Parenting

Parenting is an interactive family process in which adults undertake a primary role in forming children in body (through conception and care), soul (through personality development and love), and spirit (through nurturing hunger for God). Ironically, this relationship forms not only children but parents. Children, without knowing it, help their parents “grow up.” So it is entirely appropriate to ask not only how the children ended up but also how the parents turned out!

Parenting today is a threatened calling from both the outside and the inside. From the outside there is the professionalization of parenting (letting the experts do it for us) and preoccupation with the technology of parenting. On the inside there is an erosion of confidence that ordinary people can parent well, and that it is worth doing at all. It has not always been this way.

Paradoxically, in earlier survival cultures and even some developing countries today, children were prized as wealth and parenting was passionately desired even though people inevitably experienced failures. In the identity culture of the West—where people are bent on finding and actualizing themselves—parenting is frequently viewed as an unwelcome and troubling distraction from one’s primary vocation outside the home. This is especially tragic when the parent, like Eli in the Bible (1 Samuel 2:12-36), is in religious or public service and refuses to regard parenting with the same vocational importance as preaching, counseling or public leadership. The intention of this article is not to focus on the question of how to parent, important as that is, but to explore the underlying theological and spiritual questions of why we should parent at all and why parenting has such spiritual significance.

Parenting as Vocation

What is lacking in the Western world is a rationale for having and raising children. In older cultures becoming a parent was assumed of those who married. In modern cultures, however, marriage and conception are not necessarily linked, the influence of Roman Catholic teaching on this matter notwithstanding. As we approach an almost perfectly efficient contraceptive society, it is now possible to delay having children indefinitely while one pursues buying a house, establishing a career and gaining personal happiness. The urgency of this question—Why have babies?—is raised a notch further by the new reproductive technologies, which call into question the church’s traditional teaching that it is copulation that produces (and ought to produce) offspring. Childless couples who want children and are unable or unwilling to adopt may now resort to in vitro fertilization or even surrogate parenthood. A contemporary Catholic ethicist notes that where Augustine “found it necessary to remind Jerome that it is not marriage that produces babies but sex, it may be necessary to point out in an age of new reproductive technologies that it need not be sex but can still be love” (Henley 1990, p. 18). Never before has it been so urgent to lift parenting above a simple biological urge and elevate it to a holy calling.

A vocation or calling is a life direction and service that is embraced not merely by one’s will or through social constraint, but as a response to a divine summons and for purposes beyond our own personal fulfilment. When we experience calling we say such things as “I was born for this.” We find joy in our calling even when we experience failures—as we inevitably will as parents—because our vocation is bound up in the promises of God, who is determined to bring the whole story to a worthy end. And, in the end, our vocational service is meaningful because we are accountable to God (and not just to ourselves) for walking worthy of our vocation (Ephes. 4:1). Vocation means our life matters to God. So parenting is a vocation because it is divinely constituted (Genesis 1:27-28), is accomplished in partnership with God, invites a life of faith and stewardship and is implicitly spiritual—a Godlike thing. Parenting is a path to God, not a diversion from spiritual life. It is not merely a setting in which spiritual disciplines take place—around the family meal, for example—it is a spiritual discipline itself.

Parenting is something we accomplish with God, even if we are unaware of the divine partner in the process. When we procreate we are creating “before” (pro) God and cooperating with God, without whom the creation of a new person would be impossible (Genesis 4:1). Theological attempts to unpack this mystery are woefully inadequate, including the traditional explanation by Aquinas that human parents provide the embryonic material while God provides the “sensitive” soul, an approach now being challenged by a more thoroughly unified biblical understanding of human personhood. Inadequate as it is, this traditional theological understanding reinforces the truth that parenting is a divine-human partnership, not an exclusively human achievement.

Parenting invites us Godward. For all, and especially for those who have difficulty conceiving, bearing and raising a children is a matter of “waiting on the Lord,” a waiting that may lead to taking other initiatives to become parents, or even to other expressions of vocation such as serving the children of others. Even after a child is conceived or adopted we must wait on the Lord for the outcome of his or her life—something we can neither predict nor control, try as we may. Implicit in this is the idea of stewardship. We are entrusted with children; we do not own them.

Parenting as Stewardship

Children are gifts from God to us, gifts which we never “own” but of which we are stewards, in a way so deeply understood by Hannah in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 1:28). This same idea is communicated by the concept of hospitality: we create a welcoming space for children where they can be free to be themselves, neither smothered nor “dumped.” Both stewardship and hospitality suggest that parents have more responsibilities than rights. Stanley Hauerwas suggests that a child is always in this sense adopted, since the child belongs to the parents in a provisional and limited way (Henley, 1990, p. 21). This is reinforced in the actual experience of parenting when parents discover that they do not have dominion over the child. They cannot determine that their child will replicate them in the world. A child will not, no matter how hard we try, fulfill our unfulfilled ambitions for this life, or give us a status we have not found in being a child of God.

One practical expression of parental stewardship is the simple truth that no one chooses his or her parents; but in like manner we do not choose in a detailed way our children, even should we adopt them. So this vocation of parenthood is distributed among people of various talents, a phenomenon which may lie behind the commandment to “honor” one’s parents (Exodus 20:12) even if one has little reason to be grateful to them (Henley 1990, p. 20). But there is more to this than a divine randomness. Grace can be discovered even through very negative family experiences if these are processed.

Parenting as Ministering the Gospel

The family as predicament and blessing reflects the gospel in daily life, and pleads it, as poignantly revealed in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). Robert Frost crafted a statement by a farmer whose old hired hand came home to die: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” The farmer resented the intrusion. But the farmer’s wife had a deeper insight. She said, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” More than obligation is built into the structure of the human family. There is the possibility of grace, belongingness, belovedness, undeserved kindness. One does not need to go farther than one’s own front porch to be faced with gospel issues and to be found by God. So it was entirely appropriate that the Second Vatican Council used the phrase “domestic church” to recapture the ancient idea that the family is a form of church and not just the reverse. We do not need to bring the Lord “into” our homes by a program of Christian education, or even family devotions, good as these are. God is already “where two or three are gathered,” whether the family is “good” or “not so good.” There are no perfect families, but there is no better family for us to be formed into personal and Christian maturity than the one into which we were born, adopted or entered by the marriage covenant. Thus parenting is truly vocational in its origin; but it is a ministry in its effect on people—both parents and children.

Parents too are under the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephes. 6:1-4 KJV; see Blessing, Family). In all families the parenting experience “sets us up” to give and receive ministry from God and others through the issues of everyday life in family, including such things as the need for unconditional acceptance and self-worth, the challenge of “leaving father and mother,” the images of God as Father as well as feminine images of God, and issues of who is in control. The Greek word for “ministry” is simply the same word as “service.” So we can consider parenting as a form of family service in which people are touched for God and by God in the normal everyday transactions and relationships of family life. One way of describing this two-way ministry (God to people and people to God) is the biblical concept of priesthood.

Parenting as Priesthood

In a family where some or all the members are Christians, the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9) means that the father is not the priest of the family but rather one of them! So the challenge of parenting is not only to raise godly children but to become godly parents. This comes about through a communal ministry in the home. Each believer is priest to the others. Often the children are priests to the parents—declaring through their innocent wisdom the direct accessibility and trustworthiness of God. In this way children demonstrate the childlikeness which parents themselves are called to emulate. Put differently, every member of the family has the potential to be a spiritual director to the other members, and the family as a whole acts as a corporate priesthood for one another. We do this by praying, by playing, by raising questions, in affirming where and how God is at work in our midst and by directing one another to find our ultimate security and hope in God not in their family.

Prayer is an important part of this priestly ministry since it brings people and situations to God and invites God to touch people and situations. The Bible does not specifically require that a family pray out loud together—though it can be a good thing to do—but it strongly advocates prayer for one another. The prayers of Paul in Ephes. 1:16-23 and Ephes. 3:14-19 are great patterns for priestly intercessory prayer for other members of the family. As children approach adulthood, discerning parents will pray more and say less. By the time they become grandparents parents learn that prayer is probably their most important continuing ministry to their children and grandchildren.

Unlike Job’s friends, who talked too much about God, and more like Job, who talked to God about all that was happening, parents are invited to increasingly become people who learn about God by wrestling in prayer, especially prayer for their family. Luther once said that “living, or rather dying and being damned make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating.” He could have added “parenting” to the first part of his sentence. Some parents, too anxious to have their children declare faith at the earliest possible age, stuff them with Christian information so they arrive at the teens “knowing it all” and immune to discovering something personal, instead of hungering for God and wanting more. Another way of expressing this developmental approach to parenting is through the biblical concept of discipling.

Parenting as Discipling

The connection between the words discipline and discipleship (both stemming from the Latin discipulus, meaning “learner”) is a complicated one (Lee, pp. 268-71) and has led some to advocate parental discipline by punishment and others to reject punishment completely in favor of noncoercive education. In fact, the Bible includes the element of punishment in its idea of discipline but always in the context of something greater: the covenant love which encourages growth and not simply to control.

Discipleship, so perfectly exemplified in the relation of Jesus and his disciples, is a helpful model of parenting for several reasons: (1) the context is not the classroom but life-on-life relationships; (2) learning is continuous and unscheduled; (3) the learning relationship is primarily one of imitation rather than the transmission of information (Luke 6:40); and (4) the primary motivation of discipline is not the need to control but the desire to encourage self-control and other fruits of the Spirit.

Obviously this cannot happen without the parent’s being self-reflective. This is especially needed because a family is constantly changing like a mobile with elements moving and influencing all the other elements. Systems theory is one contemporary way of understanding this; congruent with this is the biblical idea of family as covenant.

Parenting as Ministers of the Covenant

The covenant is a binding personal agreement to belong, involving mutuality, love and loyalty. Systems theory, in line with the biblical ideas of family and church, helps us understand the simultaneous need to be “we” (an identity formed in community) and “me” (a differentiated individual). A healthy family is a covenant community in which we are more one because of our diversity, rather than being unified by blurring the differences and merging members into a homogenous unit. The process of building such a community involves constant change for all the members of the family.

The development of a child should start with bonding, attaching to at least one significant adult who is really “crazy” about him or her. Without this bonding a child will grow up looking for the bonding he or she missed and, according to Bowlby’s attachment theory, will more likely become a driven person, possibly even addicted.

But this early dependence must progress toward interdependence. The covenant actually starts in a unilateral way by the parents’ action in claiming the child as their own, at a stage when the child cannot reciprocate. But the covenant becomes bilateral as the growing child affirms a family identity while becoming differentiated from parents. In one sense parents are continuously preparing their children “to leave home” from the very first months, and the failure to do this (assuming healthy initial attachment) leads to enmeshed families where the children cannot “leave father and mother” (Genesis 2:24) even when they marry, and the parents are unable to “let go.” In their covenant ministry parents encourage belonging and differentiation at the same time, giving them both roots and wings. Ultimately in a mature covenant, when the parents are old and infirm the circle is completed as children care for their parents when their parents can no longer care for themselves (Balswick and Balswick, 1987, pp. 41-42).

Throughout this process of development within the family, parents are powerfully teaching their children the meaning of covenant and therefore suggesting the fundamental basis of our relationship with God—one of belonging rather than performing. In addition, parents are preparing their children to be capable of forming their own family covenant through marriage, if God should so lead. Indeed, even a dysfunctional family experience, if properly processed, can be an asset in preparing for marriage. Understanding intergenerational sin (problems passed on from generation to generation until they are broken) and, more significantly, intergenerational grace (Exodus 20:5-6) is crucial to being free to leave home and to form another family.

So an important ministry of parents is the forming, keeping and developing of a covenant community in which through all the changing life stages people simultaneously belong unconditionally and are encouraged to change and develop uniquely. This view of family ministry profoundly challenges both the Western family (as a collection of individuals) and the Eastern (as a merged unit). It also challenges parents to be constantly adapting to their changing ministry. During the developmental stages of children various parenting styles will commend themselves: more authoritarian (directive) in the earliest months, more authoritative (high control with positive encouragement) during the growing years, and more permissive (nondemanding and warmly accepting) when children reach adulthood (Atkinson and Wilson, p. 61).

There are several practical implications that arise from a theology and spirituality of parenting. First, recognize parenting as a vocation more important than service outside the home because it is the most tangible expression of God as parent. Second, give up ownership of your child to God; your child is a trusted gift and a precious guest. Third, hear the gospel and live it through living graciously at home, not giving everyone what they deserve. Fourth, pray for your children and encourage them to pray for you. Fifth, put discipline in the context of discipleship. Sixth, build community that balances the need to be “we” with the need to be “me.” Finally, enjoy your children.

Can Christian parents guarantee that their children will become believers? No, not even by “doing it right” in all spheres of parenting. Indeed, some research suggests that inward and authentic faith in young people is found just as much in families where parents were authoritarian as among those who were permissive at the wrong stage (Atkinson and Wilson, pp. 51-62). Good parenting can facilitate a child’s growing up to become whole and open to God but cannot guarantee faith. That is the result of a miraculous and mysterious cooperation of human and divine wills. When a child raised in a healthy, affirming home does not embrace faith, at least in the present, it is not a sign of bad parenting. The story is not yet finished, as we learn when the curtain comes down in the story of the two prodigal sons, one at home but in the far country in his heart, the other at home in body and soul.

Parenting does not have guarantees, except the growth of the parents. Parenting is not really for anything: not for the certain transmission of faith to another generation, not for the pleasure of having children rise up and call us blessed, not for the satisfaction of producing high achievers. Parenting as a spiritual discipline is for God, who in the end is the only one who can say “Well done.” And God approves of our parenting, as Luther so clearly proclaimed, not because of the merits of our performance but because we did our parenting for God. “God with all his angels and creatures is smiling,” said Luther, “not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.” Everyone who has reflected deeply on this ministry and vocation attests that parenting is an act of faith. But faith is not a leap in the dark but a hearty trust in the God who has made himself known in Christ and will one day show us what we really did in parenting our children.

» See also: Birth

» See also: Conception

» See also: Family

» See also: Family Blessing

» See also: Family Communication

» See also: Family Problems

» See also: Family Systems

» See also: Family Traditions

» See also: Family Values

» See also: Homemaking

» See also: Sexuality

References and Resources

H. T. Atkinson and F. R. Wilson, “The Relationship Between Parenting Style and the Spiritual Well-Being and Religiosity of College Students,” Christian Education Journal 11 (Winter 1991) 51-62; J. O. Balswick and J. K. Balswick, The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989); J. O. Balswick and J. K. Balswick, “A Theological Basis for Family Relationships,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 6, no. 3 (Fall 1987) 37-49; E. Boyer, Finding God at Home: Family Life as a Spiritual Discipline (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991); R. Clapp, Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993); V. Hearn, ed., What They Did Right: Reflections on Parents by Their Children (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1974); J. Henley, “The Vocation of Parenting—with Surrogates,” St. Mark’s Review, Winter 1990, 16-25; J. Henley, Accepting Life: The Ethics of Living in Families (Melbourne: Joint Board of Christian Education, 1994); C. Lee, “Parenting as Discipleship: A Contextual Motif for Christian Parent Education,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 19, no. 3 (1991) 268-77; B. Narramore, Help! I’m a Parent (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972); M. Novak, “Family out of Favor,” Harper’s, April 1976; C. M. Sell, Family Ministry: The Enrichment of Family Life Through the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981); G. Smalley and J. T. Trent, The Blessing (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986); R. P. Stevens, “A Day with the Family,” in Disciplines of the Hungry Heart (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1993) 35-64; J. Taylor, Innocent Wisdom: Children as Spiritual Guides (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1989).

—R. Paul Stevens