DISCIPLESHIP IS PRIMARILY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PARENTS

Posted on by

Unfortunately it is not according to a Barna Survey. 51% of American Christian parents surveyed “expected the church to take the lead.” Only 49% of parents considered teaching their children about reason, faith, and Biblical Christianity to be their responsibility. Correctly children’s ministry leaders state that discipleship should begin at home.

The findings reflect another concerning trend, which shows 86% of parents “feel under-equipped” to teach their kids the Bible and basic theology.

There’s a deep challenge here, Barna stated. “If children’s ministry is going to be healthy, pastors must help both parents and their ministry leaders find common ground.” Discipling children should be a joint effort. For example, the Gospel is lived out in the home, alongside the Church, not just taught on Sundays.

The church needs to encourage parents to embrace their primary role, by teaching them how to have everyday faith conversations. Properly discipled mums and dads will be better prepared to disciple their kids.

Families, Barna continued, should be encouraged “to practice their faith together in everyday life—serving others, praying as a household, and applying Scripture in real situations.” This is “so the next generation grows resilient and ready to follow Jesus in the world beyond church walls.”

Barna’s insights are nothing new. They point back to the Puritans, who understood that every home was to be a little church. “A family is a little Church, a little commonwealth,” said William Gouge in 1622. “It is a school where first principles and civics are learned; whereby men are prepared for greater matters of Church and State.”

Or as Charles Spurgeon preached in 1875, “Men are as much serving God in looking after their own children, and training them up in God’s fear, as they would be if they had been called to lead an army to battle for the Lord of hosts.” This includes “minding the house and making their household a church for God.” “It is a grand event when a family is saved!” Spurgeon cheered. “Oh, if households enter into Christ, the very bells of Heaven may ring again and again and again with a joy that has many joys within it!”

HOW TO SPIRITUALLY BATTLE FOR YOUR KIDS

Posted on by

According to the CDC  (U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) and Barna Group, one in five high school students has considered suicide, and nearly one in 10 has attempted it. A staggering 40% report persistent sadness or hopelessness. Substance use, atheism and gender confusion are rising across Gen Z. And amid it all, 1.5 million minors run away from home each year in the U.S.

As the mental health crisis among teens reaches new heights with skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide ideation and a growing disconnection from faith, author Laine Lawson Craft is assuring parents they are not powerless — they are at war.

Her latest book,Warfare Parenting: A Daily Battle Plan to Fight for Your Child, released in March, is a devotional drawn straight from the trenches of Craft’s own experience: each of her three children, despite growing up in a Christian home, became prodigals, drifting into rebellion, darkness and substance abuse during their teenage years. 

But after more than a decade of prayer, pleading and proclaiming Scripture, Craft watched God transform not just their lives, but her own.

“We were doing everything we thought the Lord told us to do,” Craft told The Christian Post. “And yet, my three children were battling different wars with the enemy.”

The idea that the battle is not with the child, but with darkness itself, is at the crux of Warfare Parenting. According to Craft, the devotional is designed to provide not only daily doses of hope, but also practical and spiritual tools for those in the throes of parenting children who have wandered from the faith or are ensnared in destructive patterns.

“I realized I wasn’t battling my children. I was battling the enemy,” she said. “And that’s where warfare parenting comes in, because the enemy is tough. He’s out to seek, kill, and destroy our children’s destinies.”

But in contrast to fear or moral panic, Warfare Parenting offers parents a strategic path forward: Scripture, prayer, surrender and the belief that no prodigal is too far gone for God. Craft is no stranger to battles, spiritual or otherwise. Before becoming an author and host of the “Warfare Parenting” podcast, she ran a national magazine, WHOAwomen, which placed women of faith like Dolly Parton and Kathie Lee Gifford on covers beside mainstream titles like Oprah and Woman’s Day.

But even as she found success in publishing and ministry, her own home was unravelling. Her children were caught in the grip of partying, addiction and suicidal ideation. “One of my children was hearing voices that told her life would be better without her,” she shared. “Another was hooked on music festivals and drugs. Another just spiraled into partying. All three had different battles.”

What carried Craft through was not formulaic parenting advice but daily immersion in the Word of God. Over 10 years, she read the Bible cover to cover eight times. As she read, she began to jot down verses for fellow parents in pain, verses that later became the 365-day devotional now in print.

“This book started in the margins of my Bible and in my iPhone notes,” she said. “Each day, God gave me a scripture for a parent in the battle.”

One of her sons took 15 years to return home spiritually. During that time, she says she quite literally hit the floor in prayer, pleading the blood of Jesus over him every single day. “When God touched him, he was high. But the encounter was so profound, he was changed forever,” she said.

Craft lamented that in the Christian community, parenting a prodigal can come with a heavy load of shame. Scripture often cited, “train up a child in the way he should go … ” can feel like condemnation when a child veers off course, she said.

“People think if their child has strayed, it’s a reflection on them as a bad Christian parent,” Craft said. “But that’s not the truth. It’s a reflection of how ferocious the enemy is.” That shame, she stressed, is what keeps many parents silent, isolated and vulnerable.

“I think that’s why we have to be loud,” she said. “If we aren’t loud, the shame will build.” For Craft, breaking that silence means building communities. Inspired by the widespread recovery network Celebrate Recovery, she envisions Warfare Parenting small groups popping up in churches and homes across the country, where parents can come together to pray, swap “life hacks,” and intercede for one another’s children.

“We need a safe place with no shame,” she said. “A place where someone can say, ‘Can you help me stand in the gap?’”

Based on her own experiences, Craft wants every parent, grandparent and guardian to know that no child is too far gone for redemption. “If there’s one message I’d give, it’s ‘don’t give up,’” she said. “God can clean them up in a second. He loves them in the darkness and will come down and rescue and deliver them.”

HOW TO RAISE CHILDREN IN A WOKE CULTURE

Posted on by

Mike Johnson Speaker in the USA House of Representatives talks to Family Research Council president Tony Perkins about his family life. According to Perkins most people can’t help but admire the Louisiana leader for staying focused on what matters at home — even in their whirlwind new life with him as Speaker. Most of the time, people want to know how their kids have stayed so grounded. Johnson said the secret isn’t that they’re amazing parents. The secret is knowing Who to turn to.

Mike Johson and his wife Kelly.

When confronting the woke culture, Perkins pointed out, so much of that “goes back to the parents and preparing the foundation … so that our children can be out there making a difference.” Johnson emphatically agreed. “People ask Kelly and [me] all the time … ‘How have you done this? Your kids are all really well-adjusted and great people.’ Well, there’s no secret to it,” he insisted. “We’re not extraordinary parents,” Mike wanted people to know.

“We just follow the rule book — we follow the Bible — and we teach them that [it’s] real. It is actually an instruction manual for life. And when you develop in your children a true biblical worldview and where they understand how it applies and how reliable it is, and that’s the only reliable thing there is, then it takes hold in their heart.”

Scripture lays it out pretty clearly, Johnson explained. “It reminds us that if you teach [children] that way, they will not walk away from it. And we’ve just focused on that, kept it simple, and made faith a real aspect of life woven into all seven days of the week — not just Sunday mornings. … And we’re blessed that they’re all walking with the Lord.”

He and Kelly think a lot about 3 John 1:4, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking with the Lord.” “And ours do, by God’s grace,” he said gratefully. “We pray that they continue to do that and I hope they will.”

JUDGE APPROVES GAY THROUPLE AS LEGAL PARENTS OF TWO CHILDREN

Posted on by

A Children’s rights activist decried a California judge’s ruling allowing three men to be listed as the legal parents of two children born to surrogate mothers using donor eggs as being the consequence of laws that sacrifice the wellbeing of children to benefit the desires of adults.

The homosexual male “throuple” includes Ian Jenkins, Alan Mayfield and Jeremy Allen Hodges. The three-way relationship happened after Jenkins and Mayfield, who met nine years ago, invited Hodges to join the couple eight years ago.

Ian Jenkins, Alan Mayfield, and Jeremy Allen Hodges on “The Morning Show” in Australia on Feb. 16, 2021.

The Children’s rights activist, Katy Faust, founder of children’s rights organization Them Before Us, and the author of a recent book of the same name, noted in a Monday interview with The Christian Post that much of the media is framing their coverage of these adult men as being victims of a system that did not make it effortless to acquire someone else’s children.  

“Of course the real victims are the two motherless children who were intentionally separated from the woman who provided half of their genetic identity, the woman to whom they bonded during their first 9 1/2 months of life, and who will be starved of the daily maternal love that all children crave,” Faust said. 

But people should not be surprised by the newest manifestation of “modern family,” she asserted, as it was “the inevitable result of centering all legal and cultural conversations about family around the desires of adults.

That slippery slope of ‘if the adults are happy the children will be happy’ which began with no-fault divorce, normalized single mothers by choice, insisted gender is irrelevant to parenting during the gay marriage debate, is now championing male throuples raising motherless children,” she added. 

“Until we recognize that children have a natural and fundamental right to be known and loved by both their mother and father, you can expect more wild variations of the modern family, as children become the acceptable sacrifice on the pyre of adult desires.”

OBLIVIOUS TO IMPENDING JUDGEMENT

Posted on by

Long-running parenting magazine Parents has featured fitness guru Shaun T. and his husband Scott Blokker, along with their one-year-old twins, on its February cover.

It’s believed to be the first time a gay couple has appeared on the magazine’s cover in its 92-year history. Moreover, a magazine of this size would not take this move unless it thought it good for business. It is clearly a further sign we are in the “end times” when God’s commandments are being abandoned and the Bible says, “they will call evil good and good evil”.

“I’ve received two great pieces of advice,” Shaun T, who is known for his at-home workout videos, reveals in the accompanying interview.

“Scott’s dad told me, ‘You’re not coming into the babies’ world. They’re coming into yours,’ and that made me eager to show them the life we live.” A life without a female influence. Shaun identifies himself as the wife and therefore I assume the mother of the two boys in this relationship.

He continued: “The second was from my grandfather, who was married to my grandmother for 56 years. He said, ‘Never go to bed angry,’ and we don’t. The connectedness you feel at the end of the day is the driving force for how you wake up the next day, so every night we fall asleep holding hands.”

The above is great advice from Shaun if it was male and female as it was with his grandmother and grandfather, and as God ordained, but it isn’t, God calls male with male sinful and the consequences cannot be good for the two men nor the children.

While many took to social media to praise “Parents” publication for becoming more inclusive, fortunately the conservative organisation One Million Moms criticised the move.

“Parents is using its magazine as a platform to promote the pro-homosexual lifestyle,” the group wrote.

“Even if families do not personally subscribe to the publication, they should be warned that it could be displayed in waiting rooms of dentist and doctor offices, where children could easily be subjected to the glorification of same-sex parents.”

The group continued: “Many families subscribe to Parents and should be aware of the upcoming change of content in this magazine. After all, most conservative and Christian families will disagree morally with the magazine’s decision, and subsequently, will not want to support its content.”

BOY, 5, TEACHES US HOW TO ADMINISTER GOD’S GRACE

Posted on by

Moment of grace ... Josiah Duncan says a blessing with the unnamed man. Picture: WSFA

Moment of grace … Josiah Duncan says a blessing with the unnamed man. Picture: WSFA Source: Supplied

A BOY of five brought the customers at a fast food restaurant to tears when he said grace with a homeless man he had just got dinner for.

Josiah Duncan’s act of kindness came after his mum, Ava Faulk, had taken him to eat at the Waffle House in Prattville, Alabama.

He saw the homeless man standing outside with his bike and was so troubled by his appearance he began asking his mum about him. When his mum explained the man had no home or food Josiah urged her to buy him dinner. She did just that.

“He came in and sat down, and nobody really waited on him,” Ms Faulk told local network WSFA 12. “So Josiah jumped up and asked him if he needed a menu because you can’t order without one.”

Proud mum ... Eva Faulk with her son Josiah. Picture: WSFA 12

Proud mum … Eva Faulk with her son Josiah. Picture: WSFA 12 Source: Supplied

The unidentified man was at first shy and ordered only a cheap hamburger but after Ms Faulk told him he could get anything he wanted he got the works.

Before the man began eating Josiah insisted on saying grace with him, bringing the other 11 diners in the restaurant to tears.

“The man cried. I cried. Everybody cried,” Ms Faulk said.

“You never know who the angel on Earth is, and when the opportunity comes you should never walk away from it,” she added. “Watching my son touch the 11 people in that Waffle House tonight will be forever one of the greatest accomplishments as a parent I’ll ever get to witness.