For generations, the Church in Africa has spoken confidently about marriage and family life. We have preached about choosing a godly spouse, sexual purity, marital faithfulness, raising children in the fear of God, and preserving the sanctity of marriage.
These teachings remain important. But the questions confronting Christian families are changing.
What should a Christian couple do when, after years of praying for a child, a doctor recommends in vitro fertilisation (IVF)? How should believers respond when IVF involves the use of donated sperm or eggs? What position should the Church take on surrogacy? And how should Christians view embryos created in a laboratory but never implanted?
What should a woman do when the marriage everyone expects her to preserve has become a place of violence and fear? What should a pastor say to a husband who is being abused but fears that no one will believe him? How should the Church respond when a marriage has already ended in divorce? And what happens when issues of fertility, genetics, technology, law and Christian doctrine converge in the same pastor’s office?
These are no longer distant questions from Europe or North America. They are increasingly African questions. They are sitting quietly in our churches.
Silence Is Also An Answer
One of the convictions that led me to write An Epistle to the African Church: Marriage, Abuse, Surrogacy, Divorce, and the Future of Christian Family Ethics is simple: when the Church does not speak thoughtfully about difficult questions, Christians do not stop facing them. They simply look elsewhere for answers. They turn to social media. They turn to popular culture. They turn to friends. They turn to lawyers and medical professionals. At times, believers make significant decisions with far-reaching consequences before seeking the counsel of their pastors. This is why silence cannot be our strategy.
The Church does not need to have a simplistic answer to every complicated human situation. But it must create spaces where difficult questions can be discussed faithfully, compassionately and intelligently. The gospel is not threatened by difficult questions.
Technology Has Entered The Christian Home
Some of the most challenging questions now arise from technology.
Medicine can do things that previous generations could barely imagine. A child can be conceived outside the human body. An embryo can be frozen for years. A woman can carry a child to whom she has no genetic relationship. A child may be conceived using the genetic material of people who will never function as his or her parents.
The fact that something is technologically possible, however, does not automatically make it morally uncomplicated.
Christians must therefore learn to ask a deeper question: not merely, “Can we do this?” but also, “Should we do this, and what does faithfulness to Christ require of us?”
That question does not demand hostility toward science. Medical science has relieved enormous human suffering, and Christians should be grateful for physicians, researchers and technologies that preserve life.
But technology is a tool. It cannot determine the meaning of marriage, parenthood, human dignity or the value of a child.
Those are moral questions. And moral questions require moral formation.
Infertility Requires More Than A Theological Argument
The discussion becomes even more difficult because behind reproductive technology there are often real people carrying real pain. Anyone who has walked with a couple struggling with infertility knows that this is not merely an academic debate.
There may be years of disappointment behind the smiles people see on Sunday morning. There may be medical appointments, unsuccessful procedures, financial pressure, questions directed disproportionately at the woman, and prayers that appear unanswered.
Our first response to such couples must therefore not be suspicion or condemnation; it must be compassion, because Jesus never treated suffering people as theological problems to be solved. He encountered them as people.
That same spirit should shape Christian conversations about infertility and assisted reproduction. We can maintain serious biblical convictions while recognising the grief and vulnerability of the people sitting before us.
Truth without compassion can wound. Compassion without truth can mislead. The Church needs both.
We Must Also Talk Honestly About Abuse
The same principle applies to marriage itself. Christians rightly uphold marriage as a sacred covenant. Therefore, Jesus’ teaching on marriage should never be reduced to the disposable view of relationships that is becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary culture.
But defending marriage must never mean defending violence. A Christian understanding of marital permanence cannot become a reason for keeping someone indefinitely in physical danger. We must be able to say clearly that abuse violates the covenant it claims to inhabit.
Pastors and Christian leaders therefore need more than the language of “pray about it” when confronted with serious abuse. Prayer is indispensable, but prayer does not prevent us from acting wisely, protecting the vulnerable, involving appropriate authorities where necessary, and helping people reach safety. The sanctity of marriage must never be used to sanctify cruelty.
When the Church protects the vulnerable, it is not weakening marriage. It is defending the very dignity, love and responsibility that Christian marriage is supposed to represent.
The Church Must Prepare Before The Crisis Arrives
Too often our ethical reflection begins after a crisis has entered the pastor’s office. By then, decisions may already have been made. The better approach is formation.
Our young adults should hear serious Christian teaching about marriage before they marry. Couples should be able to discuss infertility before they face it. Pastors should receive training that prepares them to respond to domestic abuse.
Christian health professionals, theologians, counsellors, lawyers and scientists should be brought into conversation rather than working in separate worlds. Likewise, our churches should not shy away from discussing emerging technologies simply because the Bible does not explicitly mention IVF, embryo freezing, or gestational surrogacy.
Scripture does not need to name every modern technology in order to give us principles by which we can evaluate it.
The Christian tradition gives us a rich vocabulary: human dignity, covenant, stewardship, justice, love, sacrifice, protection of the vulnerable, the meaning of the body, and the sacred responsibility attached to bringing children into the world. Our task is to bring these enduring truths into conversation with new realities.
An Unleashed Church Must Enter Difficult Conversations
The Church of Pentecost’s call for the Church to be unleashed to transform society through the Gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit carries important implications for the family.
Transformation cannot stop at the doors of the church building. It must extend into our marriages and homes. It must reach fertility clinics and counselling rooms, shaping conversations about emerging technologies and their impact on human life. It must bring hope and guidance to families experiencing violence, infertility, separation, and grief. It must also equip Christian professionals to think and act faithfully in the development of technologies and the delivery of services.
Possessing the nations must also mean bringing the values and principles of God’s Kingdom into the difficult moral questions shaping ordinary human lives. This will require courage.
Some conversations will make us uncomfortable. Some will force us to revisit assumptions we have inherited. Others will reveal that issues we once considered simple become far more complicated when we encounter the people actually living through them.
But discomfort is not a reason for silence. The Church has never been called merely to answer the questions of yesterday. Every generation must faithfully apply the unchanging gospel to the questions appearing in its own time. Our generation is confronting extraordinary changes in marriage, reproduction, technology and family life.
Conclusion
The questions have changed, but the gospel has not. The challenge before us is whether the Church will be ready to bring its wisdom, compassion, and courage to these conversations. I believe it must.
About the Author
Dr Enoch Ofosu is the author of An Epistle to the African Church: Marriage, Abuse, Surrogacy, Divorce, and the Future of Christian Family Ethics, published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Written by Dr Enoch Ofosu
