There’s no denying that Halloween is spookily popular. Now the third biggest grossing event after Christmas and Easter, it is frighteningly commercialised. Sick of the puns? Sorry, they are pretty Grim!
But on a more serious note, there’s no avoiding it. At this time of year, spiders, zombies and pumpkins are everywhere you look.
So what are we to do about it as Christian parents? Hide away? Go with the flow? Something in the middle? Halloween is undoubtedly the most contentious festival in the calendar and Christians can fall anywhere on the above spectrum.
Today we want to put it to you that you need to make a decision about how you are going to approach Halloween as a family. Because whether you decide to get involved or avoid the festivities, you need to help your child engage with it on some level. If you don’t speak to your children about halloween then they’ll draw their own conclusions – and not necessarily gospel-centred ones!
So to help you make an informed decision, we decided to do a round-up of five helpful resources to help you think through Halloween as a Christian parent.
This first one is written by Dr. Krish Kandiah, the former president of London School of Theology and current director of Home For Good. His article has got some history about the origins of Halloween and is written from the perspective of a dad trying to figure out how to navigate this tricky (and treat-y! Sorry!) festival.
This is a heart-warming article about how to make the most of the missional opportunity of Trick or Treat-ers coming to your house. It’s an amazing testimony to God’s grace.
This article by Scripture Union includes some of the history about Halloween, what the Bible says about Jesus defeating evil, and also some practical ideas for alternative events. You can even order a pack for running a “Light Party” (admittedly a bit late for this year, but you should bear it in mind for next year).
This article is written from the most conservative viewpoint out of our selection, as we wanted to show the differing opinions about Halloween. There’s some useful printable resources linked to this post, to help you share the gospel with your kids while carving pumpkins.
This final one is a podcast about how handle disagreement with other Christians in how you approach Halloween. It’s helpful to think about how to disagree graciously once you’ve formed your own convictions.
We hope you find these resources fang-tastic and thought-provoking, please share any others that you’ve found in the comments section – we’d love to hear from you.
This week you get a bonus post! We’re excited to have a guest post written by friends Matt and Nancy Oliver. Matt and Nancy are parents and fellow church pastor and wife in the mighty North East! We hope you enjoy their thoughts on how they encourage their kids to engage with Sunday church meetings.
There’s a song that goes something like this:
“We are Kingdom kids
Kids of the Kingdom
We make Jesus Christ number 1 in our lives…”
Jesus said “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Luke 18:16)
Proverbs 22:6 says “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it”
It’s clear not just from these few snippets but from the whole bible that age doesn’t matter when it comes to the gospel. This led us to ask ourselves:
“How can we get our children to engage with church, not just attend it?”
Look round a lot of churches and you’ll see that they are covered in kids. They’re everywhere – under the organ, in the kitchen cupboards, children, wherever they are, get all over the place and this is an immense blessing from the Lord. But it does lead us to ask, what are we going to DO with them?
Most churches with a large number of children attending each week run a Sunday School programme at one of their services. This is a great thing. Children can receive gospel-centred teaching in a way that they can understand and even question! Brilliant!
However, what if your church doesn’t have a Sunday School?
What if your church has more than 1 service that you attend?
What about when your children get too old to attend Sunday School?
What then?
How do you get your children to engage with the gospel when there’s nothing ‘for them’?
Our church has 2 Sunday services. The one on Sunday morning has a Sunday School and Youth Programme that run during part of the church service. Our evening service has nothing aimed at children or young people. Our 3 children, aged 4, 3 and 1 attend both services.
There are many reasons why we have chosen to do this:
Firstly, our children (well, the older 2) ask to come to both services and we pray long may this continue, but we are also aware that this may not always be the case and so we don’t want to stop them.
Secondly, (and of no less importance) we want to worship together as a family as much as we can.
Thirdly, we want our children to know that church is for them. It’s not a ‘holding area’ until the fun stuff starts but that they need church and church needs them.
Fourthly, we want our children to be able to sit in a church service, whether familiar to them or not, and be able to join in with what’s going on.
Now, let’s pause here for a moment and talk about this a little more! Our children are currently very young, they can’t read, they can’t talk quietly and they struggle to sit still for longer than 4 seconds, so how on earth can they ‘join in’?
The answer to this is not simple, nor is it fixed. By that we mean it doesn’t always work and we will need to keep adapting it! But, here’s how we work it at the moment.
Each of our children has to join in during the different parts of the service:
If everyone is standing up to sing, we help them to stand up, sing (if they know the words) and dance.
If everyone is sitting down praying, we help them to sit down, close their eyes and listen to the prayers being said.
We help them to face the front, as everyone in our church faces that way.
We help them to listen during the sermon. For this we give them their tea (a picnic), which they eat whilst the sermon is being taught. This helps them sit still, concentrate and be quieter during the longest part of church.
We take them in their pjs! So they can go straight to bed once we get home.
We encourage our oldest child, who is a Christian, to serve in church – she helps with the flowers at the end of the service.
Our basic principle in helping them engage with church is to be able to have them join in with every aspect of the service and to be able to give them a reason why they should do so.
All of this, we hope, will enable them to take part in church as they grow up because, they have always taken part in church. There will come a time when they are too old for Sunday School and they will need to come along to the whole of the church service. They need to be able to join in with that church service fully.
We want our children to engage with church because we believe that being with God’s family and hearing His word taught, sung and prayed is essential to them hearing the gospel and seeing it lived out. It’s through this that we pray the Spirit will speak to their hearts and bring them to Jesus.
Do you have a blog post up your sleeve? If you’d like to write for Gospel-Centred Parenting then get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
Hypothetical parenting is easy. Before having our actual children it was easy to come up with solutions to other people’s parenting struggles.”Just establish a routine.” “Just make sure you follow-through on discipline.” “Just read this book.” We didn’t say it, but we certainly thought it!
Ha! How naïve and arrogant!
And then our son came into our lives. That squashed the know-it-all attitude.
Real parenting… real in-the-trenches, sleep-deprived parenting is a minefield. It’s hard, it’s complex, it’s exhausting and there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
This is the third part in our series “5 Parenting Mistakes To Avoid”; a series designed to help us overcome false beliefs that we have in parenting by remembering how the gospel applies. Click through to read part 1 and part 2, if you missed them.
It can be tempting to want to appear sorted as a parent. None of us want to be the sobbing wreck with the messy house, unwashed hair and badly behaved child. Nobody wants others to think of them as the Dad who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or the Mum who’s close to breaking point. But sometimes that is the reality – there are many times when we genuinely struggle to keep on top of it all.
Parenting is possibly the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and we want to put it to you in this post, that it’s much better to show weakness than hide it.
Why?
Well in the end, there’s no good reason to put on a front.
The gospel liberates us to say that we’re not the people we’d like to be, and that includes in the realm of our parenting. We’re not who we should be, yet we’re deeply loved and valued by Jesus in the midst of our mess. He doesn’t look at our parenting with a disappointed frown on his face. He sees our weakness and with a gentle smile he gets alongside us, comforts us and gives us fresh power by his Spirit to keep going.
So there’s no point in pretending to God we’re sorted. When we see this, and when we’re reassured with the warm welcome of the gospel, we can go out with a sense of security and acceptance that allows us to drop the front that we’re sometimes tempted to put up.
And here’s the wonderful thing…
when we drop the pretense and are real with people, there can be some wonderful consequences.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. As our maker, God knows the best way for us to live. So when we live in line with that, things generally tend to “work” better.
So, what are these consequences of wearing our weakness rather than presenting perfection? Well, here are four:
1. Displaying Weakness Shows Integrity
People can see right through the façade of the “sorted parent”. Any parent knows that it’s not all perfect all of the time. It’s disingenuous and discouraging to chat to someone who never shows any weakness in their own parenting, or in the behaviour of their kids. (But just as an aside, remember that honesty is very different to simply complaining. You can adore your kids but still admit it’s hard). If you feel like someone isn’t honest with you, then you end up doubting their integrity. It doesn’t endear you to someone if you confide in them and are met with a brick-wall. So be honest about what you are finding difficult. At the very least, you’ll show those around you the real you and your real life – but there’s much more to gain from it too because…
2. Displaying Weakness Builds Friendship
Integrity builds friendship. Confiding in others about struggles and fears helps you to connect with other parents who are going through similar things. Each stage of parenting has it’s own struggles – whether it’s trying to get your child to sleep through, poo in the potty, revise for exams or learn to drive. Keeping the challenges to yourself isolates you but sharing the highs and lows builds friendships with others. You need to laugh, cry, sigh and pray with others – we were never designed to carry this great joy and burden alone. We’re meant to do it in community.
Cathy has found that some of the closest and best friends she’s ever had have been the mum-friends she’s met. Lots of parents go to play groups not just because it’s great for the kids (although they are fab – big spaces, different toys, other children and messy crafts that mum doesn’t allow at home!), but because they can chat to other adults. A cup of tea and a natter with another parent is therapeutic!
3. Displaying Weakness Creates Opportunities For Support
Being honest and open means that you make friends and gain a support network. Not everyone has the luxury of family close-by. Not everyone has other parents to young children in their churches. But, unless you live somewhere very remote indeed, you’ll probably be able to find a play group to go to. If you are open, honest and friendly then you’ll meet some like-minded people who can provide a listening ear, a hug and, over time as the friendship deepens, practical help in a time of need.
But some of us do have family close by. Some of us do have a church where there are people in our congregations who can help us out. But even then, we still need to be willing to ask for help – and that means we need to be ok with showing weakness, exposing our real lives and being humble enough to receive help.
Often pride is the only thing which is really holding us back from receiving help.
God taught us this lesson the hard way.
We help to lead a church with a team of other people. We planted the church just over a year ago. But, we often feel our role in the church has been to model weakness. This certainly wasn’t our plan or desire! Since the church has been going we’ve suffered a miscarriage, Cathy’s been pregnant with Boaz and now we have a new-born baby.
It’s been quite a rollercoaster!
It’s been physically exhausting.
There have been times when we haven’t had much to offer people.
We often feel like we’re lagging behind the others that we planted with, in terms of hospitality and practical service.
We’ve had a challenging time. But we think God wanted us to be open and real about that with others in our church community. In doing so, we’ve built a more genuine community and have been the recipients of others getting alongside us, supporting us and blessing us. Others have grown in Christ-likeness as they’ve ministered to us.
It’s reminded us that we are not the Messiah, we aren’t anyone’s saviour, we haven’t got it all together, but mercifully we know the one who is all powerful, all good and for us. He’s the one our church is all about.
4. Displaying Weakness Means Jesus Receives The Glory
When we are honest about weakness we build community, gain support and in the end Christ is glorified. If we hide what’s really going on then we can’t ask for prayer, receive practical help or have our friends encourage us and gospel us.
Weakness is good. No let’s go further than that.
Weakness is essential for Christian community.
As our weakness is exposed, Jesus and his strength is glorified.
And there’s often another way that Jesus is glorified.
Cathy has found that she’s developed genuine, deep, reciprocal friendships with non-Christians since becoming a mum – whether they’re wiping Reu’s nose, changing Bo’s nappy, or handing her a cup of tea while she breastfeeds – she’s found that she could not walk this journey without them; they are God’s gift to her. Parenthood is a great leveller, and as she’s shared her life with other parents, she’s been able to share Jesus too.
So there you have it – don’t hide your weakness.
Jesus accepts weak you and me, so we don’t need to pretend. As we wear our weakness, it connects us to others as we lean on them. And weakness enables us to point others to Jesus and be pointed to Jesus yourself.
This week we’re trying something new, with a video review from Cathy of the book “Soul Food for Mums*“, by Lucinda van der Hart and Anna France-Williams. Check out the review below, and tell us what you think.
Few would deny that adoption and fostering are wonderful things to do. And yet many are put off from considering it themselves due to some commonly held misconceptions. In light of this, we thought we’d use this week’s post to debunk some of the common myths surrounding adoption and fostering.
I recently went to the Home For Good Summit; a conference for Christians about adoption and fostering. It was really informative and eye-opening.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about adoption and fostering – I had many incorrect preconceived ideas myself – so here’s my effort to debunk some of the common myths and to pass on what I learnt.
Myth #1 It’s impossible to adopt a newborn baby in the UK
Not true.
It is possible to receive a newborn baby straight from hospital with a “Concurrency Placement”.
With concurrency planning adoption, you are approved as a foster carer and adoptive parent simultaneously. You are matched with a newborn baby who comes to live with you for the first six months of their lives (in this time period you are their foster parent/s, and you get paid accordingly). The child comes to live with you because there is a very strong chance that they will not be able to return to their birth family. During these six months you will need to meet with the birth mother/parents weekly at a neutral environment with a social worker.
After six months a judgement will be made in court as to whether the child can safely return to their birth family, or whether you can legally adopt them. This is seen as a win-win for the child. Either they have always lived with you and therefore escape any unsettling moves. Or else their birth family have proven that they can provide and loving and safe home for their child – which is a wonderful scenario too!
This form of adoption isn’t for the faint-hearted as there is a chance that you will have to give up the baby that you’ve grown to love. However, if you are convinced of the worth of early permanency for the sake of the child then it’s a very worthwhile thing to do, and can have wonderful outcomes! The social worker who I spoke to works for an adoption agency which specialises in concurrency adoption. She said that around 9 out of 10 babies get to stay with their adoptive parents.
Barnados do concurrency placements nationwide as do some local authorities. You can call up as many local authorities and agencies as you like and ask them if they do concurrency adoption, and then go through the application and assessment process with one that does.
You can foster if you have young children, you can even foster if you have a baby. However, the needs of all children, your own and those you are fostering must be met. Your assessing social worker will need to be confident that this will be the case.
If you are approved then your social worker will be very careful about which children they match with your family. Your assessing social worker may even interview your own child(ren) to try and understand their personalities and needs to try to guarantee the best possible outcome from a placement.
The two people who were running my seminar at the Home For Good conference were (I’m guessing) in their late 20s/early 30s. Both had 2 young biological children and were also long-term foster parents.
If you are concerned about the impact of long-term fostering on your own children then you could consider respite fostering (perhaps looking after the same child one weekend a month for example) or mother and baby fostering. With mother and baby placements, the mother is often a teenager who needs some support in learning how to look after her baby and how to prepare for independent living in the future. Both respite and mother and baby fostering are options which we would like to explore, as we think they might be a good fit for us as a family.
Myth #3 I can’t adopt/foster if I’ve got a disability or mental health issues
Fostering and adopting can be very demanding and so your physical and mental health will be discussed during the application process.
That being said, they won’t necessarily preclude you and may be of benefit. If you have a physical disability then you may be able to be more compassionate and understanding towards a child with a disability. Likewise, if you had a mental health issue in the past then you may be able to relate better to a child who struggles with it currently. The assessment process with determine whether you’re deemed suitable for fostering/adopting. If you are approved then you will be matched with suitable children in light of your disability or mental health issues.
Myth #4 Foster parents get paid, adoptive parents don’t
Foster parents get paid an allowance and fee to cover the costs of looking after a child. The amount this is depends on a number of different factors. A fostered child is under the care of a local authority while an adopted child is a legal member of their adopted family, therefore the adoptive parents do not receive a fee for looking after the child.
However, there is money available to adoptive parents when they adopt a child with a disability, or a sibling set. This is because the government recognises that sibling sets or disabled children need more care and time from their adoptive parents, and therefore they won’t necessarily be able to support their children as much through paid employment. This financial assistance is known as “Adoption Allowance”. You may also be entitled to Disability Living Allowance for Children, Carer’s Allowance and money through the “Adoption Support Fund”. Adoptive parents are also entitled to Adoption Leave and Pay from their employer and Child Benefit and Tax Credits.
If you are considering adoption, make sure you ask what financial assistance would be available to you if you were matched with a disabled child or sibling set. Do not be shy about this – it is much cheaper for the local authority to have you adopt the children under their care, than for you to foster them. The Adoption Allowance is there to enable children with more challenging needs to still have a good chance of adoption – so don’t be coy about asking!
Myth #5 Social workers are intrusive, anti-Christian and interfering
This is a horrible but widespread stereotype of social workers – I’m guessing that this typecast alone puts a lot of people off even making the initial phone call. However, the reality is that the social workers would be thrilled to hear from you! Social workers do their job because they care about children and want them to have the best possible life chances. They certainly aren’t doing it for the money, prestige or for an easy life! Their utmost concern is for the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and so they have to be thorough and diligent in their assessment of you as carers (not simply for the children’s benefit but also for yours). But there’s an enormous shortage of foster families – 9,600 children are currently in need of foster homes, so please don’t preclude yourself based on a false impression of social workers or the assessment process (which is quicker than you think).
As far as the anti-Christian bias goes, this simply isn’t the case. Social workers are very positive when prospective adoptive and foster parents mention their connection with Home For Good. Home for Good is an overtly Christian charity, encouraging Christians to adopt because of God’s adoption of us, and because of the biblical mandate to care for orphans. Home For Good has also been at the forefront of petitioning the government for the care of Syrian unaccompanied minors . In the area of adoption and fostering Christians have been well represented at 10 Downing Street in recent years – so don’t falsely assume that the system discriminates against Christians. Check out our review of the book Home For Good here.
One final thing about social workers – they have a wealth of knowledge, access to helpful resources and are highly motivated for placements to work out. If you foster you will have to work closely with them. But if you adopt, don’t be too quick to get rid of them. Their support, experience and knowledge could still be invaluable once the child is legally yours.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
James 1:27
So there you have it. Adoption and fostering could be more of an option for you than you previously thought.
Here are the different types of fostering placements:
Emergency
Respite
Short-term
Longer-term
Children with disabilities
Mother and Baby
And the following list of eligibilty criteria shows that lots of different sorts of people can do it:
People over the age of 21
Who have a spare bedroom
Residents of the UK
Single or Married
Of any religion
Of any sexual orientation
A tenant or home-owner
Employed or unemployed
You don’t need to be a super-parent to do this, super-parents don’t exist. But are you willing to rely on the only super-parent in existence (God) to give you the strength to care for a vulnerable child?
There’s a huge shortage of foster and adoptive parents. Even if the timing isn’t right for you but you’ve found this post informative then please share it to help us debunk the myths. The more children who can find a home with loving families, the better!
“When did your little one start walking? 12 months? Oh darrrrling, my little princess Cherry-Blossom could do back flips by then!”
There are certain parenting mistakes that we can make. We’re not talking about mistakes like not keeping a boundary we’ve set, or saying something in our child’s hearing we shouldn’t. No, we’re talking about a different kind of mistake – mistakes in the realm of what we believe – the mistake of forgetting the gospel and being robbed of our joy and freedom in parenting. These are mistakes in what we believe about God, ourselves or our children, things that lead to a sense of guilt and inferiority, or else pride and superiority.
This week we’re thinking about the second of these parenting mistakes: competitiveness.
But before we go any further, just a quick reminder. There’s a type of competitiveness we very much encourage – entering our competition! You have until just 5pm today to enter our competition to win a Madlug backpack. Click through to last week’s post to read more about this wonderful organisation and find out how to enter – the winner will be announced tomorrow!
Back to this week’s topic.
Getting The Scales Out
We’ve all met one, haven’t we? A parent like Cherry-Blossom’s mum. That parent who is constantly putting their child on the scales against yours. Which child talked first, or with greater clarity or broader vocabulary? Which child is more socially accomplished? Which child has greater dexterity, better problem-solving skills, has a better grasp of maths, is more creative, is more beautiful? Which… well you get the picture.
The funny thing is, it always seems to be their child that tips the balance.
Not many parents are as brash as little Cherry-Blossom’s mum. Most are far more subtle. We see it in that knowing little look or that “innocent” comment.
Competitive parenting is so unattractive.
But let’s not be too quick to point the finger. We love our children, we spend so much time with them and grow to appreciate their talents, the developmental steps they take, the new things that they learn. That’s right, of course. But as we do that, it’s all too easy for us to move from simply appreciating them, to comparing them to others. When this comparison starts, we’re just a few short steps away from being that competitive, pushy parent.
A Bit Of Healthy Competition?
So what’s the problem? A bit of healthy competition is good, right?
We’re not so sure. Broadly speaking, we think that competitive parenting only ends up leading to one of two things.
Firstly it can lead to pride or arrogance. As we look at other children in comparison to ours and come to the conclusion (rightly or wrongly) that our child is “better”, we feel proud or arrogant. We feel superior to that other parent – their child is clearly either genetically inferior, or else their parent(s) haven’t done quite as good a job as us.
On the other hand, if we’re on the sharp end of competitive parenting or if we look at our child and see that they’re behind their peers, we’re deflated. We feel guilty – have I not been doing the right things to teach my child? Am I doing something wrong? We feel inferior – I’m just not as good a parent. We feel disappointed – why can’t my child outdo the others? We feel short-changed – how come I’m the one who gets the child that struggles?
It’s not a surprise that here on the Gospel-Centred Parenting blog we think that the gospel has something to say to competitive parenting.
A Unique Answer To Competitiveness
What the gospel says to competitive parenting is wonderfully liberating.
The Bible describes humanity as made in the image of God. Every single person has dignity and is deeply significant because they bear the likeness of the God who made them.
And what’s more, that is not simply generally true of all people, but personally true of each individual in a unique way. Check out these wonderful verses from the Psalms:
“You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
Your child was intiricately and purposefully created by our kind Father. They are who they are because that is how God designed them. That means that gratitude is the appropriate response to your child’s abilities (be they top or bottom of the class) because the good, sovereign God of the universe knew exactly who he wanted them to be, and made them so. That strips away both inferiority and pride (it’s not down to us really – and even when have taught our children something well, it’s only because God knew my frame in the secret place and knit me together to enable me to do it – it’s down to him, not me!) We can rejoice in who our children are.
What’s more, we can rejoice in how God has made the other children around us too. They are masterpeices of God’s creative, varied goodness and each show us something of him as his image-bearers.
So next time you meet Cherry-Blossom’s mum at play group, don’t let her comment get to you. Whether what she’s saying is true or not, you can rejoice in both who Cherry-Blossom is, and in who your child is – there’s no need to compete. You can be grateful to God the master craftsman, and you can get on with your day with joy and freedom.
We’re super excited to announce that we’ve been shortlisted for an award!
The Premier Digital Awards seek to “celebrate and encourage excellence in Christian engagement online”. We’re incredibly humbled to have been shortlisted for the “Up-and-Coming” Award. Check out the shortlist here.
We write this blog because we’re convinced that the gospel speaks into every area of our lives including parenting. It’s wonderful news for parents and for children, and we really want to see parents liberated, inspired, edified, emboldened and comforted by the good news of Jesus. But it’s also lovely to see our blog recognised by Premier Digital – we hope that this helps more people to engage with what we’re writing and, by God’s grace, enjoy the gospel for themselves afresh.
We hope you continue to enjoy our musings. Please keep engaging with the blog and sharing the content – it’s a huge encouragement to us when you do.
Krish Kandiah: Why I’ve Changed My Mind about Halloween