One Million Arrows Christian Parenting Blog
- The Benefits and Costs of Raising Disciples
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Guest Author: Alan Melton
- October 26, 2009 | View or add comments |
- A Vision for Africa
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By Julie Ferwerda
- October 19, 2009 | View or add comments |
- Christian Parenting...or Indoctrination?
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Guest Author: Rick Osborne
- October 19, 2009 | View or add comments |
- Babel Reversed in the Home
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Guest Author: Kim Anderson
- October 8, 2009 | View or add comments |
Entries for: October, 2009
Recently I found a discussion about the pluses and minuses of Public versus Private Schooling versus Homeschooling. I realized that they missed one more option: Disciple Like Jesus.
There are at least four components of what Jesus did:
1. Jesus told His disciples to follow Him, rather than unbelieving teachers [Julie adds: or the religious system/majority of the day led others away from simple devotion to Christ].
2. Jesus was with His disciples all day long.
As parents, it is sometimes easy to minimize or even dismiss what God is speaking into or doing in the lives of our young children. We think they're too young or too untrained to hear from God on important matters of life, such as matters of their destiny.
This is what happened to Dillon Stull. When he was in 5th grade, God gave him a vision (in the form of the continent of Africa filled with a stethoscope) that he would someday go to Africa as a medical missionary. He didn't immediately share this vision with his parents, but he did write about it in a paper for school. When his parents came across his paper, they thought, like most parents would, that their son was just enjoying the adventurous imagination typical of a young boy. They figured it was probably a passing phase.
The atheists accuse Christians of keeping their children cloistered away from other views and indoctrinating these young and impressionable minds as opposed to presenting them with a range of choices. Which they say is unfair to the children.
According to dictionary.com, the word ‘indoctrination’ means to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology etc. especially to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view. It goes on to say that indoctrination involves teaching someone to accept doctrine uncritically and that a synonym for the word is brainwashing.
Pentecost is often viewed as "Babel Reversed." In both stories, there was a divine send-off, but what contrasts! Whereas at Babel (Gen 11) God confused the rebel's understanding by dividing the languages, at Pentecost God brought understanding to His people regardless of their language. Where at Babel the result was dispersion and alienation, at Pentecost the result was gathering and fellowship.
What made the difference? Can we learn from these examples to transform the experience of releasing our young adults into the gateway for renewed fellowship?
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