Gospel-Centred Parenting’s First Birthday

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:

1. Talking to your kids about sex
2. Five minutes that ruined my day and five words that redeem it
3. Five parenting mistakes to avoid| Discontentment 

(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