There was a post on a friend’s account about the importance of “training up a child” (evangelicals especially like to use that Biblical term) to be a Christian. The post hit on a theme I harp on in a secular sense all the time: you’ve got one shot with your kids. But they took it in a different direction:

You have one shot to raise your children in church.

That’s all you get. One. When it’s gone, it’s gone forever. You can’t go back. You don’t get a redo.

As parents we accomplished our life’s greatest accomplishment. We raised our kids in church.

What they do with that is up to them, but we did our best. I’ll stand before God knowing that.

Faith is often inherited. So is a lack of it.

I am so thankful I heard that while my children were little. I determined then and there to get my kids as close to Heaven as I could. I knew I couldn’t save them, but I could raise them in church. I could get them in His presence. I could get them to an altar.

Nothing, not football, not baseball, not Boy Scouts, not a Playstation, not a demanding coach, not a job, not any other distraction was going to keep them out of church. I stood face to face with the devil on more than one occasion fighting some temptation to keep my kids out of church. Often, the devil was in the mirror.

But thanks be to God, we did it. We raised our kids in church.

Now, before 2023 begins, I remind all the parents:

You get one shot. It’s precious, scarce, and fleeting. Use it or lose it.

The post came with a picture:

It got me thinking again about the roll of imitation in the raising of a Christian child. Consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1

The children huddled at the altar railing in the picture: why are they doing that? Because they saw adults in their community do it. Why are they experiencing such a flood of emotion? Because churches run their services in a way to create that emotion: soft music, quiet speaking, repetition. Why do these kids think it’s the Holy Spirit doing this in their life? Because their parents told them that emotion comes from the Holy Spirit.

Scenario 2

Kids visit a science exhibition to learn about waves and then participate in a science exhibition demonstrating those waves. They’ve given tools to measure those waves. They’re taught to make predictions about what changing the amplitude of a wave will do to the sound, then they test and check their predictions. They’re shown the difference between a sine wave and a cosine wave and given a chance to predict what will happen if both occur at the same time at the same wavelength and amplitude. And then they check their predictions.

“Faith is often inherited. So is a lack of it.” I couldn’t agree more about the first statement, but there are many causes to the second. When kids realize the difference between these two scenarios, it might lead to doubt.

  • The first is based entirely on trusting how others tell you to interpret reality. It offers no predictive capability and is limited in its scope.
  • The second is open to questioning (indeed, encourages it) and offers ways to verify its claims. It has a built-in predictive capacity and is almost unlimited in scope.

This is the reason fundamentalist Christians don’t like science.