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I wasn’t expecting to write this post until March 1—the official release date of my book—but something exciting happened…

Amazon and Barnes and Noble got the book in stock early and it is NOW AVAILABLE!!

Yes, that gets two exclamation points, because I am so excited to finally be able to share the book with you. I started writing it in September 2014, so it seems like today was a long time coming.

What other exciting release day news do I have to share? I’m glad you asked! Check this out (make sure to read all of it…details are at the end on how you can win one of a bunch of signed copies I’m giving away):

 

1. Early reviewers have had all kinds of great things to say about the book. Several reviews are already up on Amazon. One person emailed me yesterday to say, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know I finished your book last week and do not have enough good things to say about it. In 20 years of Children’s Ministry I have never read a book that I would tell every parent they need to read, until now…As a dad and a ministry leader I will be championing this book every chance I get.” I am so encouraged to hear how the book is helping people already!

And, in case you missed it before, J. Warner Wallace, author of Cold-Case Christianity and God’s Crime Scene, wrote the foreword, and the book has additionally been endorsed by Nancy Pearcey (author of Total Truth and Finding Truth), Sean McDowell (author of 15+ books, including A New Kind of Apologist, which came out this week as well), Melissa Cain Travis (professor and author of the Young Defenders series of apologetics books for kids), and Brett Kunkle (nationally known speaker from Stand to Reason). I’m greatly honored to receive the support of these amazing apologists.

 

2. The book has a retail price of $14.99, but enough preorders came in that Amazon and Barnes and Noble are both offering the book for just $8.56! I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s a great deal. You’ll get 272 pages that cover 40 different critical faith topics to discuss with your kids, written specifically for parents, in an easy-to-understand way, saving you an enormous amount of research time…for less than the price of a movie ticket.

 

3. My publisher, Harvest House, is offering even greater discounts if you’d like to order a case (48 copies) or more for your church, private school, homeschool group, camp, or any other organization. Just send me an email through my contact form and I’ll put you in touch with the right person.

 

4. I’m doing a 10-week author read-along of the book in a private Facebook group. Would you like to read my book in community with like-minded Christian parents? Would you like to do that without having to get a babysitter? Would you like to be able to ask me questions about what you’re reading as you go? Would you like to have accountability for keeping up with your reading and implementing what you’re learning at home? All that is exactly what the read-along is for, and much more. Read on for details, and how you can win a signed copy of the book by joining the group today (it’s totally free!).Continue reading

The other day I was reflecting on how much time I spent in Sunday school and youth groups growing up…and how little I understood about the Christian faith by the time I left home. For some reason, I decided to calculate roughly how much time that actually was.

I scratched out the following on a piece of paper:

• Kindergarten through 12^th grade = 13 years (I went to church from the time I was a baby, but I just wanted to include the core learning years in my calculation)
• 52 Sundays per year
• 90% attendance rate, to allow for illnesses or being out of town

13 years of Sunday school x 52 Sundays per year x .90 attendance rate = 608 hours

608 HOURS.

And that’s not even counting the corresponding worship services…that’s just the Christian education time!

I don’t know about you, but that number made my jaw drop.

I spent more than 600 hours in church growing up, but by the time I left home, here’s all I really understood about Christianity:

People go to heaven or hell depending on whether or not they believe in Jesus. Once you accept Jesus, you are saved. Christians need to be as good as possible and not sin just to be forgiven. It’s important to tell others about Jesus so they can be saved too.

The result is that I lived the next 12 years with an incredibly blah, shallow faith. I didn’t actually lose my faith—as do more than two-thirds of other kids who grow up going to church—but it was only hanging there by a thread.

Where did those 600+ hours of Christian education go? How can it be that so many kids spend this kind of time in church and don’t leave home with much more understanding of Christianity than could be taught in a week of church camp?

I think I know the answer.Continue reading

I’m counting the days now until Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side is officially released on March 1! It finally seems around the corner. Thanks so much to all of you who have already pre-ordered. It’s been the #1 new release in Amazon’s Christian apologetics category for the better part of the last two months! I’m thrilled to see that so many parents are excited to get better equipped for these important conversations with their kids.

For those of you who have pre-ordered or plan to order, I want to let you know that I’ll be posting details in a couple of weeks on a read-along I’ll be doing soon after the book comes out. I’ll be creating a private Facebook group where we’ll read through the book together over 10 weeks. Each week, we’ll read 4 chapters (about 20 pages) and I’ll lead a discussion of key points and answer questions you have. This will be a great opportunity to connect with other Christian parents, to learn in community, to stay motivated in your reading, to ask me any questions you have, and to stay connected after the read-along as a group committed to building a Christ-centered home! I’m really excited about it, and I hope you will be too. More details coming soon. In the meantime, let’s get back to the subject of this post.

Last month I shared the full introduction to the book here on the blog. Today I want to share a full chapter so you can see what the rest of the book is like (this will be the last full excerpt that I can share here). Following is Chapter 8: Is Faith in God the Opposite of Reason? This is a particularly important topic to be able to discuss with your kids given how regularly they’ll hear that being a Christian is irrational and unreasonable. I hope you enjoy this excerpt.

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Chapter 8: Is Faith in God the Opposite of Reason?

Our family went on a summer vacation when our twins were four and our youngest was two. Vacation with three young kids should really be called “that occasional week in your life when you take care of your kids in another location,” but I digress. We soon realized how limited we were in the kinds of activities the kids could do at that age, so we spent most of the week at the hotel swimming pool trying to teach our twins how to swim.

My daughter quickly figured out how to make her way through the water independently, but things didn’t go so smoothly for my son. He kept trying, but he was choking every time he came out of the water. He would pop up wailing, “I got water in my mouth and nose AGAIN!”

Each time, I reminded him, “You have to hold your breath! Don’t open your mouth under water. Hold your breath.” Then I would set him back on the edge of the pool to try again.

After a couple of days, I became exasperated. I couldn’t figure out why he refused to hold his breath—such a simple thing! But then a light bulb went on in my mind. My eyes must have been as big as saucers when I realized the likely problem.

“Wait… do you know what breath is?! Do you know what it means to hold your breath?”

He burst into tears. “NO! I don’t understand! WHAT is breath?”

I had practically beaten him over the head for two days with the words “hold your breath” and he didn’t even know what that meant. He kept jumping in the water, hoping he would figure it out, but came up struggling every time.

That experience made me reflect on how easy it is to incorrectly assume our kids (both big and small) understand words and concepts that are foundational to what we teach them. One extremely important example of this is a word that almost every Christian parent uses but rarely stops to define: faith.

I heard it over and over again growing up in church, and I hear Christians say it all the time today: “Just have faith.” But what does that mean? What exactly are we telling our kids to “just” have? Without further explanation, they can easily conclude over time that Christians are called to have a very simple, unexamined belief in God. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

But that’s not the only issue. The problem that Christians often use the word faith ambiguously has been exacerbated by the fact that atheists today are actively promoting their own definition—that faith is the opposite of reason. Even many Christians, unsure themselves of what biblical faith means, have started to buy this description. Without a strong footing in their own beliefs, they’ve retreated to an impenetrable spiritual fortress where they proudly respond that faith—not reason—is all they need.

Meanwhile, our kids eventually witness this cultural dialogue and feel the burden of shame for holding supposedly unreasonable beliefs. It has to stop.

Just as with my son’s swimming experience, this is a problem of definitions. The definition of faith and the definition of reason matter greatly in the Christian life. In this chapter, we’ll get to the bottom of what each word means.Continue reading

Yesterday, I saw the following post in a Christian Facebook group:

 

 My daughter is starting her second semester of college tomorrow. She got ahold of her syllabus and found the following quote from the professor.

“Except to one whose reason is blinded by unquestioning adherence to fundamentalist doctrine of creation, the evidence of the fossil record, with that of anatomy, embryology, biochemistry and genetics, compels a single conclusion: evolution is a fact.”

Any suggestions on how she should approach this?

 

If this is his daughter’s first time hearing about evolution (or at least secular views of it), it’s going to be a tough semester. Any suggestions on how she should “approach this” are at least a couple of years late.

I hear or see questions like this all the time. Unfortunately, in my experience, many (if not most) Christian parents aren’t tackling the topic of evolution at home. I know some would love to but are overwhelmed by the subject and don’t know where to start. I wrote 8 of 40 chapters in my book on the topics of creation and evolution views to help parents who feel this way (I also posted a giant resource page last week).

However, far more parents are simply disinterested in the topic and, consequently, have a limited understanding of why evolution is such a big deal. They have a general idea that evolution is a challenge to Christian faith, but don’t necessarily know the particulars of why. At one end of the spectrum, there are parents who don’t care to know because they think it’s enough to teach their kids that “evolution is wrong and the Bible is right.” At the other end of the spectrum, there are parents who don’t care to know because they think evolution and Christianity can seamlessly fit together.

Both of these approaches trivialize the impact that studying evolution can have on a child’s faith.    

Here’s why.

(Please note: There are many different uses of the term evolution. When I say evolution in this post, I’m talking about modern (“neo-Darwinian”) evolutionary theory in which all life descended from a single primitive species via natural selection acting on random DNA mutations. For more background on basics to understand about evolution, please see my post, 4 Key Points Christian Kids Need to Understand About Evolution.)

 

The Compelling Evidence for Evolution: Not Simple to Throw Out

When your kids first have the chance to hear the scientific case for evolution, it will likely be very convincing to them. Kids whose parents simply emphasize that evolution is wrong because it’s “not what the Bible says” (without further discussion) may well be left in a faith crisis when they eventually engage with the subject in depth. That’s exactly what happened to me. Here’s an excerpt from my chapter on the evidence for evolution, in which I share my own experience:

 

I didn’t learn about the evidence for evolution until I was in my 30s. When I did, it rocked my lifelong faith in a matter of hours.

 When I was growing up, evolution wasn’t yet a subject taught in most public schools; I never encountered it academically. The only time I heard it mentioned was when my church youth group leader once laughed it off, saying, “Yeah, like we all really came from apes!”  I remember thinking that was a pretty far-fetched idea. In college, I studied economics, so I came no closer to evolutionary theory as a young adult. It was very much off my radar until I had kids and decided I should learn about it for their sake. Continue reading

At the end of my last post (If Your Kids Are Someday Shocked by the Claims of Skeptics, You Didn’t Do Your Job), I promised to follow up with a “master list” of my recommended resources for helping you get better equipped for Christian parenting in a secular world.

It’s taken me a while to get this together, but I think you’ll find it was worth the wait: I now have an entire section of my site (6 pages) devoted to these recommendations! In the future, you can get to it at any time by clicking the menu item at the top labeled Resources.

I really encourage you to take some time and click through each of the links below to discover books that will help you deepen your understanding of the case for Christianity so you can share that knowledge with your kids.

They need it.

Without further ado, here you go! Click on the links below that best describe your interests.Continue reading

Popular Christian rapper Jahaziel made the news this week when he released a statement renouncing his faith (you can read the full message here). As I read his statement, I was really struck by something…the utter predictability of every claim he made against Christianity.

His deconversion statement reads like a play-by-play from the “2015 Internet Guide to Why Christianity Isn’t True.” I have to admit that after I read it, my jaded side initially reacted with a mental shoulder shrug: “Nothing new here. Same tired set of claims.”

But then I realized that’s the same mental shoulder shrug I make at about 95% of blog comments I receive from skeptics of Christianity these days. That’s not because I’m somehow better than those comments, or because those comments aren’t raising important questions that should be answered.

It’s simply because I’ve spent the last few years making myself aware of the challenges to Christianity, reading what both Christians and skeptics say about those challenges, and concluding repeatedly that the case for the truth of Christianity is powerfully strong.

It occurred to me when reading Jahaziel’s statement that this is precisely the position we want our kids to be in by the time they leave home—where the challenges they hear from the world are nothing new, nothing shocking, nothing they haven’t heard some version of before…and nothing they haven’t had the opportunity to investigate with you.

That’s not as hard to accomplish as you might think.

The fact that these claims are so predictable means our job is both well-defined and achievable.Continue reading

With the rest of the world, I’ve felt deeply grieved over the recent terrorist attacks. I feel a true sense of despair that there is no end in sight to events like these.

If you’ve been online much lately, you’ve probably noticed the endless articles pointing fingers of blame for the attacks in all directions. As has been the case since 9/11, many of those fingers are pointing squarely at “religion.”

For example, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science Facebook page published a post that expressed condolences and stated, “Let us continue to be an opposition to religious fundamentalism!” This was followed by a “Don’t pray for Paris” meme which has been shared over 53,000 times.

Similarly, a cartoonist from Charlie Hebdo (the French magazine whose office has been the target of two terrorist attacks) published a drawing stating, “Friends from the whole world, thank you for #prayforparis, but we don’t need more religion! Our faith goes to music! Kisses! Life! Champagne and joy!”

These negative sentiments about religion in general are hardly new in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Ever since 9/11, atheist authors have used religious violence as a major impetus for their own war on religion (as an example that can be extracted from the title alone, consider Christopher Hitchens’ book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). Their conclusions are generally two-fold: 1) that religion is bad and 2) that religion is (consequently) false.

But terrorist attacks and other religious violence don’t tell us those two things at all.

In a world where such violence is increasingly becoming an issue, and where atheists are increasingly using that issue to challenge any notion of God, it’s important that our kids understand how to think critically about such claims. Note that this isn’t even about Islam specifically; it’s simply about what a person can or cannot conclude about religion based on the existence of religiously motivated violence.

Here’s what your kids should understand about the two erroneous conclusions that religion is bad and religion is false.Continue reading

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine as we waited for our kids to finish an after school activity. Our conversation at some point turned to the importance of taking your kids to church. For a moment, my friend paused in a deep thought, then looked at me pensively and said, “I just want to be sure my son has hope, you know? Without God, there’s just no hope.”

I nodded. I agreed. Without God, there is no hope.

But I’m concerned about the way I’ve been seeing Christians, like my friend, speak about that fact lately. Her comment was the latest in a string of related hope statements I’ve noticed in recent weeks as I’ve observed conversations between believers and unbelievers online.

The conversations go something like this. An atheist will state something opposed to a belief in God (this could be just about anything), and a well-meaning Christian will reply something like, “Without God, life is meaningless. We’re just an accident, we have no purpose, we’re all headed to nothingness, this universe doesn’t matter at all, and there’s no hope.” You can almost hear the Christian confidently slamming the case closed.

I believe that my friend and the other Christians I’ve seen discussing hope like this are well meaning, but are ultimately speaking of hope in a misleading (and possibly harmful) way.

Here’s why we, as Christians, and especially as Christian parents, need to be careful how we talk about hope.Continue reading