If you have not read the past two weeks’ posts entitled “All in the Family” and “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average,” then I encourage you to read those two posts before reading this week’s.
This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s exploration of the topic of returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. Last week I wrote about how “the Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children.” I made this case through exploring the topic in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in the practice of contemporary observant Jewish families. Today we will bring this closer to home for us as Christians by getting some historical and theological perspective on the appropriate role for parents in “multi-generational Christian faithfulness,” an emphasis that has been lost in the lives of many Western Christians in recent history.
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes to his protégé Timothy, “I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” Paul doesn’t take credit for building up Timothy in the faith; it was Timothy’s family who deserved the credit. Surely the early Christian worshiping community that Lois and Eunice were a part of played an important role in raising up young Timmy in the faith, but ultimately it was his family who fulfilled their responsibility to him. Part of a Christian parent’s responsibility is to involve their children in the life and worship of the local congregation, but that is only part of the responsibility. The (usually once a week) interaction between the children and the congregation should be seen as a necessary supplement to what is already going on at home. Sunday morning should be the cherry on top, not the whole dessert.
The 4th century pastor John Chrysostom once preached: “The family…is a cornerstone of faith, a household church and a foreshadowing of the eternal kingdom.” He also writes, “Raise up an athlete for Christ and teach him [or her] that, though he [or she] is living in the world, he [or she] is to be reverent from earliest youth.” For John Chrysostom, as for the Apostle Paul before him, the phrase “athlete for Christ” doesn’t have anything to do with a curveball. It is a metaphor for the life of faith. Like athletics, faith takes training; it doesn’t just happen. The training comes from the parents with additional help from the local congregation. About faith training, Dr. Voddie Baucham goes so far as to say, “If [Christian] parents have raised their children to be great doctors, lawyers, athletes, or musicians, but have not trained them to honor and obey God, they have failed.” Again, while I disagree with Dr. Baucham on many things, the centrality of family in the faith development of children is not one of them. After years of work in youth and children’s ministries, I believe that this is very counter to the contemporary culture of parenting, even amongst Christian parents. I know a lot of Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became good successful citizens. I know fewer Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became faithful mature Christians.
Along the same vein, the 16th Century reformer Martin Luther wasn’t all that concerned about experiencing the church as being a big family. He was actually more concerned about experiencing the family as a little church. He writes, “Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel. In short, there is no greater or nobler authority on earth than that of the parents over their children, for this authority is both spiritual and temporal.” Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn expands on Luther’s emphasis on family by claiming that “Christianity is no longer the dominant culture in the United States. If we want our children to grow up with Christian convictions, capacities, and choices, we must much more deliberately nurture the faith and its concomitant lifestyle.” Am I making my point? Biblically and historically it is the parents’ responsibility to pass the faith on to their kids, not the church’s. The church has a great role in this, but it is a supporting role, not the lead role.
Whenever we stand up in the sanctuary in front of the gathered covenant community of faith to have our children baptized, we, as parents, are asked a few questions. One of the questions that I, as the pastor, ask the parents is this: “Do you promise, through prayer and example, to support and encourage [your child] to be a faithful Christian?” Every parent who has their child baptized in a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, as well as in many other denominations, has stood in front of the congregation and God and promised, not "considered" but promised, covenanted with God and the church, to raise their children up to be faithful Christians. After the parents make that promise, I ask the congregation a similar question: “Do you, as members of the church of Jesus Christ, promise to guide and nurture [this child] by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging [her/him] to know and follow Christ and to be a faithful member of his church?” We’re all in this together!—the parents, the local congregation, and the Church universal. But again, the parents take the lead role, the congregation is the supporting cast.
As a child, I attended church every Sunday. Every Sunday I was in Sunday school and every Sunday I was in worship at Yeamans Park Presbyterian Church. My parents were very adamant about the importance of our participation in the life of the church on Sunday morning. However, there was a very significant disconnect in our family—-nothing was ever said about the Christian faith except for on Sunday mornings and a brief table grace each night. We went to church (endured it is more accurate) but we weren’t being trained in the Christian faith at home. Church was just some place we went to do something we were supposed to do (the definition of empty religious ritual). It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized there was a different way.
As many of you know, just before my seventeenth birthday, I moved in with my best friend’s family. His parents were the volunteer youth sponsors at the small Southern Baptist Church in town. It took some adjustment but I started to have fun in youth group and eventually came to claim my own faith in Jesus Christ instead of just going through the motions. But it wasn’t the instruction I was getting at the church that made the real difference. Remember, I’d been getting weekly instruction at church my whole life. It was the instruction that I was now getting at home that made the difference. My friend’s parents modeled Christian faith every single day. Often times, through a partially opened door, I would see one or both of my friend’s parents praying or reading the Bible. “The Lord” came up in conversation all the time. Every conversation we had took place within a Christian worldview. It wasn’t close-minded; it was faithful. Prayer wasn’t just something we did before we devoured our supper. Discipleship in Jesus was a way of life in the home. The ministry of the local church supplemented that, but the church didn’t carry the brunt of the weight in our Christian upbringing.
For example, there were a few of us among the church’s youth who were light years ahead of the others in the maturity of our Christian faith. Even I, after just months of active involvement, found myself on a different level of discussion than many of the other kids. I’m not bragging, just stating an easily observable fact. How could this be? After all, we were all smart kids who attended the same public high school, the same Sunday school class, the same worship service, the same youth fellowship gathering, and the same summer camp. So what was the only difference between the kids who seemed to “get it” and the kids who didn’t? Those who “got it” were getting instruction from their parents at home and those who didn't weren't. That’s the only difference. Presbyterian pastor and youth ministry author Mark Devries writes, “Parents play a role second only to that of the Holy Spirit in building the spiritual foundation of their children’s lives.” He goes on to remember his own training, “In my childhood, my faith was formed as much around the dinner table as it was in the pew.”
In his book Family Based Youth Ministry Mark Devries also discusses a large study about the role of parents in multi-generational Christian faithfulness. He writes, “The Search Institute’s National Study of Protestant Congregations indicated that the first predictor of adolescent faith maturity was the level of ‘family religiousness.’ The particular family experiences most tied to greater faith maturity were the frequency with which an adolescent talked with mother and father about faith, the frequency of family devotions and the frequency with which parents and children together were involved in efforts, formal or informal, to help other people. As might be expected, the Search study’s first recommendation for change in Christian education was to ‘equip mothers and fathers to play a more active role in the religious education of their children, by means of conversation, family devotions and family helping projects.”
It is my personal opinion that if our kids are only getting Christian training in Sunday school, fifteen minutes of Sunday worship, and then in Junior Church, then we are failing as Christian parents and not fulfilling the promise we made at their baptism. Please don’t get me wrong, I love my parents dearly, but I have seen the negative result of the disconnect between Sunday mornings and the rest of the week. I have seen that it generally produces adults who are either a nominal Christian with little involvement in the church or who are not even Christian at all. Because I have seen the results of this way of raising kids hundreds of times in my short ministry career (as well as my own family), I have chosen a different path in raising Wyatt and Josselyn. The path that I am leading my family in is a path closer to that of my best friend’s parents, but actually I am committed to being even more intentional about it than they were. In other words, I’m building upon their faithful example.
Next week we will explore: “What is Family Worship and Why Should We be Doing it in Our Home?” In the weeks following I will write about resources for family worship, about the ways that a local congregation has often inappropriately taken the lead in raising Christian kids instead of a supporting role, and I will eventually write about why I wholeheartedly believe that it is paramount to “multi-generational Christian faithfulness” that children (at least children of school age) participate fully in the main Sunday morning worship gathering of the congregation instead of leaving the sanctuary after only a portion of the service.
I hope everyone who had kids at the Christmas Eve service took home the Story of Jesus book that had been provided by Jennifer Shaw and actually took the ten minutes to read it as a family on Christmas day. I encourage you to make a point to pray with your family today, not just over your food but for other areas of life as well. Sing songs of praise to God today. Read the Scriptures together today. Take the time you were gathering for the Advent stickers and keep on doing something worshipful during that time. Not sure of the best way to do this? We’ll get into that next week.
Have a wonderful Christmas week and enjoy the snow! I’m headed home to pull my kids around on the new sled that Santa brought them yesterday.
Grace and Peace,
Everett
