Leadership, Family Ministry, Apologetics
The first family ministry book I ever read was Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries. My first response was to reject family ministry as a preposterous idea in my particular context.
It took two years for the struggles of ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit to change my mind.
Childhood identity theft.
It’s a real thing.
Thieves steal children’s Social Security numbers and then appropriate their financial identities for personal profit. “Children represent an emerging market for identity thieves who steal their Social Security numbers because they offer clean slates that can be used to commit fraud for years without detection,” one CPA has observed. “Many victims don’t learn about the crime until they are young adults and find their credit in tatters as they are rejected for student loans, jobs, and places to live.”
(If you happen to have run across this post because you need information about that type of identity theft, here’s a helpful and free tool: Child Identity Theft Education Kit.)
Childhood identity theft is also, however, a real phenomenon in a far longer-lasting aspect of a child’s life. [Read more…]
If you’re a parent, what’s your goal for parenting?
My parenting purpose statement is simply this: Our purpose is to leverage our children’s lives so that people in every nation will receive multiplied opportunities to respond in faith to the rightful King of kings.
Data and arguments aren’t the strategies that do the best job of convincing people to change their lives. What convinces people best is the promise of a better story than the one they’re presently living. That’s why every leader should be—in the words of R. Albert Mohler—a
steward-in-chief of [the organization’s] story. … Leadership comes down to protecting the story, bringing others into the story, and keeping the organization accountable to the story. The leader tells the story over and over again, refining it, updating it, and driving it home. … [Read more…]
To have a biblical worldview is to interpret every aspect of our lives—including our relationships with children—within the framework of God’s story. At the center of God’s story stands this singular act: In Jesus Christ, God personally intersected human history and redeemed humanity at a particular time in a particular place. Yet this central act of redemption does not stand alone. It is bordered by God’s good creation and humanity’s fall into sin on the one hand and by the consummation of God’s kingdom on the other.
This story of creation, fall and law, redemption, and consummation is the story that Christians have repeated to one another and to the world ever since Jesus ascended into the sky and sent his Spirit to dwell in his first followers’ lives. This age-old plot-line should frame every aspect of our lives—including how we treat and train children.
