Blog
“It's Not the Church's Job to Raise Our Kids”
Categories: Meditations
We live in a world that seems to get busier every year. Houses are more expensive. Commutes are longer. Jobs are more demanding. Children’s activities are more time-consuming. As a result, there are tens of millions of Americans who have every minute of every day scheduled for something.
Lots of important things suffer as a result of this lifestyle, and children are at the top of the list. For years “quality time” has been the parenting buzzword. Maybe you only ever talk with your kid for 10 minutes a day on the way to soccer practice, but with enough wisdom and effort, you can make that conversation Meaningful.
However, quality time doesn’t seem to yield the results that a lot of parents want, particularly when it comes to religion. It’s no secret that young people have been leaving the Lord’s church in droves. They might be headed to a great college and a great career, but they don’t seem to be headed to heaven. Sometimes, this happens despite everything that parents can do. More of the time, it happens because of what parents didn’t do.
In this increasingly perilous environment, parents are increasingly looking to outsource religious instruction to the church. This is, after all, consonant with modern parental strategy. You don’t teach your son to play soccer. You pay to put him on a soccer team, and the coach does that. You don’t teach your daughter to play the clarinet. You pay for music lessons, and the music teacher does that.
Instruction is the province of experts, so parents want to leave religious instruction to religious experts. It’s the church’s job to have really good, really thorough Sunday-morning Bible classes. It’s the church’s job to organize activities, so that your kids can make good friends instead of the trash friends they’re likely to make at school.
There are two problems with this. The first is time. Even if you also take your kid to Wednesday-night Bible classes _and_ the monthly teen devotion, 2.25 hours a week is not enough to bring up a child in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
In fact, only a parent (two parents if we’re following God’s plan) can possibly devote the time to do the job right. This can’t be an activity. It has to be a way of life. If you don’t have the time, parents, you need to make the time. God doesn’t expect you to live in that house, drive that car, or chauffeur your kid around to 57 different activities. He does expect you to teach them about Him.
Second, when it comes to a child’s spirituality, parents are (or at least should be) the experts. Nobody knows my kid like I do. Because of shared DNA and shared lives, I know them. I know the way they think. As a result, nobody is better equipped than I am to give them spiritual guidance. No Sunday-school teacher or youth minister, no matter how willing, can step into my place.
It’s very convenient to make the church responsible for the way our kids turn out. That way, we don’t have to invest much effort ourselves, and if they turn out badly, we can blame the church. However, no matter how much we might want to transfer the burden of parenting, it remains solidly on our shoulders. No matter how much we squint, the word “church” will not magically appear in Ephesians 6:4. The work of training our children is ours. Either we do it, or we don’t.
