Most Christian families are not failing at family worship because they’re lazy. They’re failing because they’re never in the same room.
That’s the argument underneath Adam Madden’s new book, The Productive Household. Adam is a pastor in Brigham City, Utah, a father of nine, and a man who spent twenty-five years in ministry living off the envelope system before he ever bought a business.
Here’s the assumption: dad is productive somewhere else. Mom is productive somewhere else. The children are formed somewhere else. Everyone sleeps under the same roof and spends ninety-five percent of their waking hours apart, and the few hours that are left get spent on recreation. Nobody in the house builds anything together. This is the new normal for households today. And what we call “normal” is only eighty years old.
Adam told me about a survey he ran years ago in a Bible Belt church (a hundred teenagers, solid conservative congregation, parents at every service, deacons, tithers, the cream of the crop). The questions were softballs: Do you read the Bible with your family more than once a month? Do you pray together more than once a month? Fewer than ten percent said yes.
That is not a piety problem. Those parents believed the right things. They worked separately, ran to ball games, and got home at nine. Paul gives us an objective standard for a well-managed household in 1 Timothy 3:4, and the honest answer is that the schedule made obedience impossible.
There are two ways out. One is to grind harder inside the same arrangement. More programs, more resolve, more guilt. The other is the eject button: sell it all, buy acreage somewhere, go trad. Adam refuses both. He is emphatic that he is not telling anyone to become a farmer. He is telling men to ask a different question: how do I take one step toward being with my family more instead of less, and what could we build together once we’re there?
His own story is not a template. It’s an argument that the doors are more open than men assume. No capital, nine kids, a cold email to a couple whose dog boarding business had gone dark during COVID. They owner-financed it. The Maddens were paying bills within a month and doubled revenue in two years, and now his oldest son and son-in-law run two facilities. Then a Christian couple down the road let them lease a piece of the family farm with mountain springs on it, so the kids could learn aquaculture and get some calluses. They started smoking trout for farmers markets. A chef in Park City called, got nominated for a James Beard award, and flew their fish to New York.
But the businesses are downstream. That’s the part men get backwards, and I pressed him on it in the episode, because I want what he has and I’m forty years old. You can buy the business. You can get the land. And your children will want nothing to do with any of it, because they don’t know you and they don’t like being around you. A family-integrated business is a tool. It buys you context. What you put into that context is the actual work. The work is worship, instruction, correction, a father who is present enough to be imitated.
Richard Baxter said you are not likely to see a general reformation in the church until you see reformation in families. That is still the order of operations. Most of us are several generations from where we should be, and Adam is clear-eyed that he started too late to hand off everything he wishes he could. His sons can keep building. That’s the point.
Adam joined me on Episode 204 of Full Proof Theology to walk through the book, the theology of household economy in Deuteronomy 6 and Ephesians 6, and what the first step looks like for a man in a dual-income home in an expensive city.
Listen to the episode here.
Watch the episode:
Pick up your copy of The Productive Household here.
You don’t have to quit your job tomorrow. You just need to open the Bible with your family tonight.