“The Fine Print”: Train Up a Child

This article is part of a series written by the Rev. Barton Gingerich entitled “The Fine Print”: Common-sense Expectations for Church Membership.

Train up a child

Many church members are parents of young children. To be a Christian father or mother is an immense privilege, a weighty duty, a difficult work, and an indescribable joy. And it is in the vocation of parenthood that the world has put immense pressure: unrealistic or unhealthy expectations, neglect of essential duties, and a despairing outlooks that lack an eternal perspective. Simply put, the fallen world does not want us to ask, “What does God think? What does God want from me as a father or a mother?” 

The world would have us worry incessantly about getting the right toys and right experiences and getting into the right schools and right social circles. The world would have us intone, “Follow your heart–be true to yourself” while neglecting the reality of human sinfulness and the call to sacrificial love. The world would have our children distracted by screens so that they would not be a nuisance to us, and, likewise, the world would have us use our own screens to escape any boredom or other pain that comes with parenting, weakening and even severing our relationship with our own family members. The world would have us place our children on a gerbil wheel of travel sports, building up resumes, fear of missing out, and a plummet into either burn-out or careerism. And all while the spiritual health of our little ones languishes, putting their eternal soul in jeopardy. 

Let us stop asking what the world wants of us and start asking what God wants. 

First of all, God wants our children. Jesus beckons for us to let our little ones come to Him (Matthew 19:13-14). One of the first ways we do that is by making sure our children are baptized promptly–that they receive the sign of the covenant and become part of God’s covenant community to be raised up as a disciple of Jesus. In receiving the sacrament of adoption, our children then have standing to call upon the Lord and pray in Christ’s name, with a full confidence that they shall be heard by the Father. 

Of course, this would be the start of a particular kind of life within the Christian household. A big aspect of this life, as alluded to earlier, is devotion. A Christian family should pray and read the Bible together. Young children will often benefit from Bible storybooks, but, in time, they should start reading the actual Holy Scriptures. And Christian families should discuss their religion amongst themselves. It should not be an awkward topic. It should be part of the lifeblood of their identity as a family. The Lord makes all the difference in our domestic lives.

And, for some people, this may seem like a tall order. Parents might feel ill-equipped to answer spiritual questions or challenges to the claims of the Christian religion. They might find the instilling and enforcing of a habit of family devotions to be nearly impossible, and they may even struggle to get their children to come to church at all. There are two important problems to address if this is the case.

For one, the Fifth Commandment is the Law of God, and it must govern the Christian home. “Honor thy father and mother” is not just a good idea or a museum piece. It must be a living reality, and parents must work to establish this as an operating principle within their households. This will mean pushing back hard against the world’s now-popular condemnation of disciplining children through various punishments, as well as the deeply toxic notion that a parent should somehow be his child’s “buddy.” This worldly quest of a child’s approval means parents won’t risk being disliked for a short season in order to maintain the favor of their offspring. A thoroughly disobedient child is a crisis, and it is not something to be laughed off. One can work to prevent this in early child-raising, but one must also understand every child is a person with free will, which can entail a choice to rebel and test the limits and legitimacy of authority. 

And the legitimacy of parental authority brings us to our other problem: you cannot give what you do not have. If one has not studied the Bible, asked questions and sought good answers regarding the faith, instilled in himself habits of devotion, formed a Christian view of life (including matters of politics, economics, manners, ethics, and so forth), then he will not have much to offer his own children. The best way to raise faithful, active Christians is to be a faithful, active Christian. If one has spent his years neglecting basic piety, he will find himself completely unprepared to instill piety in his own family, both spouse and children. And so, oftentimes, raising children means attending to one’s own discipleship and communicating what it takes to do so to one’s own offspring.

Above all, it is important to remember that God’s grace is sufficient to sustain us in our vocations, including the vocation of parenthood, with all of its challenges. It is possible to be a Christian father and a Christian mother. And Christian parenthood is one of the greatest privileges one could ever enjoy.