Getting your Kids Through Church Without Them Ending Up Hating God (eBook)

“I don’t want my kids hating God because of me.”

Some years ago Wayne Cordeiro, the pastor and author of the brilliant book Leading on Empty1, was asked to meet with a group of American church leaders. Most were around forty years old and all had churches with over 3,000 members. On the second day of the conference the organizers asked these leaders a question that caught many of them off guard: “What do you fear the most?” Cordeiro says that as each took a turn at answering, tears began to flow and several couldn’t even finish what they’d started to say. One admitted that he didn’t know how much longer his marriage could sustain the pressure of his job. But it was another leader’s answer that got Wayne Cordeiro’s attention. His greatest fear?

“I just don’t want my kids growing up hating God because of me.”

I’ve thought so much about that church leader and what he said. I care about the local church. My wife, Dianne, and I have only ever attended two churches in our whole lives and one of those is a plant from the other. We are in that church almost every Sunday. I used to be involved in the leadership there, but I left that role to concentrate on my work with the charity Care for the Family. When I resigned I said to the congregation, “I’m sure you’ll do better without me than with me.” They did. I love that place.

And I care about church leaders. During the First World War some soldiers who were sent home from the front were given the title “honourably wounded”. Many of the church leaders I meet are “honourably wounded”. The pressure – physical, emotional and spiritual – combined with the constant energy-sapping criticism has taken its toll. I know that church leaders aren’t perfect, but we dare not take them for granted. One of the greatest privileges of my life has been the opportunity to speak with thousands of leaders across the world and try to encourage them.

But as I reflected on this man’s words my heart went out to him not just as a church leader, but even more as a parent. I hope that this book will be of help to church leaders; however, I have written it for all kinds of mothers and fathers.

When asked about his greatest fear, the church leader at the conference could have mentioned any one of a hundred fears to do with his job: that his church wouldn’t prosper, that the funds wouldn’t come in for the building programme, perhaps that one of his deacons would change his mind about retiring! But no: his first thoughts were for his children.

Why the fear that they might hate God because of him? Was he a monster at home? I’m sure he wasn’t. Did he not provide for his family? I have no doubt that he did. Did he not love his children? I am sure he would have given his life for them.

I think I understand the reason why many parents have felt that fear, because the spectre of it has terrorized my own heart. It is that the experience of being brought up in a Christian home and being intimately involved in the life of a local church, with all the pressures that can bring, could damage the seeds of faith in our children’s hearts. Our fear is that the exposure they have to Christianity will cause them to have little love for God or his people.

“There is no pain like parental pain.”2 So wrote psychologist John White. If he is right then it is because there is no love like parental love. We can treat our husband, wife, friends or colleagues so badly that it is possible they will stop loving us. But most parents find it hard to imagine anything their child could do that would cause them to say, “I just don’t love her any more.”

C. S. Lewis wrote, “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.”3 All over the world I meet parents who are in pain for their children. On the surface it can be hard to understand why. These young people (and sometimes much older ones) may have excellent jobs and a good set of friends, and perhaps be happily married with children of their own. More than that, they are loving sons and daughters. So why then are their parents grieving? It’s because, although their children were brought up in a Christian home, and although they attended church for most of their young lives, they seem to have hard hearts that are closed to faith. It’s almost as if they have been inoculated against Christianity and now react negatively whenever they come into contact with it.

Who would want to be part of a faith like that?

Megan was twenty-five years old. Until the age of sixteen, every Sunday she had attended the church that her mother carried her into when she was a baby. I asked her if she went to church now and she shook her head.

Her jaw tightened. “No. I don’t believe any of that God stuff now.” I bought her a coffee and asked her to tell me why she felt that way…

An hour later we said goodbye, and as she left I gazed after her. I knew that she felt her story was unique, and of course in some ways it was, but as I listened it seemed as if I had heard it a thousand times. It was not a story of intellectual doubt robbing her soul of faith, or of crushing persecution terrifying her heart into denial of God. It was not even a story of out-and-out rebellion – of her shaking a fist at heaven and partying to forget she had done it. No. She sighed more than ranted and quietly told me of the people, events, attitudes, and disappointments – some of them with herself – that had eventually snuffed out the flame of faith in her heart.

In the following days I found it hard to get Megan out of my mind, and I knew why. It was because of her very last comment to me. It would have been easier to take if it had been said with bitterness, but it wasn’t. She said it with sad resignation. “Rob, why would anybody want to be part of a faith like that?”

Almost every parent realizes that they have made mistakes, and yet the truth is that most of us have given the task of raising our children our very best shot. We know there are a hundred things we would do differently if we could have another go – though we have a sneaking suspicion that, even then, we’d just make different mistakes.

Most of us don’t need any more guilt. An old man looking back at almost three-quarters of a century of fatherhood said, “Parenting is fifty per cent fear and fifty per cent guilt.” I agree – except I think he’s probably a little light on the guilt side. So many parents live with guilt. At times it suffocates us, enslaves us, and finally it consumes us. We feel totally responsible for the actions and attitudes of our children.

Logic doesn’t help. The fact that our son is now a thirty-seven-year-old lumberjack with four kids of his own doesn’t stop us wondering whether, if we’d pushed him a bit harder with his homework when he was thirteen, he would now be a brain surgeon. One woman wrote to me and said, “Guilt comes attached to the placenta.” But guilt like that rarely helps us, and sometimes we have to remember that even God has trouble with his children.

My own children are now grown and married and I thank God for what he’s done in their lives. But there have been many tears along the way, some “if onlys”, and while perhaps no “haunting regrets”, nevertheless a wish that when Dianne and I first became parents somebody had at least warned us about some of the issues that we’ll consider together in this book. It matters.

When you pray for your children, ask God to protect them from the dozens of pitfalls that await them in life: greed, easy sex, illicit drugs, alcohol abuse, and a hundred other traps. Ask him to help them as they face those who would ridicule their faith and trash it before their eyes. If persecution comes to them, pray that they will have the courage to face it. But, when you have done all that, pray about another danger – the thing that destroys the seed of faith in millions of young people: ask that your children may come through their early experience of Christianity without them ending up hating God.

I realize that this may not seem a very ambitious prayer. I understand that your heartfelt prayer is that they will end up loving God – of course. Nevertheless, there are millions of parents who would settle for an adult child who at least had a heart that was still open to God.

But, before we start, let me say this. If our children are grown, it may be hard to read a book like this because we feel that perhaps for us it’s too late. If this is your situation, let me remind you of that wonderful verse from the book of Joel: “I will give you back the years the locusts have eaten.”4 It is never too late to reach out to an adult child; never too late to say sorry; never too late to pray.

Over the past ten years I have spoken to tens of thousands of people across the world at “Bringing Home the Prodigals” events. And I have discovered that many “prodigals” never did turn their back on God – they rejected something else. This book is an exploration of what that something may be. And if we can discover that “something”, then perhaps we can prevent many children from going down...