A four-part blog series
Five Rhythms, Habits, and Spiritual Practices to Cultivate a Kingdom Culture in your Home
I don’t know about you, but I love practical applications. It’s awesome to hear the facts and read all the articles, but please help me figure out how to make this a part of my everyday life. As Christian parents we desire to raise kids who love the Lord, but how do we weave Jesus into the fabric of our homes? These are not a prescription nor a legalistic canon to measure oneself up against. Instead, they are a combination of rhythms, habits, and practices that help the parent set an atmosphere, a spiritual ecosystem, in which genuine empowered faith can take hold in the course of a child’s upbringing. After all, “habits form much more than our schedules, they form our hearts.”[1]
The Centrality of Prayer
Many theologians and pastors have sought to classify and organize the spiritual disciplines and practices in various ways. Dallas Willard categorizes them as Disciplines of Activity (fellowship, worship, prayer, service, etc…) and Disciplines of Letting Go (chastity, fasting, frugality, generosity, etc …).[2] Richard Foster as Inward Disciplines, Outward Disciplines, and Corporate Disciplines.[3] Many early church fathers such as Augustine found the disciplines to be central to formation. Augustine, in particular, found silence and solitude as the ideal environment for formation.[4] Parents dream about such a reality. Most would classify prayer as one discipline among all other disciplines.
For years I have wanted to highlight the centrality of prayer in all the disciplines. What I am saying is that prayer is the discipline that makes all other disciplines spiritual. Fasting without prayer is simply starving. Scripture reading without prayer is simply reading. An active and ongoing prayer life is what makes all habits, rhythms, and practices spiritual. Within the Christian home, parents must cultivate a culture and lifestyle of prayer. Often, we sit down at the table with our children and ask, “who wants to pray?” Sometimes we allow the youngest at the table to say a cute prayer. Nothing wrong with this – I have done it as well. With that being said, we cannot abdicate our responsibility to shape and teach our children to pray. Wondering if prayer is central in your home? I would ask these questions:
1. Do we stop and pray for one another on a regular basis?
2. Do we stop and ask one another for prayer on a regular basis?
3. Do we pray proactively or only reactively? The daily comfort, strengthening, and guidance of the Holy Spirit comes to us as we pray. We must learn to rely totally on the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide our steps in our own lives and in our function as godly parents.
The Guidance of Scripture
A kingdom culture home is not looking to the outside culture for answers and guidance, the Christian family is guided by the word of God. In the midst of the thousands of messages the American receives through their digital device each day scripture must remain the message that illuminates and guides more than every other. I will mention three substantive ways that the guidance of scripture can be evident in our homes. First, children see their parents reading and studying the word of God. It doesn’t happen every day but many days our children come down from their bedrooms to a picture of their mom and dad on either side of the kitchen table reading the word of God. I pray this is a lasting image in their hearts and minds for their entire life. I pray they are internalizing that scripture guides our lives.
Second, normative conversation around scripture, its meaning and implications in our lives. Whether on the drive home from church discussing the sermon, in moments of discipline and correction, or in major family decisions, the word of God infiltrates our entire lives, in conversation, and our way of thinking and living in the world.
Finally, the most predictable might be in the form of family devotions. Granted we are not the super strict family devotions every night of the week or even the same night of the week kind of family. I do, however, find incredible growth taking place when we slow down as a family and study the scriptures together. I’m confident in saying that my kids grow more spiritually in these ten-to-twenty-minute family sit downs than they do the rest of the week combined. A house built on the truth of God’s word is a house that will stand.
The Anchoring of Sabbath
I’m a recovering workaholic. I once regularly spent 80-90 hours a week working for Jesus. I hit a wall, though. I lacked joy in what I did. I came to understand the incompatibility of my lifestyle with the gospel and the impossibility to be a good husband and father at this pace. I learned about sabbath rest in Jesus. Pete Scazzero defines sabbath as stopping, resting, delighting, and contemplating for a twenty-four hour period once a week.[5]
In the early years of parenting sabbath is really hard. Diapers still need to be changed. You typically feel behind on household chores like laundry and yard work. Sabbath is a decision a family must make, one that honors our Creator who made the sabbath for us (Mark 2.27). This rhythm of life takes both preparation, discipline, and persistence. It’s a habit that forms us deeply though.
Rich Vilodas Jr. says “Sabbath is an invitation to a life that isn’t dominated and distorted by overwork.”[6] Sabbath chips away at the materialism and performance driven culture that scratches and claws to be seen as a success. The marker of success for the Christian family is different though. Success is faithfulness and trusting God with our whole selves, that includes our time. Sabbath has a way of anchoring us so that even when we get off track during the week the anchor of sabbath keeps us connected as we stop, rest, delight, and contemplate the character and goodness of God. Establish a day of total rest from all things that are not on the agenda of sabbath rest.
Life Around the Table | Meals & Conversation
One of the most powerful predictors of a child’s life outcomes turns out to be consistent meals around the table. It has shown incredible benefits in emotional health as well as things like vocabulary and comprehension. Most family dinner routines involve microwaveable TV dinners and fast food with devices in hand or Netflix on in the background.
The Christian family must be countercultural in this way and set new habits of life around the table. The devices must be set aside and the television turned off in order to connect and unify in the family meal. For our family, we have set a goal to be around the table together five nights a week. We don’t always hit that goal but most weeks we do. It is about more than educational and emotional outcomes though. In many ways, it is the one place in which all the aspects of a kingdom culture come out to play. We sit as a unified family, diverse as our personalities and days might be, we sit and enjoy the same meal. We love each other through the constant interrupting of each other and the familial picking and joking with one another. We stop to thank God for His grace and mercy and reflect upon the truth of His word in our lives. We shake off the burdens of the day and find hope for eternity in these daily moments.
When you’re present and ready for it, there are constant opportunities to disciple your children around the table moments of our lives. It might not be a table, it might be a bathtub or a car ride but these are the moments God had in mind when He told Moses in Deuteronomy 6.5-9 these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Be intentional about these moments and make the most of them.
Being, Going, & Doing | Practices of Fellowship, Worship, and Service
The life of a Christian family should be intertwined to a local body of believers in which they gather regularly to fellowship, worship, serve, and live out the mission mandate of God together. Within the family rhythm there must be a healthy view and commitment to Christian community. Many Christians live by the old country lyric from Tom Hall, “Me and Jesus got our own thing goin’.” The problem with this lifestyle is the believer remains disconnected from the regular building up of others through the outworking of their own spiritual gifts and the recipient of encouragement from other believers too. Not to mention the vital need for spiritual guidance and oversight on our spiritual path of discipleship.
The hardened soil of individualism in the American ideal must be broken up by cultivating connection with a local body of believers. Can you be a Christian without Christian community? Of course you can. But why would you want to? Is it messy? Yeah, very much so sometimes. It is worth it, though! A family with a kingdom culture will orient themselves around consistent rhythms of worship in Christian community.
The Beauty of Discipline & Discipleship
The root word in both discipline and discipleship comes from the Latin word discipulus meaning “student.” Discipline is a part of being a student, learning, and growing. It is core and essential to life as a follower of Christ. As a student of Christ, we must be corrected in order to learn and grow. God prunes us so we will bear more fruit (John 15). If we do not receive discipline then we are considered to be illegitimate children (Hebrews 12.8). Christian and non-Christian parents alike struggle with matters of discipline both at the personal level and in raising their children. Parents will at times opt for a more friendly approach or a heavy authoritarian approach on the other end.
The biblical way is probably somewhere in the middle. It’s a road pathed by truth and grace, unconditional love, fear of God, and ultimate hope in Christ. Most of the time this doesn’t feel good, though. It feels like war. Wrangling a toddler in the Target checkout line, yelling at your kids in the backseat as you navigate a traffic jam, and moments of absolute exhaustion where you just want to tell them to go play a video game so you can have a moment of peace and quiet to yourself.
“Parenting, properly understood, is an unceasing battle. A battle that God is using to refine us and a battle God will win for us. If it feels like a fight to you, that’s because it is.”[7] We must not grow weary in doing good though. Our children are dependent upon our loving discipline in their lives in order to become all that God has called them to be. What you are cultivating with God really matters, in you and in them. A harvest is coming but nobody said it would it easy. (Galatians 6.9)
Faithfulness to God over the course of one’s lifetime seems daunting. To become responsible for the care and guidance of children in addition to our own faithfulness is downright overwhelming. The hope is that our homes become a spiritual ecosystem for us to embody the way of Jesus, nurture authentic faith, and eventually empower our children in their gifts and purpose in God’s kingdom. The implementation of rhythms, habits, and practices that cultivate an ongoing and ever maturing family unit that reflects God’s kingdom will remain a work in progress. A work that is worthy of our investment.
The stable and loving foundation Christian parents establish for their children allows them to navigate each transition within the separation-individuation phases. The journey will be full of moments we want to ask for a do-over and where hindsight will be 20-20. Our hope isn’t in our perfection, though – it’s in the perfection of Christ. Every attempt this side of eternity will never measure up, but every full-hearted and faithful attempt will be enough. A kingdom culture isn’t built quickly, nothing of value ever is. Christian parents must commit themselves to do the heart work over the long haul and trust God with the results. As Charles Stanley once said, “God takes full responsibility for the life wholly devoted to Him.”
[1] Early, Habits of the Household, 12.
[2] Willard, Dallas, Spirit of the Disciplines.
[3] Foster, Richard, Celebration of Discipline.
[4]Augustine, Confessions X, 2, 2
[5] Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.
[6] Vilodas, The Deeply Formed Life, 30.
[7] Early, Habits of the Household.
Written by: Kyle and Taran Nelson. Kyle and Taran pastor in Jacksonville, FL with their three children.
