Family Worship
Andy Beard
Luke 5:1-11 Family Worship Ideas

Ancient Wisdom: Meaningless, but free?

In today's slightly longer video we take a quick break from the text of Ecclesiastes to wrestle with 2 other live options that are on the table when it comes to the question of the meaning - or rather the meaninglessness - of life. One is to lean into it, believing that meaninglessness give us freedom. The other is to create our own meaning. Do either of these work? Do they really give us an alternative to what Solomon teaches in Ecclesiastes?

Bite size guide to parenting (vi): Impressive Parenting

At the risk of stating the obvious, we can’t teach our children about the LORD, without, well, teaching them. We’ve seen how our whole vision and philosophy of parenting is to capture and communicate the reality of what it means to walk with Him. But alongside that total culture of our family life, we must teach - constantly, consistently, consciously and conscientiously. Everything else in our family life should reinforce and lend credibility to what we teach, but nothing else we do can replace it.

Cotton Mather, a preacher of a preivous generation (1663-1728) wrote that: ‘Above all and before all, it is the knowledge of the Christian religion that parents must teach their children.  The knowledge of other things, though it may be ever so desirable and advantageous for them, our children may arrive at eternal happiness without, but the knowledge of godly doctrine and the words of our Lord Jesus Christ is of a million times more necessary for them’. 

In contemporary parlance: Who cares if they know how to make a million by the time they are 40, if they don’t walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.  There is no end of broken hearted parents who will tell you that their joy at their children’s career or educational, or sporting success is tragically tempered by the fact that those children aren’t walking with the Lord. We’ll come back to this in a future post.

The foundational text for us to reflect on is found in Deuteronomy Ch.6. We’ll focus on vv.6-9 & 20-25:

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates…

In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?’ tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders – great and terrible – on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that he promised on oath to our ancestors. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.’

It’s a beautiful image in which the atmosphere of a home is saturated with a didactic culture, and a constant dialogue. The Lord has given these children into our care, on trust, and is careful to explain at this key moment in the history of the Church how He wants us to bring them up. The words are particulaly poignant when we realise the context in which they are spoken.

Textually, the immediate context is the laying out of the 10 Commandments (Dt.5); and perhaps even more importantly it comes directly after the ‘Greatest Commandment’ (Dt.6:4-5, Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength).

Historically, the Church is on the threshold of one of the most profound spiritual challenges they have yet to face, as they prepare to cross the Jordan into a spiritually desolate and dangerous land. They are about to step into an arena in which they will face the perennial temptation to leave the spiritual legacy of their parents. Other spirtiualities, others ways of living will be offered and pressed upon them. What then is the Lord’s strategy to ensure they will not lose their faith… to ensure the future strength of the Church? Parents are to impress the commands of the Lord on their children.

Actually, we missed a step. The first thing is for parents to walk with integrity before the Lord themselves. Those commands are to be on our own hearts first of all, and only then are we to impress them on our children. We cannot take our children where we are not prepared to walk ourselves. It is worth noting that the decisin we make here will affect three generations of our family (See Deut.6:2). I am being given the opportunity to forge a spiritaul legacy that will affect not only my children, but also any grandchildren.

It is not overstating the point to say that we are standing on the brink of the single most significant responsiblity a parent has to their children.  Indeed, when the Apostle Paul wants to reduce the essence of parenting to a single sentence, he does so by saying: ‘…do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord’ (Eph.6:4).

If you have children, parenting is among the most significant areas of mininstry you have. This is worth remembering in an age and a society that systemically undermines the role and value of parents and of parenting. And in the context of this most significant minsitry, the ‘impressing’ of the ways of the Lord on our children is the most significant aspect. If you have children, this is what you are called to. The Bible recognises no other kind of Christian parent than one who impresses the commands of God on their children. It is so liberating to be able to strip away so many of the other pressures and demands we feel we are under as parents to focus on this most critical of priorities that we are given by God. We stand on holy ground!

We’ll revisit this in future posts, but don’t forget that there is a series of articles on the practicalities of how to do this on the MIE website:

https://www.mie.org.uk/teaching-children

The articles are in reverse order, so the first in the series is at the bottom of the page!

a great video from Christian Institute...

How Christianity changed the world… well worth 20 minutes of your time as Sharon James introduces the main ideas in her latest book eploring not just how Christianity has left a great legacy for our culture, but also how we can build on that in our day. When many are suggesting that Christianity is a spent force, or worse, an oppressive force, in our society it’s worth being aware of our history… Sharon’s point is that Freedom, Religious liberty, Justice, Healthcare, Education, the sanctity of life, Women’s Rights, the emancipation of slaves, the environment, even animal welfare have all been transformed for the better by Christianity. She draws attentnion to Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, Butler – to name but a few – who were among the men and women who, driven by their deep Christian faith have had a hand in transforming the world.

Bite sized guide to parenting (v)

We left a question hanging in our last article on parenting. It was about hypocrisy. As we train our children to be and to behave in a certain way, how can we guard against cultivating Pharisaism, where people do the ‘right’ thing, but for the wrong reason. Linking hypocrisy to Pharisees is something we see Jesus do (Matt.6:1-2, 5, 16; 23:3, 13f, ‘Woe to you, Teacher of the Law and Pharisees, you hypocrites…). So clearly this is a live threat, and real and present danger. How do we guard against it as we seek to embody a Christian view of parenting?

First, let’s take a step back from the immediate question of parenting and interrogate the idea that it is wrong to teach people to be and to behave in certain ways, irrespective of how they feel. This is a cultural virtue (and conversely, hypocrisy - which we understand to mean not being true to who we are - is a cultural vice), and it is so easy to take this on board uncritically, and so to adopt this as an aspiration for our children. The important thing to teach our children, we think, is to be yourself… right? In fact, the idea is fairly preposterous, and it is in some ways downright dangerous - at least when understood in this way. Let’s analyse the idea.

Our culture tends to think that people are at their best when they are being true to themselves. This means that there is total identity between what is going on inside someone and what is going on on the outside. It is good to be ‘authentic’. We praise those who are without duplicity: ‘What you see is what you get’. A corollary to this is that ‘spontaneity’ is the highest expression of who we are, and that we are really at our best and are being most honest when what we do wells up from within us without us having pre-thought or prepared it (with devestating implications for how we engage with Christian worship, but that is for another series!).

Now, obviously there is a destructive and manipulative sense in which we can deliberately decieve people about who we are for various forms of personal gain. Let’s all recognise that is not a good thing (and this is likely the hypocrisy that Jesus pillories in the Pharisees, Matt.6:1). But that aside. To what extent should we buy into our culture’s sense of virtue at this point. Does the Bible teach that this is the best way, the most authentic way, to be human? The answer isn’t necessarily as obvious as we’d think. Perhaps the more like Jesus we are, the more we would want authenticity in this sense. If what is going on in my heart is good, then by all means, let’s ensure that what goes on on the outside matches with what is going on on the inside. If the Law is written on our hearts (Dt.6:6, see also Matt.12:35 etc.), if it is shaping and defining our interior life, then by all means let us live ‘spontaneously’.

But that’s a big ‘if’. And for most of us, we are only too aware of how unlike Jesus we are (and how unlike Jesus our kids are!!). In which case, how do we live? If we are honest with ourselves, and if we pay any attention to our own internal dialogue, then I’d be quietly confident that the one thing we don’t want to do is to ‘be ourselves’. In fact, the Bible teaches us that when we allow our sinful nature to shape us and our behaviour, that is when we are at our least human.

Christ-like humanity is something that we have to learn, and at times obedience to His teaching and example is something that we have to pursue in spite of how we ‘feel’, and what we are like on the inside. There are times when our desire to act externally in a way that is true to what is going on internally would fall firmly within the category of temptation! And to capitulate to it would be sin (jas.1:14-15). So much for our culture’s sense of virtue and vice. As an ethic is turns out to be dangerously inadequate. in this sense, faithfulness rather than spontaneity is a truer goal.

The reality is that we are far more complex as human beings, and even more so now that we are ‘born again’. We have two ‘natures’ within us: our old Adamic nature, often called ‘the flesh’ in the Bible; and our new Spirit-ual nature which we have by virtue being in Christ. Authenticity for a Christian is about learning to put to death our sinful humanity, and to live instead by the Spirit (see e.g. Rom.8:5-13; Gal.5:13-26 etc). These two natures battle for supremacy, and although we are confident as to what the outcome will be in the end, along the way the reality can seem a lot more ambiguous at times. The point is that it isn’t as simple as being true to yourself. For us, the critical question is: Which ‘self’ will we be true to? That is a battle that we must fight at every level of our being.

And it is a battle that we must teach our children to fight at every level of thier being. We don’t want to breed Pharisees / hypocrites; but we do want to ‘bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord’ (Eph.6:4). We do want to teach them how to make sense of their internal conflict, and how to fight for Christlikeness. We do want to teach them how to put to death their sinful nature, and to know the freedom of living by the Spirit. We do want to give them such a compellig vision of Christ and the life He is calling them to live that all else is eclipsed by the beauty of holiness. We want to teach our children to be worshippers first and foremost. To be so captured by His glory that they want to fight to be like Him. We want them to have such a deep experience and understanding of His grace that it ‘teaches them to say No to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age … who are eager to do waht is good’ (Titus 2:12-14). That’s a much greater ambition than teaching our children to be true to themselves. It is teaching them rather to be true to who they are in Christ.

When we stop and think about it, in spite of the rhetoric, we don’t want our children to be true to themselves… and to be honest, we’re not always thinking clearly enough to want them to be true to Christ. Too often we settle for the much more superficial (and easily managed and measured) goal of good behaviour.  What we actaully (think we) want is well behaved children.  The plaintive cry of many a hassled parent is ‘Why can’t you just behave yourselves!’. But hopefully we are beginning to see how superficial, and dangerous that could be - after all, Pharisees are immaculately well behaved, but their heart is untouched by the beauty of His holiness.  Pharisees know how to behave, but not how to love, or how to worship.  Our concerns must be deeper than behaviour as an end in itself. In this our culture’s concern for resonance between heart and bahviour does have something to recomment it. We desire the hearts of our children to be turned to Christ.  A heart captured for Jesus is the key to Christ-like behaviour.  And that is a much deeper vision for the children and young people in our midst.

Our families and our Church must be communities of redemptive grace in which children hear the call to faithful discipleship.  Like their parents, children and young people need to be encountered by their God and redeemed through the work of Christ and by the Holy Spirit.   As parents we cannot be content with merely managing and controlling behaviour.  We do have responsibilities here, but if we settle for that there won’t be lasting change, and as soon as our children move beyond the sphere of our influence (and so our structures of control), there will be nothing to restrain them any longer.  As parents we must parent the heart and not (just) their behaviour. 

Jesus captured this powerfully in the image of fruit-bearing tree in Luke 6: 43-45, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.  Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. ...  A good person brings good things out of the good stored up in their heart, and an evil person brings evil things out of the evil stored up in their heart.

Behind every behaviour there are attitudes and desires of the heart.  THis is the irony - we always act ‘authentically’.  What that means is that lasting change in behaviour always comes through a change of heart.  Authority and discipline are needed (however they articulate themselves in your family) but always in the context of getting at the issues of the heart.  The danger lies in the fact that managing behaviour (often through threat, intimidation or manipulation) achieves more immediate results.  It’s tempting, because we want lasting change to be instant.  But it isn’t – it will be a process for them just as it is for us. It will be a growth in their understanding of themselves and in their understanding of God (on which more in coming articles).  The process of touching the heart is a spiritual thing.  As parents we have to recognise that it is fundamentally beyond our reach.  It is the work of the Holy Spirit.  That said, we do have the responsibility to set up what Paul Tripp calls ‘a transaction with God’ as part of our culture of discipline in the family.  He suggests five questions that can structure a conversation that has the potential to touch the heart.

1.       What happened?

The aim to help a child simply recall the events they have been a part of.  Tripp suggests we don’t worry too much about the inevitable bias there will be in the account – after all, we all have a perspective.

2.       What were you thinking and feeling as it was happening?

We want the child / young person to recognise that they were not passive, but that they interacted with, and formulated their response to the situation as it developed. 

3.       What did you do in response to the situation?

Help the child / young person to recognise that our words and behaviour come from the heart (what we thought and felt about the situation).   Our behaviour is not formed by the situation, but by our hearts response to that situation. 

4.       What were you seeking to accomplish by doing what you did?

This helps to identify motives, goals, purpose, desires…  what is really driving us.

5.       What was the result?

Help the child / young person to recognise the consequences of their behaviour, including the fact that they are now in trouble with their parents!

 

The aim is to help children and young people to connect their behaviour with their heart, not with the external circumstances of their situation.  Obviously the sophistication and self-awareness develops over the years.  But as we prayerfully embark on this process again and again, we are looking to compare and contrast with the Bible’s teaching about what we should think and feel and how we should act by virtue of who we are in Christ.  In this we are teaching our children / young people the art of repentance and of being conformed to the image of Christ.  We are not teaching them to simply behave well; nor are we teaching them to be uncritically ‘true to themselves’. In these questions, we are teaching them to be faithful to Christ, and in so doing to be transformed by Him so that their new nature in Him becomes increasingly dominant in shaping their thoughts and words and deeds.

Actually, these are pretty good questions to work on for ourselves as adults.  As we do, we find we are modelling the process for our children through our own commitment to growing in Christ, and we will find we are ‘shepherding them with integrity of heart’ (Ps.78:72).

Bite sized guide to parenting (iv)

We’re working with the idea that our vision of God shapes our vision for parenting. As parents, God design is that we we ‘model’ Him to our children so that as they learn to relate to us, they learn to relate to God; and as they grow into their own maturing relationship with God, they are given a ‘head-start’ by their experience of their parents (i.e. us). Let’s continue to see how that works out in practise. But as we do so, we need to recognise that we are working these things out in the context of a society that is structured in a way that can often undermine the relationships within a nuclear family, and so we are likely to feel some tension. Many (though not all) families have found the restrictions we are living with due to ‘Lockdown’ quite stressful to negotiate - in part because we are simply not used to such a focus on family life. We are used to being out of the house for long periods of the day - at work, at school, at after school clubs, pursuing other interests. We are used to having ‘me-time’ and chunks of the day when we aren’t in each other’s company. For us, that is ‘normal’, and the fact those patterns of life have been so disrupted for so long, has thrust us into situations we aren’t practised in.

Functionally, there is also the danger that - because of the above - we ‘implicitly delegate’ aspects of parenting to agencies outside of the home, which means that we are in unfamliar territory when our children are at home for such a sustained period of time. It isn’t uncommon for teachers (for example) to raise concerns about implicit assumptions that they are responsbile for chidlren’s charcter and patterns of behaviour as well as for their education. These are intricate questions that require careful consideratoin, but if we see teachers as having greater authority and responsibility to shape a child’s character then the parents, we may well find we have lost balance somewhere.

So, we’re going to spend a couple of posts looking at the vexed question of training and discipline, before we turn to the question of the devotional life of the family - although by now we should be anticipating that these are two sides of the same coin! How we structure famliy life will either resonate with, or create dissonance with, what we are teaching our children about what it means to be in relationship with Jesus.

We looked briefly last time at the question of whether we should be intentional and proactive in training our children at all. As we saw, there are several popular models of parenting which suggest we shouldn’t be. And we’ve seen why we must demur. But even then the questions come thick and fast: How? What for? How do we make sure we aren’t just instilling hypocritical patterns of behaviour? How does grace fit in? Many of the details will need to be worked out within the context of a family home, but let’s at least see if we can nail down some principles.

At the risk of sounding repititious, we base our model of training and disicpline on the model of training and discipline we see modelled by God in the Scriptures. This should immediately allay any fears of instilling a ‘victorian’ vision of discipline, or of bringing anything that is harsh, abusive or oppressive into the lives of our family. Discipline is a means to growth and freedom. Occasionally you see or hear of situations where the Bible has been distorted and manipulated into saying something it doesn’t, and used as a foil for severity, cruelty, brutality, and abuse. I would hope it goes without saying that this is as far from the Bible’s teaching as it is possible to envisage.

And let’s deal with some other misconceptions while we’re at it. Discipline is not just about getting our kids to do what we want. We should be anticipating that this isn’t going to be an arbitrary, or random, still less a capricious thing. Neither should it be considered as an entirely negative thing. Training and disicpline will have built into it not merely sanction, but also structures that recognise and reward growth and maturity, and that celebrate and encourage attitudes and behaviour that resonate with God’s heart for His children.

If we set the question in the context of passages such as Heb.12:4-13, we see the question come into focus in a much richer context. God is a loving Father who caringly and consistently disciplines His children, so that they can experience deeper intimacy with Him, and greater freedom from that which proves destructive in life. It might be worth highlighting the fact that so many Christians seem to struggle to reconcile love and discipline in their relationship with God, and the spiritual angst this often gives rise to. We have a chance to help our children navigate this well, and to understand more intuitively that discipline is in fact the expression of love, not something in tension with it (Prov.13:24, ‘…the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them’). It is in fact a blessing to be lovingly trained to live well (Ps.94:12). In the Bible, failure to take this seriously is seen as neglect, and we are warned is likely to cause problems later in life (not to mention make life more difficult in the family here and now!). In short, we are teaching our children how to be loved. The goal of our discipline is to to teach our children how to live under their heavenly Father’s loving authority; it is to prepare them to relate to a God who will discipline them… 

This has two immedaite implications:

First, I am not at liberty to decide what to discipline over. This isn’t about a parent getting to turn themselves into an idol, shaping their world as they like. Still less is it a selfish vanity project, the object of which is that I become the envy of other parents because of how ‘well-behaved’ my chidren are. It isn’t a power-trip. And it isn’t about creating an environment where I get to do more of what I want, or where I get to shape the dynamics of family life in favour of my own comfort or interests. Quite the opposite. Building this into famliy life is often more costly for parents. There are much easier ways to parent! Underpinning all this is an assumption that we have a clear grasp on the the Bibles teaching about issues like wisdom and righteousness, holiness and the dynamics of discipleship. We need to ensure that we are consistently building discipline around the Bible’s standards and concerns. We don’t get to sit back and think: What kind of kids do I / we want? The question is: What kind of kids does the Lord want? Though obviously, ideally the two overlap, and we want the kind of kids the Lord wants; and the things God disciplines His children about shape and define the things we discipline our kids about. If we develop a different set of priorities then not only is that sinful parenting, but we are also storing up confusion for our children later in their own spiritual lives.

Here’s an example: imagine the not uncommon scenario of two children bickering over a toy. Equally uncommon is the instinctive reaction many parents assume to be legitimate: Who had it first? Whilst this gives us an easy and straight line through the presenting issues, there is (in light of our meditations) an obvious question: Where in the Bible does it say that whoever ‘had it first’ is absovled of responsiblity? … or that whoever had it first has a more legitimate claim? just posing those two questions exposes how far we may be operating outside Biblical standards and ethics. There are in fact a matrix of issues at play here that raise opportunities to teach and train in questions of sharing, generosity, covetousness, selfishness. These are exposed as we reflect on parenting from a Biblical perspective, (a perspective which includes celebration and affirmation, correction and disicpline, however that looks in your home), and things begin to look very different to commonly received wisdom.

And they look a lot more exhausting. Which is itself part of the issue.

Secondly, my responsbility as a parent is to teach my children to respond well to loving, considered, appropriate correction and discipline, so that they will learn how to relate well to their Heavenly Father (e.g. remember our previous post’s hesitations about allowing ‘delayed’, or resentful and reluctant obedience). This takes us into the heart of the life of the Trinity, and gives us a glimpse of how deep the vision of ‘parent’ goes. One of the most beautiful insights into the life of God is the Son’s perfect trust and joyful submission to the will and wisdom of His Father. This is something we want to grow in ourselves, and as we do so, we will model this to our children; as well as train and encourage them in their own growth in Christlikeness. This also frames the question of obedience as a spiritual issue.

I cannot separate the question of my own being disciplined (and my response to that) from that of my disciplining my children (and their response to that). There needs to be a resonance between these two dynamics. This is both a powerful teaching tool and a resource. Not only are we modelling something for our children, and in so doing idenitfying with them (we - parent and child - are both under authority); not only are we providing a framework in which our children can understand their experiences of discipline; but it also gives us tremendous insight into their experience of discipline, and their struggles with it. Why do they struggle to respond well to obedience? For the same reasons I do. This equips us to think through how we shape and train our children far more effectively.

There is one outstanding question in all this… how can we be sure we aren’t breeding hypocrites? It’s an interesting question that reveals as much about our understanding of authentic humanity as it does our concerns for integrity. We’ll look at it in our next post.

Bite sized guide to parenting (iii)

We saw last time that one of the deepst insights the Bible offers about what it means to be a parent is the modelling of God to our children.  I suggested this solves a huge number of parenting-related dilemmas at a stroke. It helps us to evaluate any number of parenting theories that are proposed and to chart a secure course in the midst of our cutlure’s confusion, our own sinful tendencies and our reactions to our own experiences of being parented.

At a crude level, it challenges behaviours such as simply giving into our children when they nag, or cry (or worse… and why do they do it public!?? Maybe because they know it works?). Or training our children in ‘delayed obedience’. Sometimes you see parents - OK sometimes we - tell their children to do something, and then start counting. Is this how we want our children to learn how to relate to God? When you articulate it, you begin to see how unhelpful it will be for them as they grow up: ‘When God tells you to do something, it’s OK not to do it first time and straight away… or to only do it reluctantly, or resentfully. It’s OK to carry on doing what you were doing for a while longer, and only eventually (grudgingly?) to obey Him’. Wouldn’t it be much better, and much more in line with the Bible’s vision for your role as a parent to teach your children a joyful and immediate obedience that is born out of trust and delight in our children’s relationship with us? Not only will that dramatically affect our experince of parenting, but it will teach our children how to joyfully respond to the commands and teaching of their God.

Another example of how reflecting on the Bible’s vision for parenting as preparation for a child’s own relationship with God can help is the way it highlights the dangers of warning chldren about consequences of their behaviour and then not following through. We’ve all heard parents (and been parents!) who endlessly list off an increasingly severe series of potential repercussions, when everyone, including the child, knows that none of them will be acted upon. Again, the question comes into sharp focus when we consider how well this would prepare our children to make sense of their relationship with their God. Will they experince God as someone who gives empty warnings as to the consequence of behaviour? Does that resonate well with the Bible’s teaching? …or our own experience? What will our children’s reaction be when they discover that God is not like us (or better: we are not like God)?

It also gives the lie, for example, to pretty much any version of ‘child-centred parenting’. As this is so prevalent, it is worth a slightly more sustained consideration. Child-centred parenting (as a conscious model of parenting) has been around in one form or another for about a century, and began life as a reaction to what was perceived as overly-authoritarian and controlling models of parenting (stereotypical ‘Victorian’ style parenting). It is rooted in the idea that parents had no inherent, or even legitimate, authority over their children, and so not intrinsic right to set famliy rules, make family decisions, or establish expectations on children’s behaviour and porcess of maturing. Already we can see how dissonant this would be with the Bible’s mandate for loving and protective authority.

As a model of parenting it has proven somewhat naive in its vision of children as self-directing, moral and empathetic bundles of initiative. Whilst not calling into question a parent’s love for their child(ren), we can suggest that love can be misdirected, misinformed and lacking in discernment. As one psychologist recently explained: ‘It is true that children act out of curiosity, but without parental guidance, children cannot learn to go beyond their comfort zones and learn about things that do not interest them. It is true that children need loving parents who are sensitive to their emotions, but they also need adults who teach them how to cope with hardship, struggle and failure. And it is true that children have rights, but these rights do not make them equal to adults’ (Dr. M.Mascolo).

Children do not come into the world mature and complete. Of course they need love and nurture, they need empathy and compassion, praise and support. And of course they also need training and instruction, investment and structure, discipline and challenge. Mascolo goes on: ‘Child-centered parenting runs the risk of producing entitled, narcissistic children who lack the capacity to persevere and cope with difficulty’.

Knowing what we do about the Bible’s teaching, we can understand why. When we parent in a ‘child-centred’ way we are teaching our children to relate to God in a pattern that runs coutner to reality. It can be deeply liberating for a parent to realise that they can parent in a way that is profoundly sensitive to their child, without having to abdicate what they instinctively know to be necessary in their role. In the same way as God relates to us in a way that perfectly integrates love and authority, discipline and compassion, support and direction, so parents can aspire for a vision of their role that reflects this faithfully into the lives and experiences of their children. Children need this full spectrum of God-like relating to them if they are to grow into the men and women God is calling them to be. Until they learn how to stand themselves in godliness, they need parents who will put the scaffolding around them to support them as they grow.

These are difficult (and controversial) areas to think through as Christians. But think them through we must if we are to pick our way through the maze of competing pressures and ideas that are offered to us day by day.

Bite sized guide to parenting (ii)

OK, so let’s start with the most basic question of all:  What is a parent?

My son, keep your father’s command and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. Bind them always on your heart; fasten them around your neck. When you walk, they will guide you; when you sleep, they will watch over you; when you awake, they will speak to you. For this command is a lamp, this teaching is a light, and correction and instruction are the way to life…

Prov.6:20-23

As you read a passage like Prov.6, you might be struck at the kind of language that is used to describe a parent’s teaching and instruction of their children. If you are familiar with the Bible, you might even be struck at how the language and imagery that is used to describe a parent’s teaching and instruction is identical to that of God’s teaching and instruction thorugh the Scriptures themselves (have a look at Ps.119:105 for the most obvious example, but also Deut.6, which we’ll be looking at in a couple of Blog-posts time). This resonance is very deliberate, and points us to one of the most powerful ideas about parenting that we find anywhere in the Bible. It’s breathtaking, and I warn you that you will have to fight the urge to simply reject it out of hand as soon as you grasp what is being said…

As a parent, and especially if you are a parent to younger children (the dynamics evolve as children grow older), you are playing the part of God to your children! You function as God in relation to them – which might explain why we feel so insecure, and are so painfully aware of our inadequacy!?! This will raise questions about our own discipleship (i.e. How like God am I?), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves… we’ll get to that in due course.

Kids think in concrete not conceptual terms (again, this is especially true of younger children).  This means that if you sit down and try and explain the concept of God in theological terms, you’re not going make a lot of progress. Young kids simply don’t have the catgories that will allow them to process what they are being taught. This might strike you as strange, given the huge emphasis in the Bible on parents doing precisely this, teaching their children about God. How can we do that? Or more to the point, how is God going to teach the children who are growing up within the covenant people of God about who He is, and how they are to relate to Him.

You’ve got to love the Genius of God! He gives those children little model-gods who, in concrete terms, will show children what God is like and who through their relatioship with those children teach them how to relate to God. In short, He creates parents.  Basically, a child learns how to relate to a parent and then as they grow older, they transfer the dynamics learned in their relationship with their parent(s), to their relationship with God (mediated through Christ) as that becomes more directly mediated through Christ rather than via their parents.

See this worked out negatively fairly regularly in Church life. We are used to realising that some people really struggle to relate to God as Father because of how their own parents treated them… Why is that such a problem? Why does our relationship with our parents have the potential to so hinder how we think of and relate to God?  Because of this dynamic, which God has built into our the structure of our relationship we have with our parents growing up, whereby we learn how to relate to God by learning how to relate to our parents.  Negatively, it means that if I have grown up in a context of negelct or abuse, then I bring that anger, fear, distrust, defensiveness and relational retreat into my relationship with God. However painful that is, it is not irredeemable. As we learn from Christ, through the Scirptures and in the context of the fellowhsip of the Church, about the nature of God, we can (re-)learn how to relate to Him well. But it is made more difficult!

This same potential proves incredibly powerful if parenting is done in a way that is informed by our vision, and our own relationship with God. If I am a godlike parent, who provides for my kids, cares for them, guides them and nurtures them; if I model God well to them in what and how I love and serve and discipline them, then as they gow up theya re learning how to trust, how to respond to and live well under authority, how to loved, how to be guided and nurtured, and so on. And as they develop, these behaviours and modes of relatioship are transfered into their own developing relationship with God.

This is why, as we read through Romans 1, and the characteristics of a culture ‘handed over’ by God, right in the midst of a terrifying protrait of a humanity left to its sinfulness, we we stumble across the phrase: ‘they disobey their parents’ (Rom.1:30). After some of the other things in the list, this can seem a bit subdued. We might shrug that off… ‘Surely every kids does that. How come that is so symptomatic of a godless culture?’ But of course, the problem is that in learning to disobey our parents, we are learing to disobey God.

This is idea is foundational to so much else that we want to say about what it means to be a parent, and the good news is that it solves a huge number of parental dilemmas at a stroke. As we realise that a key responsibility in our role as parents is to faithfully represent God to our children, to model Him to my children and to train my children through that how to relate to Him, so in turn we realise that many of our questions are answered by our own experience of and understanding of the God we worship. We’ll explore some of these together as this series continues.

As I said earlier, the temptation is to simply recoil from such a challenge, however inspiring and fulfilling it promises to be. But it is exactly that: a temptation. As Christians we want rather to press more deeply into our own expereince of God in Christ, through the Gospel, and bring the spiritual resources we discover there to our calling as parents. It is challenging, but we want to rise to that challenge, and to remember that it is also an incalculable privilege.

And as I said in the previous article, we seek to exercise our parental ministry - as we do every aspect of our Christian lives - in the atmosphere of grace.

Bite sized guide to Christian parenting (i)

Having put up recent blogs that focus on the MIE families, children’s and youth ministries, I thought I’d launch out into a seires that might help us to reflect on the whole issue of parenting from a Christian perspective. I appreciate that this is a bit of a minefield, and that by and large, people feel strongly about the decisions they make about how they parent. But as a Church it’s great to be able to wrestle these sorts of issues through together. In seeking to speak into this, I’ll be approaching it the same way that I seek to approach everything I teach at MIE:

(i) Let’s see if we can work out what the Bible teaches!

(ii) Let’s see if we can work it out in an atmosphere of grace!

(iii) Let’s see if we can support one another as we work towards God’s vision for family life.

There is one thing that it is helpful to do as we start a journey like this. As we’ve seen in Ecclesiastes, we need not only to understand the Bible, but also to understand ourselves. For example, why have I / we made the decisions I’ve / we’ve made about the kind of parents we aspire to be? This will help explain how I respond to the Bible’s teaching. It gives me as good a chance as possible to hear it in as constructive a way as possible. For something as personal as our parenting, that is an important consideration. So where do we get our thinking about parenting from? Can we identify why we parent as we do? I’d suggest that there are a number of likely sources. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Our own experience of being parented. All of us were kids at one point, and I’d say that our experience of our parents - or whoever it was who cared for us as we grew up - plays a much larger role in shaping our own experinece of parenting than we realise. As we remember and reflect on what was good, what we resented, what was scarring, etc. we are making decisions about how we seek to relate to our own kids. Even as children it is likely that we were already making a list entitled: ‘If I ever have kids, I’ll never say that / do that / make them do that…’. Much of our own parenting is worked out in reaction to our experience of being parented.

We do need to be just a bit careful about this. After all, just because I resented it when I was 8, doesn’t mean it was necessarily bad parenting… and if I’m reacting against that, there is no guarantee that what I’m doing is actually more constructive. We’ll need to be diligent as we reflect on the extent to which this is a driver in my own parenting.

Fear of ________________. Fill in the blank. A lot of parenting decisions can be born out of fear… fear of being judged by other parents… fear of our kids not liking us, or resenting us… fear losing them… fear of them making bad decisions in the future… fear of failure… fear of loss… fear of being unfulfilled… fear of… it’s a long list. Some fear is legitimate. A lot isn’t. Cultivating self-awareness helps us to at least recognise what fears are driving us, and to what extent (we have a tendency to fear the wrong things and to the wrong extent). Having identified them we are then better placed to assess them and their affects on the decisions we make about being parents.

‘Research’. OK so this is where I’m bound to get into trouble! Let me say up front that research is in principle a good thing. And let me qualify that by saying that there is a lot of bad ‘research’ on parenting. Anyone who has read more than one book on parenting is bound to have noticed that ‘research’ seems to lead different experts to very different conclusions. The cynic in me is no longer amazed at how often it turns out that research shows what the people sponsoring it wanted it to show. Even more subtle is how often I find the research that confirms what I want to do / not do anyway. If I want to parent my kids in a child-centred way, I can find plenty of books and conferences that will show me how research shows that is the best way to parent… I’ve learnd to be sceptical of any sentence that starts, ‘Research shows…’ (that isn’t just about parenting by the way!!). Before we use ‘research’ to justify our decisions (especially if it turns out that those decisions don’t resonate very well with what the Bible teaches) we need to ask a range of questions, such as: Who did the research? Have I seen it, or am I trusting someone else’s interpretation of data? Did the people commissioning the research have an agenda? What was it? What was the research about? How was it conducted? Amongst whom?

Cultural assumptions.  It’s amazing how much of our parenting style will be picked up by ‘what everyone else seems to be doing’. In ways that aren’t always entirely apparent we seem to make collective decisions about how we do things, and the simple fact of concensus creates an illusion of unassailable wisdom. What’s more worrying is the cultural norms you can identify source thinkers for. You’d be surprised how many of those thinkers were in fact deeply anti-Christian, and bizzarely anti-family. Underpinning a lot of ‘cultural assumptions’ is the idea that family units are not good things, and that we need to extricate children from parental influence and give them a ‘blank sheet of paper’ (for those of you who like details, many of the ideas that shape our culture’s view of parenting orginated with the philosopher Rousseau, and were developed, amongst others, by educationalist Froebel in the 1830s. For the record, Rousseau abandoned his own five children to Paris Foundling Hospital - an almost certain sentence of death in 18th century France!). Most of us have never read any philosophy of child development, but we do engage with what percolates down from those thinkers in magazines, TV programmes, popular books, parenting blogs and courses shaped by them. It’s also worth remembering that what features in magazines and appears on TV is based on ratings, viewing figures and sales… not necessarily on what makes for godly parenting.

My Insecurity. Let’s be honest. Most of us feel like we’re faking it. Pretty much every single parent lives with a profound sense of failure – with all the accompanying feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  As we work through this series, I’m assuming that as axiomatic. So many who are, or who have been, parents are sowedded to this, that I simply assume it as normative! In part this means that we are always struggling, usually feeling like we’re one step away from everything falling apart, and are kind of desperate to grasp any idea that looks like it might be the silver bullet. Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why parenting is such an emotive topic!

There are so many other sources we use to build our vision for parenting. Our ideas and aspirations usually come from a range of experiences and ideas - sometimes conflicting ones! The Big Quesiton is: how much of our sense of what it means to be a parent is distilled from and resonant with the Scriptures. This is a huge issue for us, and one that is particularly difficult to navigate because we feel insecure about our knowledge of the Bible, and even more insecure and anxious about our parenting. Conversely we are also so deeply invested as parents and our committed to our kids that we can easily feel threatened and judged when those relationships are explored. We are prone to a defensiveness about our parenting that we wouldn’t necessarily feel about other aspects of our life. This is as understandable as it can be dangerous. Dangerous, if it prevents us from being able to discern God’s heart for my parenting, and if it hardens me to the Spirit’s leading us into a liberating wisdom of God’s purposes for family.

We need to be aware of all this, and prayerful in it if we are going to be in a position to hear what our Heavenly Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth derives its name, has to say…

Should we be preaching from John 8:1-11?

This Sunday we’re continuing our series through John’s Gospel. If you are reading this in the NIV, then you’ll no doubt see the marginal note, ‘The earliest manuscripts, and many other ancient witnesses do not have Jn.7:53-8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36; John 21:25; Lk.21:38 or Lk.24:53’. The NIV has also put a line above and below this text, and printed it in smaller and italic font.

All of which raises the question of whether we should see this as part of the Bible or not. The impression created by the NIV is one of suspicion. You’re left with the feeling that mostly it wasn’t included, but some versions sort of did - wholly or in part - but weren’t really sure where to put it. Other conteomporary versions are more circumspect, and most simply have a shorter note explaining that some early texts don’t have this passage but make no alteration to the font in which it is printed. So, is this part of the Bible or not? The fact that we like the story doesn’t justify us including it in the text of the Bible, or our preaching from it as if it is the Word of God (as it will be confessed to be in our service).

The first thing to say is that there is a genuine question here. That there are some ancient texts of John’s Gospel that don’t include this passage is a simple matter of historical fact. The question is: What does that fact mean?

Are we to conclude that the orginal text of John’s Gospel (i.e. the one written by John!) didn’t include the passage, but that at some point later (several centuries later apparently) someone remembered or (re-)discovered that this had happened, and edited the text of John’s Gospel accordingly. Possibly the change wasn’t universally accepted for a long time, but eventually it was, and it found it’s home here at the start of the what we now call John 8. On such an interpretation, while it isn’t impossible for the story of the woman caught in adultery to be considerd as inspired Scripture in the same sense as the rest of John, it is pretty difficult to avoid a sense that it isn’t at quite the same level!

Of all possible interpretations of the evidence, this is - by far - the least plausible. As a way of constructing the history of the text it is staggeringly unlikely. And it is interesting that very few even of the most liberal scholars advocate its removal from John’s Gospel, accepting the story as a genuine event in Jesus’ life, even if not originally part of the Gospel.

What are we to make of this?

The first thing to remember is that the Early Church had an immensely high view of the nature of the Bible. Today, we are quite used to Christians suggesting that the Bible isn’t really inspired. There are a number of different ideas floating around the Church these days that suggest that bits of the Bible are inspired, but others are more human (and therefore less trustworthy); or that the Bible becomes the inspired word of God when it is read; or that it ‘contains’ the Word of God; or that it is merely the evolving human awareness of God charted over time (and therefore not really isnpired at all); or that it only inspring, rather than inspired. And a host of other ideas that one way or another call into question the historical catholic belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God in that what the Bible says God says.

There are any number of ways of demonstrating this fundamental fact of Church history, both from simpy reading how Jesus, the Apostles and other early Christians viewed the Bible as the direct speech of God, to citing a number of the Early Church Fathers and early Bishops, who are unanimous in their testimony. Just in case you’re interested:

Clemens Romanus (90-100) speaks of the Scriptures as ‘the true utterances of the Holy Ghost’;

Clement of Alexandria (150-211)  affirms that the Christian faith is ‘received from God through the Scriptures’;

Origen (185-254) holds that the Holy Spirit is the co-worker with the evangelists in the compiling of the Gospels, and that therefore lapse of memory, error or falsehood was impossible to them;

Irenaeus (c.200) describes Scripture in terms of its ‘perfection’ as God’s spoken words;

Polycarp (69-155) describes Scripture as the voice the Most High, and condemns as ‘the firstborn of Satan’ all who would pervert its words;

Tertullian (160-225)  refers to Scripture as ‘the writings and the words of God’

Augustine teaches that since Scriptures is God’s word, the human authors could not and did not err at any point. 

I explore this in a sermon here: https://www.mie.org.uk/nicene-creed (He has spoken through the Prophets)

There is a separate discussion about how the Church came to recognise the Canon of Scripture, but that is a separate discussion and one that would make this blog-post even lengthier than it threatens to be. The Church had a strong sense of recognising the Scripture as the actual Word of God, and of treating it with such reverence, that Bishops and clergy who in times of persecution handed over copies of the Bible to the authorities were stripped of their office. The idea that a Church that held such a high view of the Bible as the Word of God would countenance someone adding a passage centuries after the Canon was set simply beggars belief. One early theologian (Marcion) tried to permanently remove parts of the Bible was ex-communicated for his troubles!

The second thing to observe is that there are (very) early - likely the earliest - editions of John’s Gospel that do include this passage. Papias, a disicple of John in the first century, certainly knew the story and preached from it, and indeed in the West (the ‘Latin Fathers’, including Jerome who had no hesitation about including it in the Vulgate translation of the Bible at the end of the 4th Century) it has always featured. It is also found in ‘The Apostolic Constitutions’ (a sort of early Church equivalent to the Book of Common Prayer dating from the 200’s).

The actual question seems to be: What was going on in the Eastern, Greek speaking Churches, where the evidence is more ambiguous, and the texts which omit this passage are found. The answer is in fact an open secret. Augustine and Ambrose both speak to and explain the Church’s retiscense to go public with this passage. The story had been used by those arguing against the Christian faith to claim that Jesus condoned sexual immorality; and as such it was ‘hidden’, or withdrawn from the Church’s public writings. It makes more sense of the evidence to think of it as being part of the original text, but that it was ‘hidden’ from (some editions of) John’s Gospel, because the explosive reality of Jesus’ grace was so scandalous, so open to misinterpretation and abuse that some parts of the Church felt it should be withdrawn from the public domain and taught only within the closed parameters of the faithful; where it could be safely explained at length. We may judge this to have been an unhelpful decision, but in the context of a beseiged Church that prized asceticism, and that saw their sexual purity as a powerful missional distinctive, it can be at least understood.

This isn’t as strange as it first sounds. In parts of the Early Church, even passages like Matt.6 (including the Lord’s Prayer) weren’t taught to converts until they had passed through a 3-year discipleship programme. There was a great deal more secrecy in a Church that was persecuted and that faced significant anti-Christian propoganda. Non-Christians weren’t allowed to be present at a Communion service; and in fact Christians were also excluded until they had completed the Catechumenate. They were often completely ignorant of the nature of the Lord’s Supper (even of the fact that it consisted of bread and wine) until that time.

As it is, the concensus of the universal Church for centuries has received this passage as an authentic part of John’s Gospel. There are good arguments for seeing it’s place as integral to the original Gospel of John. The whole epsiode makes complete sense in the light of Jesus having declared Himself to be the Fountain of Life, and the Source / Spring of Living Water the previous day; and seems necessary as providing the context of time and place for what is happening from 8:12 onwards. It also fits the rhythm and structure of John’s Gospel, which uses a story to introduce and to set up the themes of the teaching that follows (e.g. feeding of 5,000, followed by Jesus teaching He is the Bread of Life). In this case, John is using the story to set up Jesus’ teaching on being the Light of the world (see John.3:19-21); His teaching on being the Judge, and the danger of dying in sin etc.

So… When we read this passage tomorrow and say' ‘This is the Word of the Lord’, we have every confidence in responding: ‘Thanks be to God’.

Ancient Wisdom: Love for money is nothing new...

Love for money has always been a problem. It’s easy to believe that it’s a recent phenomena rooted in the culture we live in. Apart from the obvious point that culture is developed by people, we can see from the Bible that love for money was a problem for people long before consumerist societies! And because love for money has always been a problem, the Bible is full of amazing insight and teahcing about how to relate to money and how to handle it faithfully. As we finally move on from Eccl.5:10, one final question is about whether we aware of that teaching, and whether we follow it... and why it matters that we do so.

In Conversation with Maggie Gaved about Global Church

We’re continuing our series looking at different aspects of the ministry and mission of MIE. In this video, we catch up with Maggie to talk about Global Church. Why is it so important that we engage with the Church throughout the nations of the world? What does that look like in real terms for us at MIE? And what might it look like in the future? If you want to catch up on MIE’s commitment to the Global Church in more detail, why not visit the Global Church page on our Website, or get in touch with Maggie.

https://www.mie.org.uk/global-intro