Author: admin

Last week during our Bible time with the kids, we were talking about God’s love for us and what exactly that means. As the conversation progressed, I asked my kids (ages 6 and 5), “And how do we even know God loves us?” For purposes of that particular conversation, I was simply expecting them to answer that the Bible tells us about God’s character. Instead, my daughter said, “Because you told us so.”

My reply left my lips before I could ponder the full implications of what I was about to declare.

“Oh, no, no, no. I never want you to believe things about God just because I told you so.”

Internal gasp. Did I really just cast a shadow of doubt on my parental credibility? Did I just make my kids think they should take my spiritual guidance with a grain of salt? Did I just lead my kids to stop caring what I have to say about God?

My daughter looked at me with a bit of impatience.

“Mommy, what I mean is that God told the people who wrote the Bible, then they told people, then eventually your parents told you and you told us.”

At that moment, I had a choice. I could have taken the easy road and bought back my statement by saying, “Oh, OK. In that case, yes”…or I could have committed to the underlying value in my original statement by pushing her to think more critically about what she had just said.

I chose the latter.

“I like how you’re starting to think about this. But what about kids who have parents who don’t believe in God, and their parents are passing down that teaching? They don’t believe God exists because their parents told them that’s what’s true. God either exists or He doesn’t, but we can’t determine that just based on what our parents say…different parents say different things. Do you see the problem?”Continue reading

I’m very excited to share with you today the official website for my forthcoming book, Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side: 40 Conversations to Help Them Build a Lasting Faith!

CLICK HERE TO SEE IT!

I turned the manuscript over to my publisher in April, but in the last few months, I’ve been getting it to prospective endorsers (both apologetics professionals and “regular” parents) and building the site. You’d be amazed how much time all that takes. So today feels like a big milestone…to finally present it to you, my loyal blog readers!

As you’ll see when you click over, I’ve been incredibly blessed to receive endorsements for the book from several apologists I greatly admire. The foreword was written by J. Warner Wallace, author of Cold-Case Christianity and God’s Crime Scene. If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know how much I love Det. Wallace’s work. When he offered to write the foreword for my book, I really couldn’t believe it. He was very generous with his kind words in the foreword, and you can read an excerpt under “Endorsements” (I’ll post the full foreword closer to launch date).

Now, all of this said, I didn’t want to write a post where I just pointed you to the new site and asked you to pre-order if you like what you see. I wanted to make this fun, so I’ve developed a self-assessment quiz to go with this announcement:

What kind of Christian parent are you?

Here’s how it works. I believe there are four factors that determine what kind of Christian parent you are: time, the importance you place on your kids growing up to be Christ-followers, how necessary you feel working on your kids’ spiritual development at home is, and how knowledgeable about Christianity you are.

For each of these factors below, figure out which of the two profiles best describes you. Write the letter down. When you’re done, you should have a four-letter profile (e.g., TING). (This is similar to how a Myers-Briggs test works, if you’ve done that before.) Then scroll down the results section to find your profile. I’ll describe you a bit from the quiz and then explain how my book can help YOU specifically!

The quiz shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes and (warning!) it might really make you think.

 

FACTOR 1: TIME

How much available time do you have for developing your kids’ spiritual life at home (praying together, having meaningful faith conversations, and studying the Bible outside of church)?

1. I wouldn’t say I have tons of time (who does?) but, realistically, there are various places in our family’s week where we can put intentional effort into our kids’ spiritual development (that doesn’t mean you necessarily are putting the time in, but that you could).

Give yourself: T

2. Close to zero, or negative. I’m stretched to the max between what’s required of the kids at school, extracurricular activities, and/or my work schedule. It feels like my only free time is in the bathroom, and even there someone or something usually needs my attention.

Give yourself: M

 Continue reading

In conjunction with my book coming out in March, I’ll be doing several speaking events and seminars. In those events, I’ll be explaining to parents the key faith challenges that their kids will encounter, and what they need to do to equip their kids with a faith that’s ready for those challenges.

Last week, one of the event coordinators sent me a couple of questions that her prospective attendees had sent in response to the outline of my talk. The parents who had seen the outline wanted to be sure I included information on how kids will encounter challenges to their faith. In other words, it’s one thing to have a general understanding that challenges lurk in the world, but it’s another thing to be able to put your finger on what, specifically, we’re talking about.

Today I want to give you a bunch of very practical ways your own kids will encounter challenges to their faith. There are many others, but this is a list to just get you thinking. If you don’t believe your kids are being challenged on their faith (or will be soon), I pray this opens your eyes.

 

1. Your kids’ own thoughts.

Who has never had doubts about their faith simply based on their own life experiences? Even if you kept your kids in a tiny bubble for 18 years so they would never encounter an external challenge to their faith (something neither possible nor desirable), questions would still naturally arise. How do I know an “invisible” God is actually there? Why is there so much bad stuff in the world if God is good? Why am I trapped in this tiny bubble? The list goes on.

 

2. Other kids.

With fewer Christian adults in America, there are now fewer kids being raised as Christians as well. Just as we want to raise our kids with a belief in Jesus, most atheists want to raise their kids with a belief that God doesn’t exist. If your kids are in a public school, they will certainly hear conflicting comments from other kids about Christianity…and friends are powerful influencers.

What if you send your kids to a private Christian school? They’ll probably encounter fewer challenges from friends, but that doesn’t mean they won’t encounter challenges at all. My own kids go to a private Christian school and last year a Kindergartener told them that only her mom believes in God—she believes “in science,” like her dad.

Wherever you engage with other kids—school, extracurricular activities, and even church (see number 17)—your kids may very well encounter challenges to their faith.

 

3. School teachers.

While public school teachers are supposed to be objective, it should surprise no one that such objectivity doesn’t always play out in practice. I received an email from a parent a few weeks ago saying that her daughter mentioned something about her faith in class one day and the teacher replied, “You believe all that stuff?” The girl was embarrassed and the mom who emailed me wondered how to talk to her child about the issue of respecting authority figures (like teachers) while understanding they may also be wrong.Continue reading

With the start of the new school year, we’ve begun reading through the Bible together as a family again (see this post if you want to know more about what we’re doing).

One reason I love the children’s Bible we’re using is that it includes far more stories and much more detail than most children’s Bibles I’ve seen. That means we’ve had the opportunity to dig deeper into Genesis than our young kids have ever dug before. And there’s a running theme to what they’re noticing about these new stories:

There’s a lot of really strange stuff in the Bible.

For example, we’ve been reading stories like Abraham entertaining angels, angels striking a crowd with blindness, Lot’s wife turning into salt, God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Jacob wrestling with God.

I hope you don’t think it’s irreverent to label these and many other Bible stories as strange. The definition of strange is “unusual or surprising in a way that is hard to understand; not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien.”

To acknowledge and discuss with our kids that the Bible is strange is not irreverent…it’s actually extremely important when preparing them to engage with a secular world. In this post, we’ll take a look at why that’s the case, and how to discuss biblical strangeness with your kids.Continue reading

Each day in America, it’s getting a little less normal to be a Christian family.

Study after study shows the trend of fewer people identifying as Christians, and more people identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” Frankly, I don’t think most of us even need the studies to find that out. It’s blatantly obvious in the media, in the government, in schools, and online.

America is indeed changing, and that fact has many implications for Christian parents. In this post, I’m going to look at six of those implications.

Before we jump in, however, I’d like to make something clear: This is not a doomsday post. I’m not shouting from the internet roof tops to prepare for cultural disaster and that Christians have suddenly become a tiny, persecuted minority. Not at all.

This post, however, is an acknowledgment that our culture is steadily changing, and the direction of that change is away from Christianity. The more we understand about the nature of these changes and how they may impact our kids’ faith development, the more effective we can be in our role as Christian parents.

So what will it mean for Christian parents if there are fewer Christians in America? Here are six major implications.Continue reading

In my last post, I described J. Warner Wallace’s new book, God’s Crime Scene, and how it looks at the case for God’s existence based on cumulative evidence from the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the design of life, our experience of consciousness, free will, and morality.

When I published a link to that post on my blog’s Facebook page, one of my atheist readers commented that he is “more than skeptical because, of [the author’s] 8 chapters, 6 can be easily explained away.”

I’m really glad he made that comment, because it brings up a very important point that your kids need to understand about the evidence “for” God:

All of the evidence that Christians believe points to God can have non-God (“naturalistic”) explanations.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that your kids understand this. I recently received an email from a mom of a teenage son who started studying evolution and became an atheist after he was surprised to learn about all the naturalistic explanations for the development of life.

This happens to a lot of kids who grow up in Christian homes where they aren’t exposed to secular views. The eventual shock factor when they encounter naturalistic explanations is enough to torpedo an entire childhood of faith.

Our kids should never leave home without having been exposed to these other views.

It’s also important that kids not only understand other views, but have a framework with which to evaluate them. Otherwise, you’ll be sending them swimming in a tidal wave of information.

With respect to the evidence “for” God, here’s a simple framework even the youngest kids can and should understand. I’ve woven an example throughout the five points that can help you easily teach these concepts.Continue reading