Calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In our work as apologists, we encounter a consistent mindset among parents who are deeply concerned about the spiritual well-being of their children. Though each situation is unique and often complex, the basic request can be summed up with a simple phrase: “Fix my kid!”
To honor these moms and dads, we’re going to make a careful distinction between their good intentions and a deeply entrenched mindset that’s as prevalent as it is misguided. The mindset in question is a cultural byproduct of what French philosopher Jacques Ellul calls “technique”—the modern obsession with securing total control with maximum efficiency. This thinking shows up in several contemporary phrases, all of which center on some form of technical mastery or optimization. “Life hack,” “because science,” “living my best life,” and the faintly sinister “killing it” are just a few of technique’s colloquial expressions. But this worldview has also come to dominate many of our daily habits. We’ve got apps designed to increase our productivity by counting down the days of our lives; we’ve got meal-replacement drinks so we don’t have to waste time preparing and sharing food with fellow humans; we’ve even got features that help us speed up our podcasts so we can plow through reams of content more efficiently.
As Ellul points out, the price of this relentless drive for efficiency is a growing sense of dehumanization. Architecture that prioritizes function over form also helps us picture technique. From the alien vistas of the modern city’s monolithic skyscrapers to the barren nightmare of wartime bunkers to the mechanized horrors of the labor camp that effectively converts its prisoners into biological machinery, technique works by reducing everyone and everything to a problem awaiting a technical solution.
With the best of intentions, many parents follow this line of thinking to their kids. By reducing a child to little more than a solvable problem, these parents’ request to “Fix my kid!” fits neatly into Ellul’s category and caters to the notion that moms and dads are essentially parental engineers seeking technical solutions for their kid’s problems. It’s easy to see how this ambition follows close on the heels of the information-saves mindset. We want to secure the correct information for the optimal functioning of our convictions. It’s simply a matter of plugging in to the right channels. Recall the mom who subjected her son to hours of “edifying” podcasts in the hope of rejuvenating his spiritual life. It’s tempting to speculate that she sped these programs up for maximum efficiency.
Christianity can’t be downloaded. Though there’s no shortage of Bible apps and subcultural algorithms from the world of evangelicalism, there is no Christian life hack that will help you kill it in your devotional life. The parents who approach us at conferences and youth events have discovered this firsthand. Sadly, they often draw the wrong conclusion from their experiences.
Not long ago Cameron was part of a youth conference with an undeniably strained dynamic. The speakers radiated the usual energy and enthusiasm that characterizes these events. Their young audience, however, sat in stolid silence, defensively brandishing their phones. Most of the kids had zero interest in being there. Finally, the emcee asked them to raise their hands if a parent had forced them to attend. Nearly every hand in the auditorium shot up. Fix my kid! echoed in Cameron’s mind as he scanned the crowd in that dimly lit room.
The whole thing put him in mind of some of his classmates from his Bible college days. Desperate parents frequently see Christian colleges as a kind of spiritual military school, and they lean heavily on the faculty and administration to reform their kids. Ironically, this benevolent form of coercion only serves to undermine parental authority. During a particularly contentious disagreement in his teenage years, Cameron’s mother said, “One day you’ll discover firsthand just how hard parenting is. The world can be a terrible place, and nobody prepares you for the dilemmas you’ll face.” She didn’t realize it at the time, but this haunting insight pierced straight through her son’s defensive armor. Make no mistake, parenting is hard and the temptation to lean on someone who claims to have all the answers is often motivated by increasing levels of desperation. Nevertheless, it amounts to an abdication of parental responsibility. Here we arrive at our final common misconception: spiritual education belongs to experts.
Before proceeding, we want to be clear that we’re not disparaging any of the resources available to Christian families. We wouldn’t be writing this book if that were the case. From podcasts to conferences to youth leaders to books and training seminars, the church offers an embarrassment of riches for families. Though we’re not denigrating these efforts, we are arguing that they can’t take the place of parenting. A child’s spiritual education is the primary responsibility of their mom and dad. We’re also going to join with responsible clergy and theologians worldwide in arguing that there are no spiritual experts. Longtime pastor and theologian Harold Senkbeil brings a wealth of experience to his work as a minister, having pastored everywhere from rural to urban settings and having taught in seminaries as well as playing a leading role in a parachurch ministry that trains pastors. Nevertheless, this seasoned minister maintains, “Frankly, if you run into someone who claims to be an expert at ministry, you should run the other way.”1 Amplifying this claim, he argues, “We can’t apply a spiritual stethoscope or blood pressure monitor to the soul; only God himself sees into the human heart. So spiritual ministry by definition can’t be measured.”2 Though Senkbeil has pastors in mind here, we can apply his observations to parents as well. Because God alone sees our children’s hearts, we can soundly conclude that no so-called expert can fix or solve them.
Of course, this doesn’t stop many parents from continuing to see those in frontline ministry (especially pastors) as a species of professional Christian. Though the classic vocation of pastors is soul care, the idea that they can subject the human spirit to the same kind of conclusive analysis as an x-ray or a blood test is a notion utterly foreign to Christianity. This line of thinking places prayer and urinalysis on roughly equal footing. It’s a simple but profound category mistake, one that brings us to a greatly misunderstood and much-needed word.
Mystery is perhaps one of the more misunderstood words nowadays (though paradox is up there too). It’s often the place we retreat to when we’re out of ideas but still want to sound profound. Many conversations have stalled at the impasse of mystery. “The Lord works in mysterious ways” may well be one of the most infamous of Christian bromides. The word mystery also strikes a disingenuous note since it can give the impression that its user has gained access to hidden realms beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
Theologian Hans Boersma helps us to recover a more holistic understanding of this vexed word. In the biblical sense a mystery is neither solvable nor inscrutable. Rather, it is something that exceeds our full comprehension.3 Think of the countless books devoted to the subject of Christ’s incarnation. Scores of brilliant and highly articulate scholars discuss the matter on a routine basis in both formal and informal settings. Despite the plethora of insight, no one will ever fully wrap their mind around the fact that Christ is “very God and very man.” Christ’s incarnation remains a mystery not because it’s inscrutable but because it’s inexhaustible.
Though human beings don’t share in Christ’s divinity, we remain mysteries to ourselves as well. The church father Gregory of Nyssa even goes so far as to defend divine mystery by pointing to our inability to comprehend ourselves: “I also ask: Who has known his own mind? Those who think themselves capable of grasping the nature of God would do well to consider whether they have looked into themselves.”4 (It goes without saying that this insight applies to our current obsession with personality tests.) But why are human beings mysteries? Isn’t this just another clever rhetorical ploy to help us avoid a more responsible conversation? Peter Kreeft explores mystery as a “‘problem that encroaches on its own data,’ i.e., a question whose object is the questioner, a question we can’t be detached from and objective about because we’re always personally involved. Falling in love, e.g., is a mystery. Getting to Mars is a problem.”5 If humans were solvable problems, we’d be at a point of poetic paralysis since the engine driving all of our songs, stories, and poems is the mystery of what it means to be a person. Human nature is always personal—there is no view from nowhere. We can’t shed our humanity to gain a better perspective on its limitations. We can’t fully solve a problem that implicates us. While it’s true that the various fields of therapy and psychology yield tremendous insights, there are no psychological and spiritual experts in the truest sense.6
Unwittingly, many parents fall into the trap of seeing their kids as problems. If we survey the cultural landscape, it’s not hard to see why. Our world is awash with metrics. Measuring is second nature to modern people. But when we measure, we’re doing more than simply crunching numbers. The multitude of measurements communicates ownership to us.
Recall a disconcerting episode in the life of King David: David summons Joab and the commanders of his army and orders a census of the nation of Israel. Joab is distressed by this order and begs the king to reconsider, but David overrules him. Swift punishment follows from the Lord, as the whole nation is engulfed with disease and pestilence (1 Chronicles 21:1-17). To our eyes this may look like a colossal overreaction on the part of God. The Lord is punishing David for playing God. Yes, he has installed David as Israel’s king, but the nation remains his alone. In effect, David’s census amounts to an act of irreverence and fatal pride. Joab’s initial dismay was warranted. David’s order was presuming ownership, and this pride unleashed God’s judgment.
There’s a sense in which our myriad tools of measurement offer us a kind of microcosm of David’s pride. How often do you count your followers on social media, for instance? How closely do you monitor your children’s lives? From personality tests to dating apps to social media to fitness software, we are in constant danger of being misled by our tools into thinking that we are our own.
But what happens when our tools fail? Pushed to their limits, many parents try to cope by outsourcing the problem to experts. That’s when unwilling participants show up at youth events and Bible colleges get a grudging boost in their student population. Every year we see a flood of requests from brokenhearted moms and dads wanting a spiritual overhaul for their kids. What this would involve is left a bit vague, but the plan usually turns on getting the right information into the young person’s brain: books, podcasts, conferences, one-on-one meetings, and regular video calls. Again, we’re not opposed to any of these efforts so long as they’re viewed as auxiliary. We take exception, however, when we’re effectively asked to fill in for parents.
Sadly, the broken households scattered throughout our fallen world add a good deal of complexity to the situation. In many cases a single parent is forced to navigate all of this difficult territory on their own. With fostering and adoption we see yet another picture of the stark challenges facing so many families. Adding insult to injury is the feeling of judgment (both from oneself and others) that so often accompanies our efforts. The frequent glamorization of family life made possible by the highly selective vision of social media only exacerbates the problem. How often do we look through other people’s posts and conclude that we simply don’t measure up as moms and dads? But though our difficult circumstances inevitably play a role in shaping us, they need not define us. We labor side by side with our Lord and Savior, who offers to us his gentle yoke (Matthew 11:28-29). In a sense this is the most liberating part of the gospel invitation, namely, that our sins and brokenness don’t need to define us. And to reiterate a point we made earlier: no matter what has happened, none of us are accidental parents. The Lord has entrusted us with this awesome blessing. Pastors, youth workers, apologists, and ministers of all stripes can lend a helping hand, but they cannot take our place as parents.
We all need to remember that we belong to God—and those of us who are parents need to remember that our children belong to God. They are not problems awaiting solutions; they are gifts from our Lord he has entrusted to us. And though we can’t fix them, we are responsible for them. Naturally, we want to protect them from the onslaughts of this world, and we want to enlist all of the help we can get in this endeavor. But when our protectiveness degenerates into an ambition to control our kids, we’ve stumbled into the ubiquitous modern tendency to confuse mysteries with problems. The idea that human beings are nothing more than the sum of their parts is scientific naturalism, not Christianity. Our sons and daughters need parents, not technicians.
If you’ve fully grasped that your child is not a solvable problem, you’ll quickly see that their salvation isn’t in your hands. One of the most liberating aspects of mystery is that it frees us from the burden of having to save our kids.
The shape of our spiritual responsibility to our children turns on our own walk with Christ. The Christian life is more caught than taught. Furtive glimpses of his dad’s morning devotions, the look of wincing astonishment on the face of a newly baptized infant, the unassuming glory of the bread and cup in a small Austrian church service held in the upstairs of a corporate office—these were the windows into the faith for young Cameron. Life’s routine trials brought more glimpses: Though they were far from perfect, it wasn’t lost on Cameron that forgiveness was second nature to his parents. They didn’t hold grudges, and they didn’t tear others down. Nor did they grieve “as those without hope” when death intruded on their lives. There was spiritual stability and resilience that life could not hammer out of them, and the source of this strength was clearly not part of our withering world. For his parents, Christianity was not some passing fashion or a convenient lifestyle; it was a way of life and it circumscribed every aspect of their existence.
True faithfulness is visible, and it’s the mark of Christ’s witnesses. This is part of what it means to “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Good parents are not experts, influencers, thought leaders, or apologists; they are faithful witnesses whose lives bring glory to God.
Writing to his young pastoral protégé, the apostle Paul offers a lovely tribute to the legacy of faith in Timothy’s family:
I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. (2 Timothy 1:5-7)
Together, these devout women have instilled a lasting faith in Timothy, so much so that Paul can readily discern their lasting influence in Timothy’s life. Here we have a beautiful picture of the redemptive ways our families can shape us. Conversely, we also see the tragedy endured by those who grew up outside the church. For Stuart the road to Christianity was long and treacherous, largely because neither of his parents followed Christ. With two parents deeply committed to the Lord, Cameron’s experience was gloriously different. Though he endured his share of trials, Cameron’s childhood was filled with the majesty of God’s Word, the wonder of his sacraments, and the homely beauty of his church—all things that any child can accept and that nobody can outgrow.
But not all of us have a Timothy. Sadly, it’s often the reverse, and we continue to plead for the spiritual well-being of our children as they wander far from the arms of Christ. Many of us find ourselves in the position of Monica, mother to Augustine of Hippo. Before he was revered as the great doctor of the church, Augustine was a spectacularly gifted scholar and a thoroughgoing hedonist, with no interest in Christianity. Not only did Monica continue to love him unconditionally, she steadfastly persisted in praying for her prodigal son. Monica’s tears are a powerful rejoinder to our era of parental outsourcing. While she eagerly sought the counsel of brilliant spiritual voices who might reach her son, she never abdicated her parental responsibility by outsourcing Augustine’s spiritual education. Though many faithful and gifted servants contributed to Augustine’s eventual conversion—the teachings of Ambrose of Milan played an instrumental role in his thought—the picture of Monica’s faithful life and persistent prayers for her son underscores the massive importance of a parent’s spiritual influence. Indeed, so prominent is her role in Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, that many theologians call her the unsung hero of the book.
With this in mind, we feel it’s fitting to bring this chapter to a close with Augustine’s heartfelt tribute to his parents. For Augustine both parent and child are ultimately children of God bound for their eternal home in the new Jerusalem. It’s our prayer that these words will serve as both a challenge and an encouragement to you if you currently find yourself in Monica’s position. May you know the Lord’s strength as you seek to faithfully model Christ for your children, no matter where they are:
From their flesh you brought me into this life, though how I do not know. Let them remember with loving devotion these two who were my parents in this transitory light, but also were my brethren under you, our Father, with our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow-citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, for which your people sighs with longing throughout its pilgrimage, from its setting out to its return.7