Many years ago a song/poem by Sammy Davis Jnr with that title was very popular. Society often wonders about the next generation, yet they have not built what they inherit!
Children are precious to God. They begin life with enormous potential for being delightful and positive human beings who live life with faith, hope and love, and contribute to the life of human community, and to God’s redemptive purposes for His creation. It grieves me to see that our society gives the message that children should just enjoy themselves and do whatever they want, and they quickly learn to expect that. Many parents struggle with issues of discipline and control.
How then can faith formation happen in the life of children? As a church we must have a cohesive pattern whereby faith and the values that embody it, are passed on from generation to generation. This has profoundly broken down in western culture and in the church, and so the challenge is all the more acute.
My encouragement to parents would be as follows:
1. Be strong in your own Christian faith and priorities. The children will be no more committed than you are (unless they are exceptional). Live it. Model it. Do they ever see you pray? Read the Bible? Do you ever talk about how it affects you?
2. Make church a family thing, not an individual thing. Children today have too many choices. They actually don’t know what’s good for them.
That’s why they have parents!
3. Make faith a positive thing. After all, the fact that God loves us is the most positive message in the world. They won’t learn that on TV.
4. Open the Bible with them. If not every day at least some days a week. Every time you do you are putting in a building block of godly character and helping shape their minds. Do you want your children shaped by God’s message to us or by the advertisers and manipulators of western culture? It’s a parents’ choice!
5. Don’t let your children hold you to ransom! Sometimes when they don’t get their own way they will test you out so that it makes it easier to give them what they want, for the sake of peace in the house. Stay strong. Character is built in children through them not getting things their own way, but learning to handle disappointment and to obey their parents!
Jesus tells us that children are precious. It is a beautiful age. Jesus says we all need to become like children if we want to enter heaven. They can have a very trusting and believing simplicity. That is wonderful, yet it is also easily abused. The privilege entrusted to parents is to channel and direct that trusting simplicity (while it lasts) towards a lifestyle honouring to their God.
Such parenting is not easy but it is possible. May we be a community that empowers both parents and children to be who they are called to be. As Sammy Davis says, let’s not blame the kids! They are normally copying adults!