Developing Your Children's Faith - Singing a New Song

We found that the best way of developing our children's faith was to teach them at home. We had already started home educating before we became Christians but once we realised that it was part of God's plan for our children to be educated outside of the school system, that gave us added confidence to get through the difficult times of home education (like exams.)
 
However, home education by itself wasn't enough. HE was part of an overall concept of taking personal responsibility for our children and not to delegate that responsibility to anyone else. This concept, for us, applied to churches as well. We were not to rely on Sunday School or church youth workers for our children's faith development (in any case, some do an extraordinarily bad job of doing this; count the number of teens in your church who have started dropping out lately.)
 
If God had given us the responsibility for our children's education about Him, which we believed He had,

'Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.' Deuteronomy 4:9

then we needed to heed His word about how that was to happen, 

'4 Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 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. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.'

We needed to decide how literally to take this command from God. We decided that verse 7 meant to talk about God ALL THE TIME with your children and we couldn't do that, if our children were in school all day and out at youth events for much of the rest of the time. We were very selective about the children's and youth activities they were involved with. Some were beneficial to the process of faith development and some, most definitely, were not.

At various times, God called us to be involved in some ministry but, even by the time the children were 12-13, we didn't feel right about leaving them at home to go out to do church stuff, so we decided that we would only get involved in ministries where our children could participate alongside us. In their teen years, for us, that was music. We organised and led a worship band called Life-Songs which our kids were a vital part of and I do think that it was instrumental (!) in their faith development.

 

What does this mean for you, Dear Daughter? If you decide to take personal responsibility for your child's faith development, how will it look in your household? Is God calling you to make out-of-the-box decisions in order to kindle or protect your child's relationship with Jesus?

 

You don't have to sing the world's tune. You can make up a totally new song.

Mimi is a wife to Jamie, mother to two grown up children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother to a darling little grand-daughter. She home-educated her children and now teaches exam subjects to groups of home-educated children. She's a Worship Leader in her church and has a passion for helping women raise children to adulthood with a strong faith in the Lord Jesus.