- does this encourage the breaking of God’s laws?
- is this full of sexual content, immodesty, violence, language, or disrespect?
- does this portray elements of the occult that includes magic, fortune telling, casting spells, and witches or vampires cast as “good”?
- does it play more on emotions than engage the mind?
Third Culture kids are described as spokespeople, bridge builders and natural change agents. They aren’t only advocates for the ethnicities they’ve become acquainted with, but have developed a unique ability to transfer their cultural intelligence to brand new places.
Likewise, our kids shouldn’t be so assimilated (conformed) to the pop culture that they lose their ability to be ambassadors for Christ.
Provide a Christian education
This is the “elephant in the room” with respect to the lack of a biblical worldview among youth growing up in Christian homes, and why the Church is losing the culture war. An increasingly secularized education system will always produce an increasingly secularized society.
If Christian influence in the culture has dissipated over the last 100 years, it isn’t for lack of Christian evangelism and Christian churches. Each successive generation is discipled in the schools by teachers who were discipled in secularized public or Christian universities.
After spending 10,000 hours in these secular classrooms, of course children will be affected by what they see and hear. Children may love Jesus with their hearts, but they are being trained to think secularly.
What you pour into a child’s mind determines what she thinks, and what she thinks determines how she acts, regardless of her heart-filled faith. The one thing that can overrule a person’s heart is their mind!
Teach your kids in Jesus alone
Like anything else, Satan takes something good and tempts us with a counterfeit. I believe all the people who are “shouting their deconversion” are actually railing against this, but they’re doing it in a faulty way. Instead of realizing and admitting that they never truly trusted Christ and now submitting to Him, they turn to the world for the answers that religiosity didn’t provide.
It’s clear that their hope this whole time was in something other than the saving power and work of Jesus.
We can’t just raise our kids in a culture permeated by Christian music, movies, education, youth groups, lingo, etc. and then expect that that’s going to insulate them from the harsh realities of the world. Or equip them to stand strong in their faith.
What happens when they turn 18 and leave the comfort of that culture? What happens when their friends say they no longer believe?
As Sally Clarkson put it so well: “Christian activities and interests do not make a home Christian. A Christian home is never defined by what the children are doing; it is defined by what the parents are doing.”
We need to be in our Bibles and committed to prayer. We have to guard against moralism posing as Christianity and good works masquerading as the Gospel.
Most of all, we have to teach our kids to put their hope in Christ alone. Read with them the hard stories in Scripture of Job, Daniel, and the apostles in Acts. Read the biographies of missionaries who, while they despaired of life itself at times, continued to put their trust in God.
Don’t divorce pain and hardship from the Christian life. Jesus never promised us a care-free, prosperous experience if we follow Him. It’s more like “take up your cross daily”.
That’s what our kids need to hear. That while this life may be full of disappointments, struggles, and harsh realities, they have a Redeemer and Savior who walks with them through it all until they reach the finish line and enter into glory.
Model authentic faith
There is a saying that more is caught than taught. While it’s important that we teach our kids what the Bible says, it’s crucial that they see our life and our doctrine match up. Otherwise, they may have an appearance of godliness, but deny its power (2 Timothy 3:5).
The Gen2 survey conducted by Generations found that the child who abandoned his faith was almost 600% more likely to refer to his parents’ hypocrisy as a reason. If we give way to idolatry, our children will usually follow in our footsteps with their own choice of idols.
Kids get the message loud and clear as they watch us prioritize other things over their relationship with the Lord. They’ll know whether Christ is merely a spoke on your family’s wheel instead of the hub.
Parents who don’t walk in accordance with their beliefs are communicating that their faith isn’t relevant. Authenticity, humility, confession of sin, and true faith really matter, if the next generation is going to walk with God.
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This post originally appeared at Called to Mothering, published with permission.
