How do I know if my child is a Christian?
Your child does not get a visible mark on her forehead or a stripe on her back when she comes to Jesus, so you have to talk, pray, and discern.
parenting
All Student Summit: Taking Care of Your Family
Parents, don’t waste your lazy summer days
Is it really such a bad thing to have wide open spaces in our planners? Might this be the very thing we need in order to refocus our priorities and make the most of the short season of time we’re given with our children?
Social media and middle school
“Everyone has it, why can’t I have it!” “They’re leaving me out of everything!”. . . cue the tears, bring up the music, and now the dramatic finish. . . ”you’re ruining my life, I’ll never make real friends!” This year’s winner of best actress in a pho-drama goes to a middle schooler for her role in…
Family worship and the day I made my daughter cry
My daughter, Laurelen, graduated from a small, classical Christian high school. The school enjoys a commencement tradition in which the parents hand the diploma to their child, but only after speaking a few words of encouragement (usually accompanied with some nostalgia) to him or her. The graduate responds with some brief, prepared remarks of his…
Living with food allergies and longing for heaven
Perhaps you have heard about the Teal Pumpkin Project, an effort to make trick-or-treating safe for kids with food allergies. Lay aside whatever convictions you may have about the holiday in question for a moment and consider the theological truths behind those odd-colored pumpkins. While I might have paid little attention to this a few…
The tools your church needs for effective family ministry
How can your ministry equip parents with the resources they need? In the first place, help parents to see that if they are believers in Jesus Christ, God has already equipped them with his Spirit, his Word and the community of faith (John 16:12–14; Eph 4:11–16; 2 Tim 3:16–17; Heb. 13:21). Through these gifts from…
Parenting: It’s Never an Interruption
Parenting is all about living by the principle of prepared spontaneity. You don’t really know what’s going to happen next. You don’t really know when you’ll have to enforce a command, intervene in an argument, confront a wrong, hold out for a better way, remind someone of a truth, call for forgiveness, lead someone to confession, point…
How to train parents to disciple their kids
If we want our family ministries to be effective, we need to involve parents.
Why Christian parents should not want good, happy, safe kids
“I cannot believe that you would do that!” That incredulous assertion is an all too familiar response from parents (including myself) who discover a child has sinned. But for Christian parents, such an assertion is anti-Christ because it constitutes speaking as if the gospel is not true. It represents the response for a parent…
4 priorities for every gospel-centered parent
Human parenting, and especially human fathering, points and shows something of what it means to know God and who God is.
Shaping a child’s soul, a task too important to be turned over to the professionals
I saw something beautiful one day while walking down Breckenridge Lane. In a front yard not far from my home, a young mother was removing a layer of leftover leaves from the fall in preparation for planting spring flowers — an ordinary activity in the middle of an ordinary day. What was extraordinary about…
iPhone, iPads and Christian parenting
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the following, Russell D. Moore writes about one of the most pressing implications of parenting in the digital age. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Here’s what I just don’t understand: the trend among professing Christian families to give unrestricted Internet access to their pre-teen children through iPhones…