day, and especially on something like a digital news feed, I mean, they just come. They come and they come, and often they come without any sense of relative weight or relative lightness. You know, what's important and what's not. And by the way, they're often driven by algorithms that simply say, this is popular, but that could mean it has nothing to do with something with great importance. It just somehow hit a nerve with the public or just a button of interest. But sometimes in these headlines, you start to see a pattern. And at least for those who are looking at these things closely, these patterns can sometimes be very revealing. Okay, so we have Father's Day coming up in the United States on Sunday. Now, Mother's Day is an older holiday, and that's because it really emerged in a certain context. And of course, we can understand why in various civilizations, you would have something like Mother's Day. Father's Day came later. And Father's Day is a way of just underlining the importance of fatherhood in society. Now, that's important. But let's understand. We are in a society that has been for a long time trying to deny the importance of fatherhood and trying to say that fathers are not necessary and that fathers are not all that important. And then you have even studies coming out in the secular world which are coming back and saying, no, that's just not true. That's just not true. And as a matter of fact, some of these earlier stories came out and said, you know, that's not true, especially when it comes to raising boys, because it turns out that not having a father in the home is a huge issue. Let's put it the other way. God's intention, and let's just say society's affirmation for a very long time has been that fathers must take responsibility for their children, that they should be involved in raising and educating and caring for and protecting and providing for and disciplining those children. And especially when it comes to boys, there's just plenty of pathology, not to mention common sense, that says at a certain point, a father is absolutely indispensable. One way or another, some man has got to be involved with the raising of this boy. Otherwise he is not going to be orderly and disciplined, and he's not going to be motivated and move forward I mean, one of the things that becomes very clear is that boys need and hunger for the affirmation of their fathers. And that's a precious authority given to fathers. Now, we are looking, even in the Bible, the fact that, of course, there are children who do not have a father. And that's where Christians, and for that matter, even the people of Israel, understood that in that sense, the people of Israel were to be the father. The fathers of Israel were to be the father to those children. In the same way, it should be the similar response in the church. But what we're talking about over the course of the last several decades has been an intentional effort to subvert the very idea of a father and to subvert the authority and role of fathers. And as I say, it's coming back. It's also coming back when you have all kinds of people recognizing that the chances that a young girl, a teenage girl, will be involved in all kinds of really dangerous activities, I can just say, morally and otherwise, those chances go down hugely when she's living in a home where her mother and her father are both present. Having the father in the home is just massively, massively important. Okay, so what's really interesting is that over the last several decades, even a lot of just secular social science research has come back and affirmed that, and all kinds of things happening in society have drawn attention to it. What's really interesting right now. Right now, what's really interesting is the big cultural development that many fathers are really committed to fathering, really enjoying fathering, and it's capturing even national press attention, national academic attention. Now, I want to say this very carefully. I'm one of those who could say right away, my father was very involved decades and decades ago. He wasn't waiting for this kind of headline. And I'm very thankful for that. But the point is that it's a headline, because now it is something that gains attention. It's something that wasn't expected, at least by many people. Here's a headline, and it's in an article that is Time for Father's Day by Frank Bruni. Very interesting himself. And the title is the Most Important Way that Fatherhood Has Changed. Okay, so Frank Bruni is not a father, and I've discussed him before, but he has two brothers who are. And I think what's really important is that it does come in the New York Times. It does come from someone like Frank Bruni, far more on the left than on the right, let's just say. And he's writing about his two Brothers. And he says that he's riveted by their conversations with their children. He says, I've never shared this with my brothers, but I'm often riveted by their conversations with their children. The range of topics, the time lavished on each, the intimacy, the details, the ease of it all. It's really a sweet article, I have to say. It's really one of those things you look at and you go, okay, here's a display of God's creation, grace of God's graciousness to human beings in the gift of the family, the gift of marriage, and in this case, the gift of fathers. And the fact that here you have a man who is one of three brothers. He does not have children, his brothers do. And he's just astounded by the relationship between his brothers and their children. Okay, backing all of this up is a very interesting scientific study, social science. It's interesting that it has appeared. It's interesting. The headline is How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were. Okay, so here's the subhead in this report. Compared to their parents, millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with their kids. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted, but also more satisfied with life. Okay, so I just want to say that I think culturally, I'm not speaking of Christian families here, I'm not even speaking of many families in the society. But culturally, the big story the media has been pushing is women more and more frustrated with motherhood and more and more women deciding not to be mothers. And I'll say from a Christian perspective, that's a huge problem. And again, this is where the church is the alternative community. You find the opposite in the believing church of the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is interesting that the culture, the secular culture, has caught onto the fact that more dads are enjoying being dads and they're giving more time to it. So in this report, there's actually a graph. The change in the minutes per day, 2022 through 24 versus 1965 through 85. Okay, so it's taking like a three year period versus a 20 year period, fatherhood versus 50 years ago. Here's the bottom line. Fathers today spend. And of course, this is a report and they're going to quantify it. But just listen to this. Fathers today spend 38 minutes more on childcare than fathers 50 years ago. That's per day, 38 minutes. Now, when you're talking about measuring this kind of thing in what turns out in sociology or Family studies, this kind of academic context, 38 minutes is massive. As additional time within the report, we find this text today. Millennial 30something dads typically spend more than 80 daily minutes changing diapers, reading and playing with their children, driving them to soccer practice and going over homework. To make time for kids, modern fathers have reduced their daily office work by more than an hour, not to mention cut down their TV time by 30 minutes as they pour more of their waking life into being at home. Now, the big story here is, of course, this is good for kids. It's good for the entire family. It's good for everybody. But the big story here is that fathers are enjoying this. That appears to be just a great shock to the secular world that fathers would find so much enjoyment in spending time with their children and fathering their children. Now, I mentioned the New York Times is running that piece. I also want to go to a story that ran in the Wall Street Journal and it's from similar research and the headline in this is more Dads Scale Back at the Office for Family. Now, that was in that big report. I just c where men are spending about an hour less at the office on average when they are fathers than 20 years ago. The article in the Wall Street Journal is by Harriet Tory, and she says, quote, a new study finds college educated fathers are working significantly shorter hours than before the COVID 19 pandemic and are spending more time with their families. End quote. Okay, so here's a very interesting little historical turn, and it just reminds us that sometimes there's more going on than meets the eye. It turns out that in the context of the COVID 19 pandemic, the lockdown and all the rest, and of course, all of that, just, you know, a huge political issue as well, big moral issue. The fact is, however, just a little footnote here, that a lot of fathers spent time at home they hadn't spent before, and they liked it. They were spending time with their children and they discovered they really liked it. And even when they were no longer in a lockdown and they were back fully deployed in the office, they have been working hard to cut back so that they can spend more time at home with their children. I just have to tell you, to Christians, this is a giant affirmation of creation order. It's a giant affirmation of God's grace in creation. It's a giant affirmation of the role of fathers. And I just think it's really sweet that a lot of this is now coming to public view. Of course, coinciding with Father's Day. I just think it is an absolute delight to Christians. Don't we need that at times? How about before a Friday? Just absolute pleasure in seeing the secular world come to understand the goodness of creation and God's order, even in especially in the role of fathers and in discovering the astounding thing. The big story here is that fathers are enjoying fathering their children and want to spend more time doing so. Now the article also makes clear that a lot of dads who socioeconomically aren't able to do this, they don't have this kind of control over their schedules, etc. But in any event, all across the scale, the fact that fathers are finding more fulfillment in fathering that is just a huge, wonderful story and one that certainly should attract Christian attention, not just because it's interesting, but because as Christians understand at a deeper level than even those publishing this research, it really is important. Okay, now we're going to turn to questions. And as always, I just appreciate the quality of the questions, the number of them too. I mean, just frankly, how many questions are sent in by listeners to the briefing and you help us to think and to think through issues. And one of the gifts that sending in a question represents is a gift to other listeners who are sometimes, well, thinking about the same question or need to. And so that's another very interesting thing. I want to take the first question today because it's at the top of the list and it comes from a father. A father of three young boys ages 1, 3 and 5. Just makes me happy to read it. He is asking a question about having family during Sunday worship versus what some churches call children's church. He says, I'm the father of three young boys aged 1, 3 and 5. I'm seeking your advice on whether to have them in the main Sunday service with us or in children's church. I understand that children's church is a relatively recent development. My wife and I value family time and want to strengthen our family bond. It's just so sweet, all of this. He says part of the desire of having our boys in service with us is for them to see their mom and dad worship, pray and listen to biblical preaching. On and on. He says, well, I'll just say he talks about the three year old and the five year old and I'll just say they are interested in children's church, although one of them wants to be in the main worship with his parents. This father is just asking how should we think about this? He also very smartly says this Children's church thing is a new invention. Is it good or bad? Okay, so let me just back off and say at the biggest level, I think the most important thing is that parents and children should be together in Sunday worship. I just think that's really, really important. Now I say that as a principle. I'm not saying it categorically as in every situation every Sunday, because I do think there are some very gospel minded churches that are doing some really important work with children. But generally, I think the healthiest thing I see is not that they're not in what worship with their parents, but that at some point during the worship service they may go out into a different program for very, very young children. And by that I mean very, very young children. And I think there's just some issues about very, very young children in which that can be a sweet thing, especially when they may be able to be taught in a way that they might otherwise miss. Okay. However, I think the principle is what's most important here. And I think this father's heart is directed towards that principle. I think, number one, I grew up sitting in a pew when I didn't understand anything. Sitting next to my mother and my father where my feet couldn't touch the floor. And then as the oldest of several siblings, seeing the same thing happen with a younger sister and younger brothers. And we just all sat there because this is what we did on Sunday, actually more than once on Sunday. And we sat together and we sang hymns, we stood, we listened to the preaching of God's word. And honestly, when I was really, really young, I'll just tell you like a normal child, I wasn't getting a whole lot out of it in terms of the ability to say, what did the preacher talk about? At one point I probably said the Bible and God. But the point is that sitting there with my feet not even touching the floor, I was still affected by the preaching of the Word of God. I was affected by the grace of sitting there with my parents and seeing my mom and my dad in rapt attention to the preaching of God's Word and, and so eagerly and actively involved in worship. And I still think that's just really, really important. So in principle, so I want to be careful here. In principle, I think this dad is onto something. I think having the family just sitting in a row is a marvelous display of God's glory. And you know, it is true that the youngest are probably not understanding a lot of these sentences in the sermon, but that doesn't mean those sentences are not landing in Their heart in a way that we don't even understand. We are talking about the preaching of God's word, not just somebody standing on a box talking. You know, I want to tell you another thing, and I've mentioned this in some other settings. I was in a church in Florida preaching just a couple years ago, and I was sitting in a way that I could watch a family. And it was just a beautiful family just sitting there. I mean, families are beautiful. And there they were as a mother and a father. It was a bunch of kids, I mean like five or six kids. And there was a teenage boy maybe like 15 years old, and there were younger brothers sitting next to him. And you know, I just was watching this family during worship and they were all there, they were all attentive, they were all behaved. And you know, the little one, I don't know, maybe four or five years old, he got just a little restless and he was very close to his 15 year old brother. And so I'm just watching the congregation as I'm getting ready to preach and I just see that 15 year old brother just take his hand and kind of put it on the back of the five year old little brother. And I just saw the five year old calm down and rest back in his seat. And I thought, here's how creation order works. That 15 year old boy felt his father's hand on his back when he was about that age. And just in instinct, he just did as his father had done to him. And it was not pushing the kid down or anything. It was just a hand on the back that communicated everything that needed to be communicated. I just thought this is a beautiful display of creation order. This is a way in which that 15 year old was honoring his father. And probably never thought that's what he was doing. He was just doing what nature called on him to do at that moment. And I just thought, you know, there's something just beautifully right about this. It's not by accident that I'm seeing this in a congregation gathered for Christian worship. This is where above all places on creation you should get to see such a thing. I will also tell you that one of the great joys that my wife and I have is watching our very young grandchildren sing hymns outside of church just when they're folding their clothes or just about the house. Because these hymns have taken such root in their hearts. That came from congregational singing and I'm so thankful they're not missing that. Then a question came in from a man who's an elder at a church and he says, we're a very small congregation and we're meeting this week to discuss the correlation between baptism and church membership. I was wondering if you could take a moment and possibly share your thoughts. Thoughts on the correlation between baptism and church membership for those who have been regenerated. I come to faith in Christ and believe that baptism should directly precede church membership, meaning that local congregations should exclusively baptize those individuals who are intending to join together with the local church body. He says some others, many others differ in that view. Okay, so yeah, I'm glad to be asked. Let me tell you that the historic Baptist position, which I believe is just seeking faithfulness with New Testament teaching, is that baptism and church membership are to be correlated both ways. And what I mean by that is that you should not have a category in a Baptist church of unbaptized members. That should be an impossibility. This is a fellowship of the baptized. And by the way, that means full on Baptist here, that means a whole lot of water. That means immersion. And so as believers, baptism by immersion, we believe as the entry right into church membership. It is the profession of faith, the completion of the profession of faith that a believer makes having come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is an act of obedience. And that's usually the way even a pastor explaining baptism, that's what he's going to say. It's an act in obedience. That's why it's called an ordinance to Christ. And it certainly works that way in that there should be no church membership in a rightly ordered Baptist church without believer's baptism as the entry act of obedience. Okay, but I think it works the other way as well in that the normal pattern is that there should be no baptism without church membership. Now I have to say normal pattern because I think that's New Testament too. And I think because in the New Testament with the spread of the Gospel, you do have situations in which believers are baptized and then they go on to join or to form congregations. And that's kind of a New Testament model. So I would say that in principle it works both ways, but it doesn't work both ways equally. It is to say that sometimes a church will baptize someone. And the normal, even normative, I think should be that they're coming into the membership of the church. But for all kinds of missiological purposes, it could be that it is in order that this church can help in the establishment of another church or in the furtherance of the gospel, or it could be that someone is from far away and comes to faith in Christ, and there is not yet a faithful biblical congregation where that person would go back and be baptized and enter into membership. We certainly hope that would happen. But in other words, I'm saying that I think the New Testament model is really, really clear. No membership without the obedience to believer's baptism by immersion, and then generally no baptism without the context of church membership. But there are missiological contexts there, I think, even in the New Testament, where we would understand that part of it could fit a certain context. And we need to honestly acknowledge that. Okay, then a question coming in from a listener, and he's writing about Baptist history, and he asked a specific question about the Southern Baptists. And with the recent meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, maybe there's some news coverage. We've talked a bit about that. But I find this to be a really interesting question. He compares Northern Baptists with Southern Baptists. And then he asked the question. He says, was there a turning point in terms of Southern Baptists kind of learning how to push back against the culture and having to affirm and to reaffirm and clearly affirm very conservative biblical principles and biblical doctrines? Was there a turning point? Yes, there was a turning point. I want to say, in fact, there was something called the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. It's often dated to 1979, when the first clearly conservative president who was very committed to this process, it was Dr. Adrian Rogers, the late pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the one who really came as the first president under this conservative Reformation movement. And it continued, and I hope continues, and it was incredibly successful. And eventually, year after year after year, gaining ground and recovering ground, recovering doctrine, recovering truth. But something else happened, and I don't know that I've ever had the opportunity with a question like this to answer this before. It's not just what happened inside the SBC in terms of a deep conservative recovery. It's something else that happened, and that is an increasingly secularized and more hostile world. I mean, when the conservative resurgence in the SBC began, everybody in America knew who a boy and a girl was. I mean, when all that began, a lot of the basic subversions and threats against religious liberty hadn't been really visible yet. There was no such thing as same sex marriage, and no one would have known what you're talking about. And so I think the secularization and the progressive liberalization of the society around this, in contrast of biblical Christianity, has also forced Southern Baptists, and not just Southern Baptists, but confessional conservative evangelical Christians to a very new sobriety and seriousness and urgency about biblical truth. And we don't choose the times, and we would not have chosen some of these challenges, to be honest. But I do think these challenges have been very clarifying for God's people. And of course, just to answer the other part of this listener's question, all of this requires constant vigilance, continued faithfulness. And we're going to have to say things clearly ten years from now. We don't even know yet. We're going to have to speak about. And I'm hoping and praying that Southern Baptist will continue in a very faithful biblical commitment and be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us and be ready to give an answer appropriate to biblical faithfulness, whatever the world may throw at us. And the world's going to continue to throw things at us. Final question for today. It's coming from several different questions sent in from listeners. I'm just going to combine them into one. And it basically is we're talking about the declining birth rate. Christians know that's a big problem. And even for Christians, there's some big questions related to financial issues and financial strain. And so basically, I will summarize the questions coming in is how do you answer the statement that it's just too expensive to have children? Okay, so here's how I would answer that question. I took this on knowing I didn't have much time because I thought, you know, this is a good test. I need to be able to make this a very succinct argument. Number one, God commands it. It is God's plan. It's creation order. Number two, in most of human history, people had only a tiny fraction of even what people say below the poverty line now have, and they still had children. You look at the children of Israel wandering in the desert. You just look at all these different situations. Look at the history of the Christian church, times of plague and famine and poverty and all the rest, they still had children. And you know, one of the amazing responses to that is, well, they didn't have birth control. You know, they had children. And thus, where you find obedience, where you find flourishing, where you find confidence in the future, you're going to find parents having children. And I think a part of the problem here, and no time is short. So let me just say this quickly. A part of the problem here is that we all have. All have. I'm not pointing fingers at others. We all have inflated economic expectations and we use as a point of comparison, things that are just economically outsized beyond imagination for most people throughout all of human history and all of Christian history. I mean, the fact is that children do cost money. There's just no doubt that you have to feed them, clothe them, take care of them, educate them, and all the rest. But I will tell you that an awful lot of the scales used by people in government and elsewhere to say what it costs to raise a child, they are talking about costs that an awful lot of Christian parents aren't going to take on in the first place. And I can also tell you, as president of a college and a seminary, I can tell you that a lot of Christian parents factor in educational costs that are far in excess of what they actually should be paying for and even wanting for their children. So all I'm saying is that when you have people say the big issue is whether or not people can afford children, I just want to say we should be humbled by reading scripture and even just reading history about we should be humbled so that we don't frame that question the way many people are simply framing it. I'll also say that for a lot of people, for a lot of people, especially on the cultural left, that's just a statement as camouflage for the fact they really don't want to have children. And in their honest moments, they'll say, we just really don't want to have children. Or as I saw recently in the media, someone said, I'm just not the fathering kind. I do not want to minimize some of the challenges faced by Christian parents just in terms of economic reality and all the rest. I'm just saying that I don't know of any Christian parents who say, I wish I had fewer children. I wish we had fewer children. And indeed, when you look at a thriving gospel church, you find people with all kinds of different socioeconomic backgrounds and they're showing up with their children, loving their children, cherishing their children, and seeing their children as gifts from God. And so I just think as Christians, it's not that we don't take matters economic with seriousness. It's just that we understand they're not ultimate. And frankly, they're often falsely framed. All right, as always, thank you for your questions and just thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com, you can. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu for information on Boyce College. Just go to boycecollege.com. i'll meet you again on Monday for the briefing.