D17 P12: It's Family, Stupid

As we have journeyed through the "D17" (the 17 truths about discipleship), you have perhaps noticed I refer frequently to author and speaker Caesar Kalinowski (see http://caesarkalinowski.com/). I have read a few of his books and heard him speak a number of times, and I appreciate his fresh way of clarifying ideas that are sometimes elusive. It was at a small conference in KC with about 30 other pastors where he was teaching that I got the idea for this D17 list. Many of the items on this list came from that talk.

There was one thing he said in that conference that stopped me dead in my tracks, which is our 12th entry in the D17 list:

We would never raise kids the way that most churches try to raise disciples.

Wow.

His point is best illustrated by trying to envision what this would look like:

Yeah, we're intentional about raising our kids. Of course, we are. We get together about once a week for a couple of hours (sometimes less). That's the only time I see most of them. For the first part, we separate off into different rooms based on age or what topic we're interested in. We've got these convenient booklets that tell us what we're supposed to learn, and if we fill in all the blanks right, then we're going GREAT. But then we all come together. And I, being the dad, set up my chair at the front of the room, and the rest of the family forms a few semicircle rows to face me and listen quietly while I talk.

Sometimes, a few of our family members get together at a time other than Sunday morning ... if there's no soccer game. It's a hassle, because my wife has to get the house all clean first - wouldn't want the kids to know how we normally live. There's nothing they can learn from us based on how we really live - we want them to learn how to do the Christian life from those snippets of our presentable lives we allow them to see. The last thing we want them to see is how normal family members live normal life ... what could they possibly learn from that?

We don't ever expect our kids to walk in a manner consistent with our family name. We really want them to. We complain if they don't. But we don't really expect them to. Otherwise, we would be having difficult-but-real conversations about bearing the family name together. More importantly, we would be lovingly showing them how the Gospel applies to everyday life and that our real issue is not behavior but faith.

Yeah, we're super-intentional about how we raise our kids.

We would never expect our kids to grow up as healthy people with this kind of family rhythm. Why should we expect disciples to grow into greater health and maturity this way?

The premise for Kalinowski's point is from 1 Tim 3:4-5, where Paul tells Timothy that one of the desired traits of a church elder is that he be a good dad discipling his own kids, because discipling the church family should look a lot like discipling your own family members. Because ... church is a family.

We are aghast watching the increasing institutionalization of raising children in our society. We should be equally concerned wherever we see it happening in our churches for disciplemaking.

Here's perhaps a simpler way to think about it: Treat one another like family, including discipling one another. However we ought to disciple our sons, daughters, siblings, spouse, and even parents is how we ought to disciple our church family.

Just two chapters later, Paul tells Timothy (1 Tim 5.1-2):

Do not rebuke an older man, but appeal to him as a father, younger men as brothers, 

older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, with all purity.

Like family. Not like a Model T on the assembly line.