My husband and I found this book to be a great encouragement and reminder about how we, as parents, have been given a great responsibility by God to disciple our children. As Christian parents, the most important thing we can do for our kids is to grow their faith in Jesus.
The practical examples it gave throughout the book, were also really helpful. Particularly about how we can be intentional in our parenting, with a strong focus on discipling our kids and youth to think like a Christian, with the hopes of God working in their hearts, and delivering them from their sin.
The book goes through four main themes, as their strategy for imparting faith to our kids and youth:
Modelling - our personal faith and how that is seen by our kids
Family discipleship time - purpose-built time designated to thinking about, talking about and living out the gospel
Family discipleship moments - opportunities throughout your normal day for speaking truth into your kid’s lives about God
Family discipleship milestones - to celebrate or remember significant spiritual markers in your kid’s lives
After each chapter on these main themes, there is a series of questions, which we found really helpful. It got us thinking and discussing how we were raised in a Christian context, what sorts of things we are doing at the moment to disciple our son, and what we can be doing in the future to get more out of these times. Since reading this book, we have made a bit of an action plan of how we want to do discipleship in our family going forward, some of these are really practical things like learning memory verses with our son, asking our son who or what he would like to pray for at bedtime prayer, making baked treats and cards for our neighbours at Christmas time. And a whole bunch more!
We were really interested in reading this book, as we are always keen to learn more about discipling and read and listen to a lot of resources in this area. We are invested in discipling our son and helping to do the same for other children in our life as well, within our extended family and church community.
We would really encourage parents of kids or youth to read this book, particularly those who are looking for ideas on how to help their kids seek to follow Christ. To quote from the book, with something that rang loud and clear to us, “with all your family has going on, you may think you don’t have time for family discipleship. The truth is, with all your family has going on, you can’t afford not to be dedicated to family discipleship”.
- Jenny, mum of a precious 4 year old son.
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