In a piece for Her.meneutics, Jennifer Grant cautions parents against trying to “bully their kids into belief,” writing: “Between the extremes of bullying our children into faith and neglecting to teach them to pray is a wide expanse.”
I completely agree, and I suspect most parents would too. And yet…in our practice of parenting, we often act as though our child’s relationship with God is all up to us. In my experience as a child of the church, a pastor, and now a father of four, I’ve found most attempts to force faith onto children stem from a misapplication of a favorite parenting verse:
“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
At first glance, Proverbs seems to offer an ironclad promise: Raise your children “the right way,” and they will automatically “turn out right.” And who among us hasn’t heard a thousand messages promising just that? We can get “new kids by Friday” if only we apply the right formula.
But here’s the problem. It doesn’t always work. We all know people who were raised in Christian homes yet abandoned the faith in their adult years. Keep reading
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