Obedience doesn’t bring about belonging, the belonging comes first. When we belong, we express our connectedness through obedience.

For the teenaged and young adult women who haven’t yet signed up for anything in particular: how the choices of the younger years can help or hinder future faithfulness.

If you’re tracking with me this far, you’re probably convinced that it’s essential to train our children to walk in God’s ways. Neglecting this duty might not be the problem you’re faced with, but the temptation to go about it in a disordered way stalks us all.

Teaching children to obey is a delicate, yet robust work. No relationship other than parent to child is designed to bear the weight of it. The trained childcare worker, the babysitter, the neighbour, the aunt, the uncle, the grandparent, the friends, the Sunday School teacher, the pastor, the school are not authorised by God to discipline and instruct children into mature godliness. Biblically, no one else is commissioned for this role.

Bullet points about how to teach children to obey.

Reflections on different seasons of personal Bible reading as a mum.

Like me, were you ever the person at school who hated every subject you weren’t intuitively good at? The need to save face meant avoiding the areas where one’s incompetence could be exposed. Which meant it took me decades to realise there is more to enjoying something than being the best at it. It’s possible to learn to do new things. There’s much pleasure to be had, when we’re willing to be seen for the duffers we are, while we fumble around learning something new.

It’s natural to dislike the word ‘obedience’, after all, none of us are very good at it…

A casual chat about both maternal boredom and bored kids. Is boredom really good for us? I used to think so. It's taken 17 years of being a mum to think otherwise. And, what can we do about it?

Bringing about belief in Jesus is God’s, hidden, sovereign work. On the other hand, tending to behaviour (which can either help or hinder belief) is definitely on the rather visible parental job description. God starts and finishes the work of saving people, but he uses all manner of means in the middle. Christian parents are not meant to wait on belief before we get busy teaching our children to obey Jesus.

If our thinking about total depravity has us conclude that no child can ever learn to obey at all, that they are beyond instruction and correction, that their lack of obedience is inevitably permanent, that they are unrestrainable, then we’ve not understood enough of the doctrine.

Common cultural ideas might stop us from teaching our kids to obey Jesus, but sometimes our Christian conundrums paralyse us:

-Should we expect children will learn to obey when we know they have a sinful nature? Is it even possible this side of Genesis 3?

This is another audio-only free think about some aspects of teaching kids obedience, shared casually over my kitchen sink. These think-aloud chats are a bit of a birds-eye view from 17 years of parenting six kids (ie. lots of years not being able to ignore the realities of obedience!). It’s more about saying yes than no.

An audio only free form think-aloud chat about Christian music for kids. Which leads to other things…

When I was younger, “obedience” was merely uncool. In the 90’s and 00’s, we didn’t use the word because it was daggy, uptight and prudish. Obedience meant deprivation and legalism, the arbitrary spoiling of fun. Thoroughly unappealing. Now, it is counted among the evils of this world.

The most profoundly connected disciples Christian parents have are their own children. We are obliged to teach our kids to obey Jesus. Every moment and task in our children’s young lives is given by Jesus to be used for training them into obedience to Him. Whole body, whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, whole strength obedience. The sort of obedience which grows alongside of, comes from—and feeds—love for Jesus.

This is not a written article, but a free form, think-aloud about my family’s history of Bible reading over the past 17 years. It is recorded on the fly, so expect it to sound a little more live-action-uncut than the audio articles do. I hope it helps illustrate some of the articles.

Here are some problematic assumptions about the Great Commission which end up stifling motherhood (and stifling the mission too):

Are home duties a rival to the Great Commission? Will building an overflowing home waste resources that could otherwise be spent telling the world about Jesus? This is the question which troubled me most as I fumbled around in the early years of motherhood. The word that evangelical Christians often focus on is “go”. It’s hard to know what to do with that when so much of raising children is not going. This focus on taking the gospel to new people in new places pickles many of us in guilt, because the time of small children is not full of new people and new places. We’re trying to work out how to be with the same few people in far fewer places than we used to circuit. The slow smallness which goes with invested mothering can look, on the outside, like apathy about Jesus’ mission, or a barrier to it.

The golden law of our society is that whatever a woman is doing, she is Always Only Ever choosing the very best thing. Her holiness is indisputable. Her instincts are infallible. According to a poster on a wall near you, Women are Perfect. This lie is a false comfort. The fact is, when you are struggling to know how to deal with a persistently contrary child, or you don’t know how to fill the hours with your toddler, or you are enslaved to your own volatile temper, you know you are not Always Only Ever choosing the very best thing. No wonder we want to flee motherhood when it keeps exposing us! We need to know what to do with our shame and then we need help. But we often sabotage our own access to help.

Home is meant to be the central place from which we worship and train up worshipers. It is naturally the locus of our maternal responsibilities. It won’t be the only place where responsibility and influence happens, but it is the basic place. We can’t leap over it. This is a bland thought if we’ve not known what it’s like to be in a home full of vitality; if we’re still trying to grow out of our boredom. To say that home is where we are primarily responsible and most influential can be insulting, or at least bewildering, if we have a purely functional view of the home.