On Sunday Morning February 12 we had baby Grace dedicated to the Lord. In reality the dedication is more for Jenn and me as parents to commit publicly before God to raise Grace in a godly Christian environment, to set an example of a faithful follower of Christ and to teach her about Jesus Christ.
The act of dedication does not give her any special inroad to becoming a Christian. However, there is much value in our consistently showing her God's love and teaching her God's word, the Bible. She is a demonstration of God's undeserved favor to us and by placing her in a Christian home God has bestowed upon her grace as well.
I have observed over the years in Christian homes, particularly pastor's homes, that how the parents live influences greatly whether or not a child will later walk with the Lord. As a friend to many pastor's kids (PK's) I have seen all kinds of different outcomes among the kids. While I attended a Christian college I began asking myself what made such a big difference. I came to some tentative conclusions that I think have been born out since then.
Over the years I have watched closely every pastor's family I know. My conclusion is very straightforward. The kids who grew up watching their parents consistently live out their faith were attracted to the message of Christianity. If their parents live the same way at home as at church, if they showed the same values and had the same passion for God privately as in public, the kids generally did well. If the parents were inconsistent (read hypocrites) then the kids usually became jaded and cynical towards the Christian faith.
This held true for pastors' families as well as those families in the congregation. I was youth pastor in the same place for six years and have followed up with some of the families for the last five years since then and I have seen this hold true. If the kids started to go off track morally or spiritually my first area to begin questioning is what was going on at home. Inevitably I would find that there was some serious problems at home. It almost was a given. Sometimes the inconsistency was so glaring it was amazing to me that the parents themselves didn't see it.
Are there exceptions to this? Of course. There are times when parents do everything they can and their kids still make bad choices. Yet I think this is the extreme exception. However, I think that parents are quick to look outside the home for the answers to their kids issues because they are afraid to look at themselves and see that maybe some of the problem begin there. It could be that the parents are too rigid and won't let the kids be kids. It could be that the parents have no guidelines and the kids have no direction. Often it is the parents have one set of "stated" rules and another set that they live by. Nothing makes even me more cynical than that.
Of course the real issue having seen this for so much of my life is to not repeat it in my own family. That is the number one goal in my life right now. Will I be perfect? Yeah, right try again. I am not that diluded. But hopefully Grace will grow up seeing that her dad is trying to be the best man of God that I can be by God's grace. Fortunately that has been my experience in what I have observed in other families.
Parents don't have to be perfect. They won't be perfect. Yet the families that show consistent love and stability, have parents who love each other, set down reasonable and consistent guidelines, and try to live out what they believe generally have stable families and raise children who believe.
I don't write this as an inditement on anyone else. I write it as a challenge to myself to live up to what God has called me to be. Where and when I fall short I plead for God's grace to make up for my shortcomings. May I always strive to live up to what I believe.
Soli Deo Gloria!
3 comments:
i've tried to make this into a sensible response for days now, and it's just not working. here goes anyway:
the PK's i hang out with (read: ex-christians) have made peace with their parents, (family being a stronger bond) but still loathe the church they were raised in.
you'll be a hypocrite sometimes, because you're human. where it gets bad is when your kids become party to that hypocricy.
PK's get held to a higher standard, and people feel justified in it because they hold you to a higher parenting standard. so they come tattling to you with everything your kid's done wrong.
two obviously inappropriate responses: let s**t flow downhill (congregation > pastor > PK), or, teaching your kids to not get you in trouble at work (making them party to the hypocricy.
to say anything more would be going way outside the realm of things i know anything about, so i'll leave it at that.
I think that you are right about people holding PK's to a higher standard and that isn't right. Some kids can't sneeze without a person complaining to the parents. I think that you are also right that some parents (especially pastors) want to present their kids as perfect and never let their kids be kids or make a mistake.
That is a pretty sure-fire way to make kids bitter and angry. Pastors often have unreasonable expectations for their own kids which ends up just pushing them away. It is unfortunate if it takes until the kids are adults for the parents to realize what has happened.
As a parent i will need to stand between the kids and the congregation and shelter them from unnecessary or unfair criticism. Too often pastors will want to look good rather than take a stand and do what is right.
I got a little taste of it being a youth pastor and having cranky people come up to me and tell me that I needed to deal with these kids. I took heat for letting them wear hats in the building, running in the halls, playing games in the sanctuary or climbing over the pews.
Most of the times I very gently suggested to the people that they take an ex-lax and loosen up. Okay, I didn't exactly say that but I wasn't going to let cranky adults run kids out of the church just so the church could become a Christian museum where everything stayed perfect and untouched.
I think that was a little taste of what might happen to a pastor's family.
Of course there is just plain human will and desire that goes into the mix. One of my closest friends from college loves the church and still has a great relationship with Christ, his two sisters are doing well but his two brother walked away from the church and never looked back. Same parents, same family, same church situations.
I don't think there are any "givens" in raising kids and I realize that there are special challenges being a pastor. it is not inevitable that the kids will turn away from God and/or the church. But neither is it a given that they will be godly Christians either.
I do know several pastor's families that have avoided setting too high of a standard and have avoided letting the congregation raise their kids. It is like living in a glass house when you are a pastor and for some reason everyone thinks they have a right to tell you how you should raise your kids.
Honestly, my responsibility to raise Grace comes before my responsibilities as a pastor. I won't sacrifice one for the sake of the other and if it ever got to the point that a church situation was unhealthy for her spiritual growth and emotional well-being I would move on to another ministry or even step out of ministry completely until things could be corrected.
I think both biblically and personally this would be the right thing to do. I've known too many pastors that have said that they will just keep going and hope everything works itself out. It usually doesn't. This isn't one that has an easy answer and it is a daily issue that I will have to evaluate.
Well put, Adam. Speaking as a PK (and not ex-Christian, just Real Person - emphasis on REAL - with a much less strict view) who just unloaded 30 yrs worth of anger into a blog page now that my dad has finally retired....
It is so important to not forget the humanness of a child, and that that humanness is not something to be "corrected."
I was searching for links to illustrate my point and found an excellent page, with statistics that may be shocking to some, but not to me:
http://www.preacherskids.com/pages/articles_sub/article_watchful_eye.html
A bit of advice from a preacher's kid... don't preach at home. Sometimes the answers to things shouldn't be found in the Bible, but should be thoughtfully discussed so that the child can come to her own conclusions. It's one thing to live a "godly' life, quite another to simply follow Christ's example. The latter is much better.
Unfortunately, it's also all too rare in our churches today.
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