one for vocational direction in the family?

CHAPTER XVII

THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH

If the family is engaged in the development of religious character
through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close
relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely
the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of
religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and
the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained,
these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.

As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should
be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the
first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives
prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of
social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives
together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of
life.

Sec. 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME

Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an
institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the
developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved
if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these
two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these
relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its
interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on
the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time,
interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture
unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that
money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it
to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from
the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of
the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.

But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The
home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems
of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the
opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly
think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be
persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests
of which are in a differe