My folks gave me a wonderful gift by raising me with a
strong foundation in the knowledge of God and seeing the world through the lens
of the Bible. One of my dad’s popular sayings was “prove it to me in
Scripture”. That foundation stuck with me and helped me through times where I
questioned my faith. For example, I took a religion course at NDSU from a
Lutheran Pastor/Professor. He had some different ideas and openly questioned
the validity of the Bible. Because of the foundation that my parents instilled
into me, those questions and comments drove me to learn more about God through the
Bible rather than drive me away from the Christianity.
In some of my interactions with atheists personally or
through their writings, I found that many grew up in the church but lost their
faith. What makes some hold to faith and some loose it? I think the answer is
found in their foundation. If kids are taught to ask hard questions and lean
into the Bible, their foundation will be much stronger than the kids that
received the Sunday School answer to their questions. Some do not get any
answer to their questions at all. This is why I think Children’s and Family
Ministry is so important. We need to build that foundation of faith on the Rock
(Matthew 7:24-27) so that when hard times come, their house will stand.
It was not until
recently that God gave me a helpful picture of how disciples are “grown”: a
snowman. Growing up in Minnesota, I have built a few snowmen in my days. The
best snow for it is the wet, sticky stuff. To make a snowman, you gather up
some snow into a ball. They you roll the ball on the snow. As you roll it, it
gets bigger and bigger. If you are getting the shape of a tire, you need to
roll the ball sideways so the ball can stay round. If you have some spots that
need to be filled in, you can pack some snow in there. As you are going, you
are trying to grow the snowball in all directions at the same time.
This struck me as a great analogy for how we need to help
our kids grow as disciples. Larry Fowler[i]
(Awana Ministries) and Mark Steiner[ii]
(DiscipleLand Ministry) both use a three-pronged model for growing disciples:
Know, Love, Serve. For our snowman picture, what we know about God is our Head,
what we feel about God is our body (which has our heart), and what we do for
God is our Bottom (our feet). We want a well-formed snowman which means that
all three need to grow together. Too often, we focus too much about knowledge
and facts and not enough about learning to Love God. So the idea is that we
want our kids to grow in knowledge about God, grow in our desire to have a
relationship with God, and grow our character into being like Christ.
The passage of scripture that helped this vision is
Philippians 1:9-11. In this passage, Paul talks about how all three areas work
together. We start with growing in the knowledge and wisdom of God (Know). Then
we “approve what is excellent” which deals with our hearts desires (Love).
Then, we strive to live pure and blameless lives (Serve). And we do all of it
for the praise and glory of God. That is our goal: to help our families to
bring God all the glory in everything we think, say, and do.
In the next few weeks, I will be blogging about what it means to grow in what we Know, Love and Serve about God along with some other ideas about how we can help our kids grow in these areas as well.
[i]
Fowler, Larry. Raising a Modern-day
Joseph. 2009
[ii]
Steiner, Mark. “Measure Your Ministry”. 2014 DiscipleLand Brochure.
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