Spiritual Parenting - 4

CARE FOR THE SAINTS - Cont...

(Pt 2 - Continued from last post)
To draw a parallel, the care for the saints might be compared to raising healthy children within the home, and making disciples compared to deciding who will help run the family business beyond the child-rearing days. With the former, you have a God-given responsibility to nurture and care for them regardless of their level of faithfulness and commitment. With the latter, a God-given responsibility to be highly selective about who to consider for the job training.

Children, you see, are by nature usually often NOT faithful, available, or teachable. Especially in certain natural phases of growth (like when they are infants or toddlers... or teenagers - go figure). If I am looking for FATness in my 3 children before committing to parent them, I am going to be waiting a long time. No - my job as a parent is to effectively parent them INTO FATness - through the easy times and hard times - to nurture, teach and equip them regardless, so that they might become FAT.

When however, my children are older and I am looking over them to see which I should select to eventually take over the family business or help lead and nurture the family itself, a different approach is taken. I am looking to mentor and apprentice those who are proven FAT (faithful, available, and teachable). Those who have not proven these qualities are probably not going to change any time soon, and I don't want to waste my time.

I wonder if it is similar with spiritual parenting - with spiritual leadership. I wonder if at times we have approached new converts as if they were spiritual adults and left them alone only to die on the vine, and other times we have spent time pulling teeth with spiritual adults who are still living at home and not willing to change.

All this to say: I have seen in the house churches I have been a part of a lack of knowing what our job is as spiritual moms and dads. We organize meetings, facilitate gatherings, and keep our church families intact while we watch and wait for spiritual growth to take place. And often it is not. How could it, if we are not feeding them? How could it, if we are not training, nurturing, and equipping them for more growth?

Children MUST be fed - diapers must be changed, bedtimes kept, and booboos bandaged up. Lots of hugs must be given and lots of "I love yous" and "Im proud of yous" said. Teaching moments must be taken advantage of, sleepless nights had, and a lot of resources spent. A LOT of sacrificing must happen by caring parents for their children to have any hope of growing up tall and strong and self-sustaining. So it is in the spiritual - Bible studies must be taught, scriptures must be expounded on one-on-one. Inconvenient phone calls must be taken, late-night prayer sessions must be had, and many prayerful tears must be shed. Many prayer-and-share meetings must take place over coffee, desert, or dinner - where spiritual questions are answered, doctrine is solidified, and spiritual counseling and coaching is happening regularly. A lot of spiritual trial and error must be overseen by wise spiritual parents who constantly sacrifice - their time, resources, and emotions - for the sake of the spiritual growth and maturity of the spiritual children under their care.

So I think that a different approach must be taken in parenting spiritual children within a local church (anyone and everyone the Lord has brought into our church family) - we parent them in spite of their lack of FATness, so that they might grow up into FATness. When making disciples who make disciples (mentoring and coaching the next generation of the leaders of the church), we are looking for the ones who are already FAT to invest in further.

Have we provided this type of care for those in our church families? Have we stopped to ask ourselves and the Lord where the various ones in our church families are in their process of spiritual growth? And are we truly willing to engage in the sacrificial spiritual parenting that is necessary to grow spiritual children into spiritual adults?