Seven Principles for Raising Christian Children
As a church, while we will benefit from wisdom wherever it is offered, we will not be making new parenting fads the core of our parenting philosophy. The basics around what the Bible teaches about being a Christian parent are more than sufficient for nurturing children in the grace and truth of Jesus Christ.
Every generation puts forward new visions for how to raise the generation behind them. I grew up in the self-esteem generation. Kids today are growing up in the gentle parenting movement. Both of these fads have proven to be failures. It was later discovered that it is mostly narcissists who have “high self-esteem,” and the most healthy people often are self-doubting. And the approach of gentle parenting, or therapeutic parenting, has resulted in a generation of mental unhealth—with record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide rates. (Here is a podcast that explains some of this, from the author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.)
There is a great temptation to find the most recent experts on parenting and believe that they have found the holy grail on parenting. But with so little track record, why should we trust any of these new experiments that are being tried out on children? As Chesterton noted about educational philosophies:
[I]t ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. (What's Wrong With the World, p. 99)
As a church, while we will benefit from wisdom wherever it is offered, we will not be making new parenting fads the core of our parenting philosophy. The basics around what the Bible teaches about being a Christian parent are more than sufficient for nurturing children in the grace and truth of Jesus Christ. I have seen that in my own family and in many others over the course of my 27 years in the church.
For many parents, the best thing they can do to grow as a parent is to get into a Discipleship Group where they will learn spiritual discipline, deep Reformed theology, and guidance in practical Christian living with other believers.
What are the basic principles that should guide us as a church as we equip parents to raise children in the knowledge of the grace of Jesus Christ? Here are seven principles our session puts forward for parents to follow.
1. Covenantal Life: Baptism, Worship, Church Involvement
Our first priority for raising children is that they are brought up within the covenant of grace. The Bible gives us permission to regard the children of believers as members of the household of God, and so children should grow up with that sense of identity. They should grow up believing, “I am not my own, but I belong body and soul to the Lord Jesus Christ,” as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. We don’t raise Christian kids by keeping them at an arm's length from the Lord, but by raising them in him as part of his people.
The way children experience this covenant identity is through the initiating sacrament of baptism as an infant and the renewing sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Therefore, we encourage parents to not neglect baptism, to work toward having their children in the whole service at as young an age as possible (this requires work), and to have them profess faith to the elders as soon as possible so that every week they can be receiving the grace of Christ in the word and sacrament. We also want the children to learn the truths of the whole Bible and the Reformed tradition from childhood on, both at church and in the home. As the Westminster Standards reminds us, the Lord uses these ordinary means (word, sacrament, and prayer) to effectually work salvation in the souls of his people.
2. Spiritual Formation in the Parents as Individuals
Parenting is always a reflection of the parent, and so our second priority for parenting is that the parents themselves have Christ formed in their own hearts and character. While the Bible gives many verses with instructions to parents, all the other passages that speak more generally about Christian character apply to parenting. For example, before the Apostle Paul gives his household instructions in Colossians 3, he gives a more general paragraph about Christian character which includes compassion, humility, kindness, forgiveness, love, peace, meditation on God’s word, singing, and fellowship. All of these are assumed before the Bible gives more specific instruction on parenting.
Therefore, we want parents to be engaged in orderly discipleship around the means of grace. We want them to learn the daily disciplines of reading the Scriptures and praying, confessing their sins to one another and to their children when they sin against their children, and enjoying the fellowship of the Holy Spirit with other believers. For many parents, the best thing they can do to grow as a parent is to get into a Discipleship Group where they will learn spiritual discipline, deep Reformed theology, and guidance in practical Christian living with other believers.
3. A Healthy Marriage
Our third priority for Christian parenting is that children learn the gospel through the marriage of their parents. The Bible says that Christian marriage is a picture of the gospel, the relationship between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22–33). When Dad is leading and loving his wife like Christ does the church, when he cherishes and nourishes her, children are witnessing a powerful testimony to the beauty, truth, and goodness of the gospel. When Mom submits to her husband and speaks of him with respect, children are witnessing the beauty, truth, and goodness of being a part of the church, the bride of Christ.
We take obedience to all of God’s word very seriously, but we resist legalism, or adding laws that God never made. We do not take ourselves too seriously. And our expectation is that the Christian life leads us into joy not gloom.
Therefore, we want to be regularly providing teaching and instruction for marriages. When marriages are strong, children are more secure, more loved, more joyful, and more likely to want a Christian marriage for themselves in the future. Often parents give so much attention to their children that the marriage is neglected. We want to call parents to a biblical vision for the family, and the marriage is at the center.
4. Family Discipleship
Our fourth priority is that the responsibility for discipling and teaching Christian children falls primarily on the parents, not the church. The church is there to equip and encourage parents and to supplement the discipleship happening at home, but parents (especially the father) must not abdicate the responsibility to pass on the tradition of the faith to their children. Deuteronomy 6:6–9 says:
And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Parents need to learn how to make use of the times of sitting down, walking by the way, lying down, and rising up. Those times can be translated: morning devotion, family worship around the dinner table, bedtime, and talking about Christ as all the matters of human life come up throughout the day. These moments help create a liturgy of life, centered around the word and prayer. The faith should not be a compartment of a family’s life but what permeates its entire life: “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17).
5. Loving and Joyful Home Atmosphere
Our fifth principle is that we want Christian children to say as adults that the experience of growing up in the church and in a Christian home was a happy one. There was love and laughter, freedom and order, depth and relationship. Christians can have a temptation to place a heavy burden over the whole mood of a home and think that this is honoring to God because it takes obedience so seriously. But a healthy home knows there is a time for laughter and a time to be serious, a time for rest and a time for work, a time for tears and a time for feasting. The God of the Bible is good, and when a home is shaped by his Word, the result should be a deep sense of love and joy.
We want to be modeling this spirit for each other constantly. We take obedience to all of God’s word very seriously, but we resist legalism, or adding laws that God never made. We do not take ourselves too seriously. And our expectation is that the Christian life leads us into joy not gloom.
6. Biblical Discipline
Our sixth priority is the importance of biblical discipline. The Bible clearly teaches that children are to be disciplined consistently and diligently. And because of its repeated use of the word "rod," we take discipline to mean a measured form of striking—that is, spanking. These instructions are repeated numerous times in Proverbs (which in a sense is a parenting book) in the strongest terms:
“Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to disciple him.” (13:24)
“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.” (22:15)
“Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with a rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” (23:13-14)
“The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.” (29:15)
Though culture largely ignores and even abhors this wisdom, we believe that discipline is essential for cultivating the kind of loving and joyful home environment described in point 5. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:11).
Therefore, we provide instruction for parents of young children in how to spank their children in a way that leads a child through repentance to the gospel. Every time a child is disciplined, they should be led to confess their sin and to turn by faith to the grace of Jesus Christ. Afterward, they should experience deep reconciliation with their parents. This process of consistent, gospel-centered parenting should be the norm in our church’s culture.
7. Christian Education
Our final priority is to make sure the parents in our church have thought deeply about the formative power of education. There is no such thing as a neutral education. A public school should be viewed as a religious school that teaches a different religion than the Christian faith. Therefore, our church’s position is that the default of all Christian families should be to provide a Christian education for their children. We also recognize that there are many factors that play into this decision, and we respect the responsibility God has entrusted to parents to make this important decision. We want our parents to understand that every school has in mind an ideal person into which they are forming their students. For the Christian, the ideal person is Jesus. So parents have to ask, “Does this school share my vision for the kind of person I want my child to become?” This is the most important question when making educational decisions.
Therefore, we want all parents to desire a Christ-centered education for their children and be willing to sacrifice to make that happen. We also want to make the education at Trinity Classical School to be financially and academically achievable for all families who desire it. By running a classical Christian school, we celebrate the heritage of Christian learning passed down to us through the ages, and we believe that the kind of education most naturally generated by the gospel is a Christ-centered and classical one.
Part of my hope in listing these principles is that parents could read this and think: that is do-able. We don’t need tons of techniques from the newest fads. We need Christ. We simply need to do the basics well. The Bible doesn’t load us with burdensome laws (see 1 John 5:3). But what it does say, we must not neglect. I believe that if we as a church commit ourselves to doing the basics well, trusting God’s word, we will see scores of our children (and children’s children) growing up in the joy of the Lord, serving him in the generations to come.
