March, 2017 | Gospel-Centred Parenting

Global Insights | Parenting in South Sudan

Scott and Cathy Gospel In The Everyday March 20, 2017March 19, 2017 0 Comment

We thought it would be inspiring to hear about how Christians parent their children in different parts of the world. There are many similarities in gospel-centred parenting world over, but there are also many differences depending on our cultural context. Read the introduction to this series here.

We’re excited to hear the story of a missionary couple living in South Sudan in this post. For safety purposes, they asked to remain anonymous.

Where do you live and what’s it like?

South Sudan. Amongst a rural people-group of agriculturalists in a remote and hilly region.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities that you face in Christian parenting because of your context?

We are missionaries here and so our days and life are shaped around telling our friends and neighbours about Jesus. The community is currently very open to us sharing the gospel so it is easy to talk of Jesus freely and openly both at home and around the villages. We are part of a team with other Christian families so all our daughter’s peers also know Jesus. Because our environment is so isolated we have a lot of control over what she sees and hears. There is no TV/internet or secular input aside from the local African traditional beliefs.
Some of the challenges include being away from a wider support network, such as Grandparents, to get advice/support. We are in a team of mixed nationalities, some of whom parent in quite different ways, so though we are all Christians this can be very challenging at times. Our daughter is often overwhelmed by attention from the local people who are fascinated by a little white girl with blond hair, which makes it a constant tension between loving and not offending our neighbours but also loving and protecting our daughter. It can also be hard to balance our ministry responsibilities alongside spending quality time with her, especially to stimulate and educate her when she must often play alone.

What do you do to encourage your daughter to love Jesus?

We pray for her, that she may know and love Jesus herself. However much we would like to, we can’t make it happen. We hope we demonstrate our own love of Jesus in our own lives, our marriage and our wider relationships. We do our own ‘kids church’ every week, sometimes twice weekly, where we sing songs together, read a Bible story and pray to God. Singing is something our daughter loves so it is easy to share Christian music with her e.g. Colin Buchanan */Emu music. We try to include God in everything we do daily, so when out for walks we talk about the things Daddy God has made, or we explain when we are out telling Bible stories in the villages that it is so our friends can know King Jesus too. With limited resources we have found having ‘Beginning with God *‘ from the Good Book Company a helpful resource.

It’s so interesting to learn about parenting in different contexts. It helps us to analyse our own contexts where we our bringing up our children. We hope you’ve found this post inspiring and helpful.

Where we live in the UK we don’t have to worry about a lack of good Christian resources, or fear that our children will face isolation because of their faith/race. But we do face challenges like secular messages being communicated to our children through the internet, TV and even the school communities around them. Evangelistically there are challenges too, with many people being suspicious or apathetic to Christianity.

Reflect on your own context for a moment. What challenges and opportunities face you as you seek to live for Jesus and share your faith with your children?

We’d love to hear your reflections! Please fill in the form below to take part in the series yourself.

Gospel-Centred Parenting’s First Birthday

Scott and Cathy Uncategorized March 13, 2017March 12, 2017 6 Comments

It’s our blog’s first birthday!

We can hardly believe it’s been a whole year since we first started our blog.

It’s been quite a journey. Let’s take a moment to revisit it…

We started blogging at Gospel-Centred Parenting for a couple of reasons.

To remind us of the gospel

We started the blog to help us as parents apply the gospel to our parenting. At the time we had a toddler and Cathy was pregnant with our second child. We were starting our blog as we were starting out on our parenting journey.

The blog was birthed out of hard places. We mentioned that we were expecting our second baby, but his healthy pregnancy came after two miscarriages. We started this blog when we were still grieving the loss of those pregnancies, and we wanted to remember that the gospel really is good news for us as parents, as well as for our children.

But we were writing for another reason too…

To point others to the gospel

We also wanted to encourage other parents with the gospel. That’s why we picked and paid for the the domain “Gospel-Centred Parenting” and worked pretty hard to work our way up the Google ranking when people searched these words. We wanted other parents who were weighed down with the struggles and daily grind of parenting to be comforted by the amazing gospel of grace found in Jesus.

We wanted our blog to be characterised by the gospel. We wanted the gospel to be explored, cherished and explained in every post. We wanted to avoid the trap of simply calling our blog “gospel-centred” only to then insert some handy lifestyle tips or self-help motivational prose in it. We wanted people to be able to guess what we were going to write about in each post – the gospel – albeit from different angles and applied to different situations. We hope we’ve been able to explain that amazing story, those incredible truths, and paint a picture of our glorious saviour with originality and flair – a tricky thing to do each week! It’s been a good discipline for us though, lest we ever tire of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As we’ve sought to encourage others with the comfort of the gospel, we’ve been majorly encouraged in return.

We’ve been really encouraged by you. We are excited by how God has been growing a community of gospel-centred parents. We’ve been encouraged by how you are gospelling your children in the everyday; how you are believing the gospel is good news to sustain you through the highs, lows and sheer exhaustion; and how you are seeking to make major decisions in light of the gospel.

So thank you!

It’s encouraging that there’s an army of like-minded parents all over the country, and indeed, world, who are doing this crazy parenting thing with Jesus in the centre (well, at least that’s the intention).

Knowing there are others doing the same thing emboldens and strengthens us.

We’ve spent some time today looking over the statistics for our blog over the last year, and were overwhelmed and humbled with the people who’ve connected with our blog. Here’s a few fun stats:

Number of users: 6,064

Continents with readers: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australasia, Asia (Not Antartica- yet!)

Number of blog posts: 60

Number of competitions: 2

Number of incidents of writers block: 1

Number of marital arguments over the blog(!): 1

Number of trolling incidents: 1

Number of blessings: too many to recount!

Here’s some things that you’ve said over the last year:

“I just wanted to write to say thanks for your blog, your insights and parenting wisdom… I’m a silent blog reader normally but this has made me think again and so I hope I can encourage you in the way I’ve been encouraged! So thanks for writing and spurring us on to parent for Christ.”

“Thanks for your blog. I really get a lot from it. I usually read it during a night feed as it’s the most peaceful time of the day at the minute!”

“Ah, wow…thanks for this really helpful blog. It’s so good to do a heart check!”

“Both just read this and so grateful for your honesty and insight. Really connect with your thinking and found it very moving.”

Thank you so much for your encouragement. It helps us to keep motivated to write our posts, and to be intentional in our parenting – even though it’s tough!

Here are, according to the stats, our three top blog posts of the last year:

(We’ve pretty much learnt that the scarier something is to publish the more traction it gets. People like real. And real makes much of Jesus so we’re cool with that.)

So, what does the future hold for Gospel-Centred Parenting?

This next year we aim to keep pointing ourselves and others to Jesus through weekly blog posts. As well as this we’ve got a couple of exciting ideas in the pipeline of other resources to equip us to parent in a gospel-centred way, so watch this space for them. These ideas are in the early stages, but you may hear more about them in time.

Thank you

So thank you again. We’ve loved thinking about parenting our boys with your support and encouragement. It’s been great doing this is community with you and we pray that God will bless you and your families this coming year.

With love,

Scott and Cathy

The story of fear and the story of the gospel

Scott and Cathy Uncategorized March 6, 2017March 5, 2017 2 Comments

What emotions spring to mind when you think about parenting?

Hopefully there are some lovely ones – joy, anticipation, love, trust, amazement. Some others may sneak in there too – anger, sadness… maybe even occasional disgust.

Here’s an emotion that I think, at one time or another, is pretty universal for parents:

Fear.

It’s not always a bad thing. Fear of your child being run over causes you to hold on tightly to their hand when you walk by a busy road. Fear of your child choking causes you to chop up their food.

But let’s be honest – fear isn’t simply about these things, is it? We fear all sorts of things, and many of them aren’t nearly so rational. Or if not irrational, at the very least we fear things that we have very little control over. We fear things about our children’s futures that we can’t possibly micromanage enough to control the outcome – they’re simply too complex.

We fear hypothetical illnesses that we have no reason to assume are imminent. We fear that we’re not doing the right things to encourage their growth in language, social skills, sporting prowess, academic ability, or whatever it is. We fear how they’ll make friends, how they’ll behave in different situations without us there, how they’ll cope in this world that’s changing in ways we don’t like.

Here is the heart what we want you to see in this post, here’s what we want to believe more deeply: most of our parenting fears are not real. Most of our fears are stories that we tell ourselves, that we choose to believe. We need to stop listening to these stories, and instead listen to the story of the gospel.

Let me take one example to help you see this.

We fear how our children will cope in a world that’s changing in ways we don’t like. Different fears for the future will play out for different people. We see a political direction that makes us uncomfortable or a shift in the values that our culture celebrates that don’t align with ours. We see ways that it’s becoming more difficult to be a Christian who holds to a Biblical worldview. We see the threat of global warming and the slowness of the world’s response and we wonder where it will end up.

We see these changes in the world around us, we follow the trajectory of their stories, and we don’t like the plotline that we can see coming.

We imagine a story of where the world is going, we believe that story, and the result is fear.

Now listen to a different story. It may look no different, externally. The political story may continue to develop differently to how we’d like. The moral decline of society might continue; intolerance may increase; the world may increase in temperature.

But need that result in fear? Well of course, we should be concerned about these things. Humanity is called to be stewards of this world, and so we want to see that done in the best way possible – whether it’s ecologically, societally, morally or politically.

But fear? I’m not sure the story needs to go there.

Here are two wonderful verses that are true for you, and are true for your children:

Matthew 10:29-31:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Romans 8:15

“For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.””

Here are two things that mean that you don’t need to fear the way this world is going – even if your worst case scenarios play out.

God cares about our children. He really does. But more than that, he is sovereignly in control of even the minutiae of what happens in this world. The story of history is not outside of his control. God assigns us deep worth, and he is in control. So whatever happens to us, whatever happens to our children, fear need not be the emotion that we experience. We can trust God. His sovereign hand is active, and he acts for his children who he deems to be of deep worth.

And for those of our children who are Christians, that truth can be taken a step further. However the future plays out, there is a wonderful, mind-boggling truth that we can cling to. Our children have the Spirit in them. Even if the world is terrifying, they don’t need to be a slave to fear. They have the Spirit of sonship. They are adopted into the family of God. They know God as father. They don’t need to have fear, whatever’s going on, because the God of the universe is their father, and he’s caring for them. They don’t need to fear, and nor do we.

The story of our fear is that our children will be crushed in this hard world. The story of the gospel is that our God is good and in control whatever happens, that he’s a caring Father. This is all made possible because of what Jesus has done.

Do you see how this makes a world of difference? Here’s what we said earlier: most of our parenting fears are not real. Most of our fears are stories that we tell ourselves, that we choose to believe. We need to stop listening to these stories, and instead listen to the story of the gospel.

The story of the gospel means that we can have a radically different perspective on the stories that bring us fear. There are truths and promises that we can cling to that rewrite our stories of fear.

So here’s the challenge. Next time you feel fear taking over your parenting, ask yourself this question: what story am I choosing to believe? Understand that, understand how the gospel tells a different story, and pray that the Spirit of Sonship would speak words of comfort to your heart.

Fear is pretty much a universal emotion in parenting. But it need not be. The story of the gospel means that we can be liberated from fear, into the freedom of the gospel. Praise the Lord!