Author: admin

It is with much excitement that I’m finally able to tell you about my new book today and announce that it’s available for pre-order at christianbook.com, bn.com, and amazon.com!

Many of you read my first book, Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, which came out last year. It was written to equip Christian parents with an understanding of 40 important faith challenges kids will encounter today. It covered questions across the major subject areas of God, truth and worldviews, Jesus, the Bible, and Science. To follow Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, I wanted to write books that dig deeper into one of these major subjects at a time, giving parents the ultimate resource set for raising kids with a deeply rooted faith that’s ready for a secular world.

My new book, Talking with Your Kids about God, kicks off a series that will do exactly that! It covers 30 new and deeper conversations specifically about God that parents and kids must have today. The next book, Talking with Your Kids about Jesus, will be released next year. Further titles in the series are to be determined, but the third will probably be Talking with Your Kids about the Bible.

Talking with Your Kids about God is written in the same easy-to-understand, parent-to-parent style as Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side and chapters are still mercifully short (about 5 pages each). But there’s an awesome new feature in this series: Every chapter has a step-by-step conversation guide with discussion questions, making it even easier to have these conversations with your kids!

Not only that…each chapter methodically builds upon the last, making this a cumulative learning experience that can be used as a curriculum in homes, church classes, youth groups, small groups, and homeschools. Content is adaptable for use with kids from elementary age through high school.Continue reading

I’ve written over 250 blog posts here since 2011. People still come across my old posts by searching for something on Google, so nearly every day I receive new comments on a wide variety of old posts. Many of the comments are from atheists.

As I read the latest comments this week, I noticed a running theme.

The vast majority of atheists who comment here don’t seem to want God to exist.

They talk about the “freedom” of no longer believing in God, how nice it is to be self-reliant, how great it feels to get rid of guilt, how they’ve found more meaning in life without God, how they can better enjoy all that life has to offer, how the world will be a better place when religion is gone, and so on.

If I saw God—and a godless existence—in the way most of these commenters do, I wouldn’t want to believe He exists either.

But I don’t think those who prefer the atheistic picture of reality have given it enough thought; no one should want atheism to be true if we really draw out the implications of what that means for our existence. If people considered that more deeply, I think there would be more atheists saying, “I sure wish God existed, but there just isn’t enough evidence!” rather than, “There’s no evidence for God…and that sure is great!”

To be clear, wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. But this isn’t a post about the evidence for the truth of any one worldview. This is a post about appropriately understanding the logical implications of a worldview.

With more than 60 percent of young adults rejecting their Christian faith today, and many becoming atheists, I have to wonder how many did so thinking atheism was actually more attractive…and not understanding these implications.

As parents, we should not only show our kids why there’s good reason to believe God exists, but why they should be thrilled that He does.

Let’s see what reality would look like in a world without God.Continue reading

In our backyard we used to have a beautiful lime tree.

One day I noticed that a thorny vine of some kind had started growing around it. It looked enough like the rest of the tree that I figured it was just another stage of growth. A quick Google search told me thorns often grow around citrus trees, so I didn’t think much more about it.

Then, within a couple of months, the thorns took over the tree and it began to die. A gardener looked at it and said these particular thorns weren’t part of the tree at all. It turns out they were a foreign invader.

Had the foreign invader looked more foreign, I would have realized the need to uproot it immediately. But because it shared surface-level similarities with the tree, I was fooled into thinking it was all the same thing.

I often write here about the threat hostile atheists pose to kids’ faith today. But atheism is not the only threat. In fact, there’s a particular threat that can be even more dangerous because it less obviously requires attention. It’s like the thorny plant that gradually killed my lime tree because I didn’t even realize it was foreign.

That threat is called progressive Christianity.Continue reading

I don’t normally write just to moms—my readers are both moms and dads—but in honor of Mother’s Day this one is specifically for all the moms out there.

For the past few days, I’ve been sick with some kind of flu/cold combination.

Yesterday, I pulled myself out of bed while feeling like I had a thousand pounds on top of me. As every mom knows, being sick doesn’t exempt you from getting the kids to school. So, I plodded down the stairs in my signature “I’m sick” robe and went to work making lunches.

After I finished making a hot dog and beans concoction, my daughter informed me she left her lunchbox at school…which had her thermos in it. The thermos was the only container that would have worked for what I had just made. I had to start all over and quickly get a sandwich together instead.

In stomped my younger daughter, who was devastated that she went to bed the night before with three braids in her hair, yet didn’t have the waves she hoped for in the morning. She blamed me for not braiding correctly and, in a huff, accidentally knocked a full glass of water all over the floor.

Not to be outdone, my son yelled from upstairs that he didn’t have a clean uniform to wear.

It was like the opening scene of a bad 1980s sitcom about wacky family life.

Rather than laugh, however, I lost it. I wasn’t sure if I felt more like yelling or crying, so it all just came out at once. But in the midst of the pandemonium, I suddenly had this thought:

This is the kind of day that makes moms think the stuff I write about is impossible to do.

Teach my kids how we know the Gospels are based on eye-witness testimony? I can’t even get lunch right.

Engage in nuanced conversations about evolution? My son doesn’t even have a clean shirt.

Discuss the evidence for God’s existence? My daughter just wants wavy hair.

Whether we’re sick or just getting through a normal day, it takes a lot to keep the family ship moving. When you’re already overwhelmed by daily life, reading my blog and/or book may seem like a giant “piling on” of what else should be happening.

If that’s how you feel, this post is for you. Here are the four things I think overwhelmed moms most need to hear.Continue reading

A few months ago, a blog reader sent me some information on an atheist summer camp. I was fascinated to read all that they are doing to promote an atheistic worldview with their young campers. It immediately made me wonder how Christian camps stack up. After all, about 40 percent of all U.S. teens have been a camper at least once at a religious summer camp—making camp a perfect opportunity to give large numbers of kids an understanding of why there’s good reason to believe Christianity is true and how to defend their faith in a secular world.

To find out how well Christian summer camps are imparting that critical knowledge, I Googled “Christian summer camps” and visited the websites of 100 camps across the country. I spent hours going through those sites to see what they offer and shared the findings here. If you haven’t seen that post before, I highly recommend you read it in its entirety, but the bottom line was this:

Out of 100 camps, just TWO explicitly mentioned anything related to teaching Christian worldview in the context of other worldviews and how to engage with our secular culture. It wasn’t their focus, but at least it was part of the program.

The rest focused on things like “wholesome Christian atmosphere,” “exciting Christian campfire programs,” and “enthusiastic speakers.”

At the end of that post, I noted that there are two fantastic programs for teens that actually focus on equipping kids to engage critically with other worldviews: Faith Ascent’s Base Camp and Summit Ministries.

With summer around the corner, I reached out to these camps to see if they would be willing to offer scholarships to readers of this blog.

I am thrilled to say that both have agreed to generously offer you the opportunity to win a full scholarship for your child to attend camp this summer! Each one is hosting a short essay contest to pick the winner(s).

Let me tell you briefly about each program so you can 1) figure out how to get your kids to these wonderful places this summer (or in the future), and/or 2) apply for the scholarships!Continue reading

There’s a new hero in town. He’s thought to be all-powerful, always right, and everyone’s best friend. If anyone says something that could possibly be construed as being opposed to this hero, they are to be quickly shamed and put in their place. You see, if the world wants to move forward productively and intelligently—or so the story goes—they must get in line behind this hero.

He is today’s “way and truth.”

His name is science.

And tens of thousands of people marched for him last weekend in the “March for Science.”

If it sounds funny to give human attributes to the concept of science, don’t blame me. I’m only talking about science in the same kind of terms that the secular world effectively does.

To be sure, this hero isn’t actually new. He’s been promoted as such for a few centuries. But his popularity is skyrocketing today. He’s become a mainstream idol and he’s literally being paraded as a replacement for God.

In this post, we’ll look at how the secular world has turned science into an idol, and how we can teach kids not to bow to it.

To be clear: This post is about combating the idol of science…not science itself. In fact, if you read this and conclude that I’m opposed to science because I used the words combat and science in the same post, it’s a good sign you’ve fallen prey to the very mentality I’m describing.Continue reading

This month’s issue of Scientific American magazine features an article by atheist Michael Shermer entitled, “What Would It Take to Prove the Resurrection?” It’s boldly subtitled, “How to think about claims, even the Resurrection.”

Wow! This article in a popular magazine says it’s going to teach us how to think about the resurrection. I couldn’t wait to read it.

It was even worse than I thought it would be.

Every year at Easter time, secular publications feature articles on the resurrection, and every year they’re cringe-worthy.

In this post, I’ll highlight two key ways this particular article actually teaches bad critical thinking, then provide a three-point framework for helping your kids think more logically about the subject.

By the way, if you have time for Easter baskets, egg hunts and egg dying, you have time to have these conversations with your kids. Seriously. This is important.

Bad Thinking 1: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Shermer stakes his argument against the resurrection on a favorite motto of skeptics: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you haven’t heard this before, it’s a standard line skeptics throw out as an attempted conversation stopper. It’s meant to wave off any supposed evidence for a miracle as inadequate for demonstrating that something as improbable as a miracle actually occurred.

This idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, however, falls squarely in the category of things that sound good but don’t hold up to logical scrutiny.Continue reading