Living Water for the Parent’s Parched Soul

As parents and followers of Christ, few areas of our lives can prompt more guilt, insecurity, and anxiety than discipling our children. We know God expects us to disciple our children. We know it’s critical to disciple our children. We know the consequences of not discipling our children. And yet, it’s something we often struggle to do. We want to disciple. We try to disciple. But more often than not, we fail to disciple.

I know what often comes next. Pastors, conference speakers, podcasts, and authors start to rebuke Christian parents. But you’re not going to hear that from me. Guilt is an extremely poor motivator, and, frankly, much of the guilt others may have placed on you is unfounded. More importantly, guilt is anathema to the gospel. So, I’m not going to pile on here. Instead, here’s what I want you to drink in as living water for your parched soul:

You’re not a failure.
God is not upset with you.
You’ve got this.
Everything is going to be okay.

Do me a favor. Go back and read those four sentences again. Read them slowly. Read them prayerfully. Digest the truth of each.

You’re not a failure, because you are more than a conqueror in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:37). God isn’t upset with you, because when he sees you, he sees the perfect righteousness of Christ which he has placed over you (2 Cor. 5:21). You’ve got this, because the Spirit of God dwells within you and is ready, willing, and able to equip you and empower you for every good work—and that includes this one (Eph. 1:13–14). Everything is going to be okay, because our sovereign God has you and your kids in the palm of his mighty hand (Isa. 41:13).

I pray these truths echo deeply within your mind and heart. You can do it, because you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you (Phil. 4:13). If you couldn’t, God would never have assigned this important mission to you. But he did. And he is with you, guiding and directing each step you take. So be of good cheer.

If you’re like most Christian parents, you’ve had enough discouragement and hopelessness. You’ve had enough pessimism and guilt. My heart for you is that God casts from your mind and heart any shame you have around family discipleship—as far as the east is from the west. The last thing I want to do is add to the burden you might feel pressing down on you. I want to help lift that burden from you. I’m your advocate. I’m in your corner. We’re in this together. And I believe we can do it.

Confronting the Brutal Facts

In his bestselling book Good to Great, Jim Collins shares the idea of what he calls the “Stockdale Paradox.” James Stockdale was the highest-ranking officer held in the Vietnam prisoner camp known as the “Hanoi Hilton.” This camp housed hundreds of overcrowded, malnourished, isolated prisoners of war who routinely endured mental and physical abuse.[1] Stockdale survived there for over eight years; tragically, many other prisoners of war didn’t make it out.

According to Stockdale, the group that struggled most was the “optimists.” These prisoners firmly believed they would be released by the next holiday or before the next calendar year began. When those holidays came and went and the years continued to roll by, said Stockdale, they “died of a broken heart.”[2] Now, Stockdale himself never doubted he would be freed. But there was a major difference in his hope: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be” (Collins, Good to Great, 85). This is the Stockdale Paradox: holding out unwavering hope for tomorrow while confronting the most brutal challenges of today. This is precisely what we must do when it comes to family discipleship.

Here’s today’s brutal truth: for the most part, Christian parents simply aren’t discipling our kids as we should. Fewer than 10 percent of us read the Bible or pray with our kids in a typical week.[3] Only 10 percent of us discuss faith in our homes on a regular basis, and 43 percent of us never do.[4] These numbers—and more that we will look at in a minute—suggest that we aren’t discipling our kids according to God’s design and calling. We aren’t discipling them in a way that passes along a vibrant, robust, deeply rooted, deeply satisfying faith. The data doesn’t just bear this out; our personal experiences do too.

So, what do we do with this information?

First, we recognize we’re chasing a mirage. The notion that a previous generation of parents succeeded in family discipleship while we’ve somehow dropped the ball is a myth, and a vicious one at that. We’re being held up against an imaginary standard that is amplifying our acute sense of failure. Parenting is hard. Family discipleship is, in many ways, even harder. Let’s take comfort in knowing we’re not the first to struggle with it. We’re not the first to know and long for what we ought to do, but then to have a difficult time doing it.

Second—and this gets us to the crux of this book—history should tell us we have to find a new way forward. Just as there is no generation of parents in the past that got this all right, neither is there one perfect, successful strategy we can return to. We need a discipleship plan that is faithful to the gospel, but new.

Let’s do something new and expect a different result. What if we become the first generation of American parents to get family discipleship right? What if we become known for turning the tide of family discipleship, not for our glory, but for God’s glory and our kids’ good? What if we plant seeds of faithfulness so deep in our kids that they bear fruit in them and in multiple generations beyond them? So, how do we do this? It all starts with how we understand the gospel.

Adapted from Family Discipleship That Works by Brian Dembowczyk. ©2024 by Brian Dembowczyk. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.  

[1] For more information, see “The POW Story,” from the Hanoi Hilton Exhibit at the American Heritage Museum, www.hanoihiltonexhibit.org/the-pow-story.

[2] Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t [New York: HarperCollins, 2001], 85.

[3] George Barna, Revolutionary Parenting: What the Research Shows Really Works [Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2010], loc 581; Mark Holmen, Church + Home: The Proven Formula for Building Lifelong Faith [Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2010], 27.

[4] Marcia J. Bunge, “Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Children, Parents, and ‘Best Practices’ for Faith Formation,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 47, no. 4 [Winter 2008]: 349.