Right from the beginning of the book it was clear about what they were trying to do, it says:
Time, moments, and milestones are our strategy for imparting your faith to your children by building a new gospel-centered and sustainable family rhythm.
- Modeling. Serving as a godly example for your family, living out your genuine walk with God, and demonstrating true repentance where and when you fall short.
- Family Discipleship Time. Creating intentional time built into the rhythm of the family's life for the purpose of thinking about, talking about, and living out the gospel.
- Family Discipleship Moments. Capturing and leveraging opportunities in the course of everyday life for the purpose of gospel-centered conversations.
- Family Discipleship Milestones. Marking and making occasions to celebrate and commemorate significant spiritual milestones of God’s work in the life of the family and child.
The book and it's chapters follow this framwork. I appreciated that at the start of each chapter we got to hear from each of the authors and what this sort of looks like in their houesholds. I really love these type of realistic pictures of what the theory looks like, as I feel like then it is more attaninable.
The content of this book was good and straightforward. There were no real silver bullets, but consistency over time seemed to be the main goal. It has some great quotes about parents being responsible for raising their child in the lord, mostly from Spurgeon but from others like Elizabeth Elliot, Baxter, Luther and Calvin. These sort of set the bar high, or helped raise the idea of day to day parenting to be something more than just getting kids to bed on time.
With modeling the idea is that you as a parent needs to be reliable (and show repentance when your not) and relatiable (be in relational proximity). When spending discipleship time with your kids they say you should be consistent and intential with what you do with them. And then in the less structured time, in the moments where conversations and questions natrually arise, we are to use these to speak of God, His character and who we are in relation to him. We can encourage the fruits of the spirit when we see them and show them grace when needed. The idea of marking milestones may applea to the more sentimental parent, but I do think rituals you make as a family can have a lasting impact and things that we celebrate can show God's faithfulness over time.
This parent book seemed like it could have been adapted to be some sort of parenting course. There is like a note at the back if you do use it at your church for that. It did feel like half of each of the chapters was made up of exercises and questions to help you reflect and plan more things with your family. As I ran my eyes over these, I thought these could be helpful, but I am a bit of slacker when it comes to those type of questions/activities at the end of chapters - I guess you do get out of it what you put in. It had things like blank templates for a weekly discipleship plan and a family mileston plan for you to fill in, with examples. Plus for reference it had some helpful systematic/verses of different topics about feelings or behaviours your children may face. It all probably could be useful to do in a group setting and to be accountable to actually do the activies.
Also, there was a great quote in here, which I took and used in a different context for Life Groups. In discipling childen growing into adults, and in adult Life Groups, we want everyone eventually to be autonomus in their learning, they put it nicely like this:
This is how people learn best. You don’t want them to just remember the true things you say; you want to find a way to lead them to the point where a true conclusion comes out of their own mouths without you having to put it there. Your goal is not just to feed them from the word of God, but to teach them how to feed themselves. You are training them to not need you, but to recognize how they will always desperately need God.
The book did affect me in my use of time when my boys were home after school. I was challenged with assessing how much time I did spend with them and the tension I felt in working while they are home. This plays into other issues I may have, such as questioning whether I am working enought, and how controlled I am by my emails. The book made me stop and rethink how I am using these unstructured moments with my kids, noting that I am in quite a privellege position to be home when they are, when most parents are still at work till 5pm.
I did appreaciate this book, it was clear in what it was trying to do and strutured to help that ordly person who would do the activites. I did however perfer Habits of the Household a bit better, for whatever it resonated with me a little more.
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