A few weeks ago, I sat around with some fellow mothers discussing the great dilemma of modern Christian parenthood: Family devotions or no family devotions?<\/p>\n
Even just the phrase rings warning bells in my ears.\u00a0 Can\u2019t we think of a better term that doesn\u2019t make teenagers automatically want to throw up in their mouths? As someone who spent the past decade in youth ministry, I\u2019m leery of any family activity that can do more harm than good to a child\u2019s spiritual life, and I admit I have pretty mixed emotions about the idea of a forced family Bible study.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen some families where it seems to work, where their kids are adjusted and loving people who have a deep knowledge of the scripture. I have a lot of respect for that. I\u2019ve also seen family devotions turn into a joke. I\u2019ve seen many kids rebel under the pressure of their over spiritualized Christian family. And I have my own positive experience: growing up in a faithful, believing home, where we prayed at meals but where scriptural teaching was lived out organically in our daily lives, never forced from a devotional book at a specific meeting time.<\/p>\n
So I often feel the struggle of what it should look like to be committed to raising my kids to love Christ. How intentional does \u201cteaching\u201d need to be? After living with a child in two success-driven cities, I\u2019m feeling more and more convinced that as Christians we\u2019re becoming just as obsessed with our children\u2019s spiritual \u201cachievement\u201d as we are with their early literacy skills and exposure to foreign languages by the age of three. It\u2019s not hard to buy into the guilt that we should be doing something more. Surely there are spiritual flashcards! Is there a Jesus tutor I could find?<\/p>\n
I keep asking myself: if Jesus was raising August, wouldn\u2019t he just be living with him, loving him, and telling him stories about how God loves him? Deuteronomy 11:18-19 is a beautiful picture of that act of passing the faith on to our children, talking about God\u2019s word when we sit at home, walk along the road, lie down and get up.<\/p>\n