Isn’t It The Churches Job To Teach Our Children about God and the Bible?

Simply put, NO. There is nowhere in the Bible that says that it is the churches responsibility to disciple our children.

The Bible, starting with what God spoke to Abraham (Genesis 18:19) carrying on through God’s instructions to the Israelites (Deut. 6) and moving right up to Paul’s directions to Christian parents (Eph. 6:4), unwaveringly gives the task of raising godly children to parents.

If you think about it logically, parents are the ONLY ones positioned to do the job successfully. There are three legs on the stool we call discipleship. Every Christian, in order to grow in their salvation, must grow in three areas. They must grow in their personal relationship with God (daily pray and reliance on God). They need to grow in their knowledge of God (instruction in God’s word) and they need to grow in living it out.

The spiritual growth program for children is no different; they must be growing in all three of these areas daily. (“Bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” Eph. 6:4)

For a child to grow as a disciple they need to be instructed and trained in daily prayer and Bible reading. They also need to learn how to ‘live it.’ It’s when the fight breaks out over who gets the last cookie that a child should be trained in what God’s word says about the way they treat others and how we should resolve conflicts. Unless the Sunday school teacher or the Children’s Pastor makes very regular house calls, he can not possibly do the job.

Christianity is about who we are and how we live 24/7 and we are the only ones around our children enough to give them the hands-on, in-the-moment discipleship that they need.

Get The Professionals To Do It

Somewhere along the way in our culture we adopted the idea that a child’s education should be left to the ‘professionals.’ I think it started decades ago with the schools taking on sex Ed (look where that’s taken us). From there we as parents have progressively let go of pretty much every area of parental training.

Schools now teach our children everything from Sex Ed to Life Planning and from Personal Grooming to Morality. They even have Consumer Ed classes where our kids are taught about bank accounts and mortgages.

Think about it. Our job as parents in our culture today, has become, house them, clothe them, feed them and (apparently our primary purpose) make sure that they are entertained.

“Whatever you do do not direct the way they think! That is messing with the professional’s agenda.” Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but this is not just the professionals agenda. It comes from the enemy of our souls who has succeeded in getting us to allow the world to raise our children.

Church Professionals

This ‘leave it to the professionals’ idea has somehow also crept into the church. We drop our children off at school to learn about life and we drop them off at church to learn about God. Handy, we just need to pick them up from both and then pick up dinner and a few DVDs.

It is our God given responsibility to teach our children about life and what God says about how we are to live it.

Public schools can help us with teaching math, literature, science etc. and the one area where the church can be a huge help is helping our children grow in the knowledge of their faith. (I will cover how you can best benefit from the churches help in another blog.)

Although we can get aid from our schools, our churches and our communities we must NEVER relinquish our rights or our responsibilities to ‘instruct and train’ our children to anyone else.

That is how we end up with Christian teens and young adults who have grown up in the church but think like the world. It is not the churches’ job to raise our children in Christ – it is ours.

In my next post, we will deal with the next question that always pops up after this one, “How can I disciple my children when my own faith is a little shaky and when I do not know enough about it to disciple anyone?”

For help with teaching your children about their Faith, we recommend, The Singing Bible.

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(RICK OSBORNE / Christian Author, Speaker & Dad – your source for Christian Parenting advice)