Raising Christian children in a pagan culture - Cover Story

Christian Century, Feb 16, 1994 by Ellen T. Charry

PARENTS NEED to ask some hard questions about their own faith and their relationship with their children. Some may hope that their children will be instructed in the faith during the 45 minutes a week of church school, but this scant instruction cannot compete with the powerful influences that bombard the child the rest of the week. Furthermore, church school teachers are often untrained and poorly educated in the faith. And though church may provide an important social milieu for youngsters, the content of faith may never be clearly articulated there.

Parents need to talk to one another, other parents and church staff, and plan how to raise their children. Christian education should be the province of men as well as women. Children need fathers who can talk to them about God, about humility as honor, about Jesus' serf-sacrifice on the cross, and about dignity as servanthood. Fathers may be eager to get their sons onto the ballfield or artillery range, but they must leam to be even more eager to get down on their knees with children and teach them to pray.

Prayer is crucial. It teaches children to reflect on their own lives and on the world around them. It provides breathing space from the overstimulation of our society. Attending to how to pray and for whom to pray trains children to focus on the welfare of others and on world events. Prayerbooks are wonderful resources; they contain prayers for travelers, for those far away, for the sick, for those living alone, for government leaders, for an end to civil strife, for proper use of natural resources. We should also teach children to pray for virtues like compassion, courage, cheerfulness and charity.

While there are good books of prayers for children, the newspaper is probably our best source for learning to pray for others. Helping children to select a focus for prayer from a newspaper article and then to write their own prayers is excellent training--in prayer and also in thinking and writing. Some children might want to keep a scrapbook of their prayers and the articles that inspired them, so that they can look back and recall the people and events for which they have prayed.

Of course, one also learns to pray by being prayed for. Parents would do well to bless their children, perhaps when they leave for school in the morning, and to pray for them when they are facing special stresses, and at times of celebration. This means that parents must be comfortable praying aloud and spontaneously--a daunting thought for those accustomed to having the minister do the praying.

THE ACTIVITY of godparenting--which, like family prayer and study, has been all but abandoned in many contexts---has enormous potential for forming Christian children. (Grandparents can also exercise a godparenting role.) The resources for godparents are limited only by one's imagination. I suggest the following guidelines:

* Place your concern for the child's spiritual and moral development in the context of a wider involvement in her whole life. Building a genuine relationship with a child takes effort, time and energy. It requires a regular structure so that your presence in the child's life is reliable. Visits to and trips with children expand their world and build trust. If distance makes this context impossible, phone calls can underscore the importance of the relationship.