OK, so let’s start with the most basic question of all: What is a parent?

My son, keep your father’s command and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. Bind them always on your heart; fasten them around your neck. When you walk, they will guide you; when you sleep, they will watch over you; when you awake, they will speak to you. For this command is a lamp, this teaching is a light, and correction and instruction are the way to life…

Prov.6:20-23

As you read a passage like Prov.6, you might be struck at the kind of language that is used to describe a parent’s teaching and instruction of their children. If you are familiar with the Bible, you might even be struck at how the language and imagery that is used to describe a parent’s teaching and instruction is identical to that of God’s teaching and instruction thorugh the Scriptures themselves (have a look at Ps.119:105 for the most obvious example, but also Deut.6, which we’ll be looking at in a couple of Blog-posts time). This resonance is very deliberate, and points us to one of the most powerful ideas about parenting that we find anywhere in the Bible. It’s breathtaking, and I warn you that you will have to fight the urge to simply reject it out of hand as soon as you grasp what is being said…

As a parent, and especially if you are a parent to younger children (the dynamics evolve as children grow older), you are playing the part of God to your children! You function as God in relation to them – which might explain why we feel so insecure, and are so painfully aware of our inadequacy!?! This will raise questions about our own discipleship (i.e. How like God am I?), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves… we’ll get to that in due course.

Kids think in concrete not conceptual terms (again, this is especially true of younger children). This means that if you sit down and try and explain the concept of God in theological terms, you’re not going make a lot of progress. Young kids simply don’t have the catgories that will allow them to process what they are being taught. This might strike you as strange, given the huge emphasis in the Bible on parents doing precisely this, teaching their children about God. How can we do that? Or more to the point, how is God going to teach the children who are growing up within the covenant people of God about who He is, and how they are to relate to Him.

You’ve got to love the Genius of God! He gives those children little model-gods who, in concrete terms, will show children what God is like and who through their relatioship with those children teach them how to relate to God. In short, He creates parents. Basically, a child learns how to relate to a parent and then as they grow older, they transfer the dynamics learned in their relationship with their parent(s), to their relationship with God (mediated through Christ) as that becomes more directly mediated through Christ rather than via their parents.

See this worked out negatively fairly regularly in Church life. We are used to realising that some people really struggle to relate to God as Father because of how their own parents treated them… Why is that such a problem? Why does our relationship with our parents have the potential to so hinder how we think of and relate to God? Because of this dynamic, which God has built into our the structure of our relationship we have with our parents growing up, whereby we learn how to relate to God by learning how to relate to our parents. Negatively, it means that if I have grown up in a context of negelct or abuse, then I bring that anger, fear, distrust, defensiveness and relational retreat into my relationship with God. However painful that is, it is not irredeemable. As we learn from Christ, through the Scirptures and in the context of the fellowhsip of the Church, about the nature of God, we can (re-)learn how to relate to Him well. But it is made more difficult!

This same potential proves incredibly powerful if parenting is done in a way that is informed by our vision, and our own relationship with God. If I am a godlike parent, who provides for my kids, cares for them, guides them and nurtures them; if I model God well to them in what and how I love and serve and discipline them, then as they gow up theya re learning how to trust, how to respond to and live well under authority, how to loved, how to be guided and nurtured, and so on. And as they develop, these behaviours and modes of relatioship are transfered into their own developing relationship with God.

This is why, as we read through Romans 1, and the characteristics of a culture ‘handed over’ by God, right in the midst of a terrifying protrait of a humanity left to its sinfulness, we we stumble across the phrase: ‘they disobey their parents’ (Rom.1:30). After some of the other things in the list, this can seem a bit subdued. We might shrug that off… ‘Surely every kids does that. How come that is so symptomatic of a godless culture?’ But of course, the problem is that in learning to disobey our parents, we are learing to disobey God.

This is idea is foundational to so much else that we want to say about what it means to be a parent, and the good news is that it solves a huge number of parental dilemmas at a stroke. As we realise that a key responsibility in our role as parents is to faithfully represent God to our children, to model Him to my children and to train my children through that how to relate to Him, so in turn we realise that many of our questions are answered by our own experience of and understanding of the God we worship. We’ll explore some of these together as this series continues.

As I said earlier, the temptation is to simply recoil from such a challenge, however inspiring and fulfilling it promises to be. But it is exactly that: a temptation. As Christians we want rather to press more deeply into our own expereince of God in Christ, through the Gospel, and bring the spiritual resources we discover there to our calling as parents. It is challenging, but we want to rise to that challenge, and to remember that it is also an incalculable privilege.

And as I said in the previous article, we seek to exercise our parental ministry - as we do every aspect of our Christian lives - in the atmosphere of grace.