I’ve spent my adult life studying what God’s grace looks like coming through us in relationships. I wrote the book Grace Based Parenting to show moms and dads how to create an atmosphere of God’s grace in their home and still have clear boundaries and consequences. I wrote the book Grace Filled Marriage to show couples how to turn God’s heart into the defining feature of their love story. That’s because for most marriages, the missing ingredient isn’t love; it’s grace.
I can define grace-based parenting in one sentence: it’s treating your kids the same way God treats you … with grace. A grace-filled marriage is simply treating your spouse the same way God treats his spouse (the church) … graciously.
Churches play a strategic role in this. We all recognize that some kids show up at our churches without their parents. They may come from homes where their parents are indifferent or even hostile to spiritual things. Obviously, we want to meet these kids’ spiritual needs as much as we possibly can.
But we must not forget that Deuteronomy 6:4-9 makes it clear that it is the parents who have the primary job of discipling their children. We need to be careful that we don’t make it easy for the parents who are bringing their children to church to abdicate their spiritual role to us. They need to know what their biblical responsibilities are, and that we’re there to coach them along the way. The family pastor at our church borrowed the tagline from Home Depot. He says, “You can do it. We can help.”
A Grace-Based Home
The most important way that a church can help parents create homes that are havens of God’s grace for their children is to model what that looks like. This modeling cannot be occasional or accidental. It has to represent the heart of everything we do as a church. Ministries, as well as our homes, need to be entities that are consistently guided by God’s truth while at the same time tempered by his grace.
The second way we can help parents understand their role is to provide specific training in grace-based parenting. When we create an atmosphere of grace in our church, and provide on-going training on grace-based parenting, it makes it so much easier for parents to know to how to take it all home. Within this atmosphere of grace, the church can then come alongside the parents to coach them on specific areas where they need to bring spiritual leadership and insight into their children’s daily lives. Some examples of what I’m talking about are:
• Raising them in concert with the unique personality style God has assigned to them (a good tool for this is The Kids Flag Page).
• Teaching them about sex as well as walking with them through their childhood and teenage years as they make their way across the sexual minefield of their culture.
• Teaching them how to handle money.
• Teaching them how to handle relationships effectively.
• Taking advantage of their transition into their teenage years by creating certain rite of passage privileges and responsibilities.
• Helping them leverage their unique spiritual gifts.
• Equipping them to thrive in a hostile culture.
• Preparing them to be grace-filled husbands and wives in the future.
• Preparing them to launch into adulthood.
If you would like to go deeper into this discussion on how to create a more deliberate give-and-take between your church and the families that show up each Sunday, I think you’d enjoy the quick-read book I put together on the subject entitled: Connecting Church and Home: A Grace Based Partnership.
Connecting Church and Home is about a grace-based partnership that raises the spiritual stock value of both entities for the kid’s benefit and God’s glory. Church professionals, executives and lay leaders that read it in concert will gain a common language and clearer big-picture and for what they’re trying to do to equip their families. Moms and dads will gain practical (for some, brand-new) handles to use as they exercise their spiritual influence to send truly great Jesus-followers from their back rooms and bedrooms into the future.
There have been lots of churches that have used this book to frame the vital dialogue they need to have on this subject. They have each member of their staff read a chapter and then they add on a discussion about it at their staff meeting. It’s not uncommon for some members of the staff to push back on what they’re reading in the first few chapters because so many people in ministry get nervous when it comes to a discussion on applied grace (they unwittingly think it’s about no boundaries, no consequences, letting people get away with murder, kindness on crack, etc.).
Once they get a few chapters under their belt, they will start to see how truth and grace should always be simultaneous features of everything we do in ministry.
Churches are going to spend a lot of time, effort and money doing the work of the ministry. When we factor in the strategic role marriages and parent/child relationships play—and prioritize our efforts accordingly—not only do we ramp up the spiritual health of our congregation, but we raise the chances many times over that there will be a passionate generation of Jesus-followers to hold up the banner of the gospel long after we’re gone.
The reason this is so important is because strong churches don’t make strong families; strong families make strong churches.
Dr. Tim Kimmel is the founder and executive director of Family Matters, whose goal is to see families transformed by God’s grace into instruments of reformation and restoration. For inquiries regarding speaking, interviews and other appearances for Dr. Tim Kimmel, please contact Family Matters at 1-800-467-4596 or Family@familymatters.net.
