August, 2017 | Gospel-Centred Parenting

Global Insights | Parenting in New York City

Scott and Cathy Global Insights August 23, 2017August 23, 2017 1 Comment

Christian parenting looks different in different countries, cultures and contexts. Here we get some insights from our dear friends Cait and Joel Kady who live in New York City. Joel works for Redeemer Presbyterian Church (Tim Keller’s church) where he works with community groups for Redeemer Westside, and is attending Reformed Theological Seminary’s New York campus. Cait is a stay-at-home Mom for their three young children – aged 5, 3 and 1.

Where do you live and what’s it like?

We live in upper Manhattan, New York City. It’s a slightly calmer neighborhood but still very much the city and only a subway ride away from the typical, touristy, or busier parts of New York. It’s exciting, with a lot of opportunities, but challenging to get around with kids, take strollers on the subway, do laundry in the apartment basement, or get enough time in nature when it takes more effort (though it is there!).

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

We were very much influenced by Tim Keller’s ministry before moving to New York, and appreciated his perspective on raising kids here and on how God views cities. It’s wonderful to be in a place where there are so many people – even though that can feel like a drawback at times! People are the most beautiful thing that God has created, and beloved by him. There is also concentrated opportunity for ministry and culture formation when there is just so much happening. With our kids, it can be hard to have them exposed to difficult subjects at a young age, but we see that also as a positive thing to talk through with them from a biblical perspective in real life, not just hypothetically. It can make God and his ethics much more real to them as they get older and know their parents are not clueless about the world because they have been encountering it together. Being around people very different from me has been a huge blessing, challenge, and learning curve which will hopefully benefit my parenting as well.

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

We are always growing and trying to be better stewards of our time with our little ones. Right now we pray and read Bible stories together, and are trying to make singing and memorizing God’s word a part of our routine as well. Conflict is an opportunity to point them to Christ and teach them about forgiveness and their need. Our personal choice of homeschooling this next year has us excited about the chance to create lifegiving routines at home and the flexibility to explore the city and read beautiful books full of truth. The biggest thing for me right now has been personal growth, knowing that what I model, not what we teach, will have the biggest impact on them.

We hope you enjoyed this latest post in our series “Global Insights” where we hear from Christian parents from all over the world. It’s so encouraging to hear how different believers are parenting their children in contexts very different from our own.

We’d love you to consider contributing to this series – whether you live in the Highlands of Scotland, the Cape of Good Hope or the Gold Coast. Please take 5 minutes to fill in the form below to let our readers be encouraged by you.

Nurturing Your Child’s Heart For The Poor

Scott and Cathy Uncategorized August 14, 2017August 13, 2017 0 Comment

What do you want to teach your children?

There are lots of ways that we can answer that question.

Our toddler is currently being potty trained, so we really want to teach him the importance of telling Mummy or Daddy when he needs “to go”… otherwise the result isn’t too desirable.

We want to teach our children manners. We want to teach them to read and write. We want to teach them social skills. Everyday practical things that they need to know for life.

We want to teach them the gospel – we want them to know who they are before God, who God is, and how he wants to extend grace to them.

And we want to teach them the heart of God – we want to teach them to have the priorities that he has.

That’s where Compassion comes in.

Throughout the Bible, we see clearly that God’s has a heart for the poor. He cares for people in all sorts of poverty – material, spiritual, emotional, social. He cares for the marginalised, the downtrodden – he cares for those that society often forgets.

He calls his people to do the same.

Often some of God’s strongest admonishment of his people comes when they neglect the poor or, even worse, exploit them.

So we try to regularly think how we can help our boys to develop a heart for the poor.

Compassion is a great charity that will help with this.

The premise is simple. You pay £25 a month to sponsor a child. For that, the child gets the fees and uniform that they need to go to school.

We take education for granted, but for many in the poorest parts of the world that is certainly not the case. Without education, the path out of poverty is very hard to navigate. To enable a child to be educated is a wonderful thing to do.

As well as investing in their education, the child sponsored through Compassion will receive nutritious food and health check-ups.

But more than that, Compassion will also link the child in with a church-based Compassion project every week. So the child has the opportunity to escape poverty, and to hear the gospel. They’re not forced to become Christians – they can remain on the programme whatever religion they are, but they are given the opportunity to hear about Jesus.

All that is brilliant, and it’s good for our children to see that we can make a real difference in the lives of the poorest people in the world.

But when it comes to teaching our children about care for the poor, here’s the best thing about it. We’re not just sponsoring a nameless, faceless child (which would be brilliant in itself). We have been linked with an actual child.

The child we’re sponsoring is aged 3, like our eldest son. (We hope to begin sponsoring another child when our youngest turns 3 too.)

We know his name. We have a photo of him. We know where he lives in Tanzania. We will be able to write letters to him and receive letters from him. We can send him pictures of our family and he can do the same.

So as our toddler grows, he’ll grow alongside the child were sponsoring. Over time, we can tell our son more and more about the boy we’re sponsoring. We can talk to him about what the poverty might be like that people in Tanzania face, including the boy we’re sponsoring. We can pray for him. Compassion will even arrange for us to visit him, should we be able to afford that in the future. (We think our eldest will be keen on this – he is regularly asking already if the little boy we’re sponsoring can come and play).

What a brilliant way to tangibly and meaningfully teach our boys to share the Father’s heart for the poor. What a wonderful privilege to be able to help this little boy in poverty in Tanzania.

So why not consider it yourself? You can choose the age, gender and country of the child you will sponsor. If you want to do the same as us and sponsor a child the same age as your child, then the age range of children waiting to be sponsored is (from what I can see) from 1 to 15, so there’d be someone for most of us. Click here to find out more.

Not everyone can afford £25 a month. But if this idea isn’t for you, why not try to think of another way to keep the poor on your children’s hearts? Let us know in the comments what things you do to nurture your children’s hearts for the poor.

(As an aside we want to help our children see how they suffer from a poverty of their own, just like we all do – even if it’s not currently material poverty… but that’s for another post!)

Marriage Matters: But Why?

Scott and Cathy Marriage Maintenance August 8, 2017September 10, 2017 1 Comment

There are few things that will teach your children more about the gospel than your marriage.

Because of that, we’ve decided to start a new series of brief blog posts that will help you to think about your marriage. We know that being parents puts particular pressures on marriage, and so we thought it might be helpful to have occasional posts that focus on our marriages – remembering that strong marriages will help us as we seek to share the gospel with our children.

Let’s start with a caveat. We know that not all of our readers are married. Some are single parents, and that can be for a variety of reasons. We’ve spoken to some of you who have spouses that aren’t Christians and we’ve thought with you about some of pressures that come through that. If you’re reading this series as a parent in either of these groups, then we hope there still might be some things that are useful for you – even if it’s simply to help you support marriages within your church.

We started this post with a pretty strong sentence: “There are few things that will teach your children more about the gospel than your marriage.”

How can we make such an extreme statement?

Well we don’t think we’re overstating things.

The new testament teaches that marriage was designed by God to be a small picture of the relationship between Jesus and the church. So as our children look on at our marriages, they have an opportunity to see a mini picture of that greater relationship.

As well as this Jesus-church relationship, we can also say that the marriage relationship shows us something of God himself, too. In the account of the creation of humanity, the writer of Genesis reminds us that humanity is made in the image of God. This means lots of different things – much ink has been spilled on this topic – but one of the ways that the writer shows us what it means to be an image bearer is found in Genesis 1:26-27:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

God is a Trinitarian God – a God who for all eternity has been in relationship – Father, Son and Spirit loving each other. This God creates humanity to display something of himself, and God says let us make man in our image… male and female he created them.

In marriage we see united yet distinct people in a relationship of love. At it’s best moments, this displays something of the God it’s meant to image – a God who is three persons, united in love.

So that’s the idea behind this series. When marriages function as they should (and even when they don’t but we respond in godly ways), we demonstrate something of the gospel to our children. When they don’t, the damage can be deep and the scars can often last for a lifetime. God is gracious and powerful and can work through that anyway – but we all want to work on our marriages to try to avoid that. Broken marriages and fractious relationships can serve to undermine the gospel that we’re speaking to our children. So we must seek, with God’s help, to make our marriages strong.

Our marriage isn’t perfect. If yours is, do let us know your secret (but we’re not holding our breaths!).

But marriage matters. That’s why we’ve named this series what it is. And there are all sorts of matters (see what we did there!) relating to marriage that it’s worth thinking about – not only for the sake of our marriages themselves and our witness to the world, but also because our marriages are hugely significant as we seek to live out gospel-centred parenting.

We hope you enjoy walking through this new series with us.