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On April 17, 2017 By In Family and Children, Worship

10 Ways to Keep Easter this Easter Season!

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Is Easter over?

Theologically, we know that the earthquake of Easter will reverberate until the Second Coming of Messiah. And liturgically, Easter is in no way over. In fact, Easter has just begun. The joy of Easter carries on until June 3rd, which means we still have 49 days of Eastertide. Easter is far from over and there is much more rejoicing to do in the next seven weeks.

The difficulty for many of us is keeping this Easter enthusiasm for such a lengthy period. The reason many evangelicals are ready to get to the next thing is because they lack a sense of liturgical rhythm. Lent took us through a 40-day journey, but the Easter joy takes us through a 50-day journey. Easter is superior to Lent not only in length of days but also in the quality of its mood. Lent prepares us to a journey towards Calvary, while Easter takes us through a victory march. Through Easter, we are reminded to put away our sadness and embrace the heavenly trumpet sound to all the corners of the earth. “He is risen!, He is risen!, He is risen!” The devil trembles, the enemies fear, the forces of evil shake, the sound of sin is silenced when death was defeated.

What does this mean? It means we must be busy in the business of celebrating. For dads and moms, young and old, we have much to do to preserve and pervade this season with jubilance. I want to offer ten ways we can do that in the remaining 49 days of Easter. a (more…)

  1. I unashamedly used some of the options from this great resource  (back)

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On April 6, 2017 By In Family and Children

Having fun with little children

A guest post by Nicole Jeffery.

I was recently asked by a friend what I filled my days with when my kids were small. Like many other mums, she’s convinced that she’s in the best position to raise her daughter ‘in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’. But being at home all day long with tiny kids can be a bit of a crunch in the gears when you’ve been used to pursuing a career elsewhere. And when all those new mums you’ve been getting to know start cheerily heading back to the office and you’re left all alone in the park with your baby, life can feel pretty directionless. Just a single day can feel long and empty and, if we’re honest, a curious mixture of dull and stressful.

My friend’s question got me thinking, so I started digging back into some of my old notes, books and photos.  What follows is a fairly random selection of some of the things I did with our kids in those precious early years. As a family we certainly didn’t get everything right. And even the things that worked out well for us may not all suit you. Some may be impractical where you live or with your particular children. But hopefully they will encourage and inspire you to make the best use of these fleeting early years.

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On March 27, 2017 By In Books, Culture, Family and Children, Interviews, Theology, Wisdom

Teaching Redemption Redemptively: Theological Educators in Dialog

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Aside from actually teaching, nothing has aided my growth as an educator more than talking with experienced, respected teachers; particularly those in my discipline: theology/worldview. It’s hard to think of two living teachers more esteemed in the field than Dan Kunkle and Dan Ribera.

Mr. Kunkle has been the longtime worldview teacher at Phil-Mont Christian Academy in Philadelphia, PA (to learn more about Kunkle, check this out). And on the other coast, Dr. Ribera teaches bible at Bellevue Christian School just outside of Seattle, WA (to learn more about Ribera, check this out). Together, they have close to 80 years of teaching experience.

I recently engaged in some shoptalk with the Dans (Dani?). While I had high expectations for the exchange, I couldn’t have anticipated just how rich their insights would be. With permission, that conversation is reproduced below: (more…)

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On March 6, 2017 By In Family and Children

A Proverb for Dads…

… whose wives are at home raising babies or chasing toddlers or teaching teenagers, and who sometimes (naively) long to arrive home after a long day at work to a spotless and peaceful home, but are instead greeted by a chaotic riot of squealing kids, paintings drying on the sofa, science experiments spread across the kitchen, cookery splattered all over the walls, and large holes in the lawn where someone thought they’d just check in case there’s gold in these hills too:

Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.
(Proverbs 14:4)

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On December 26, 2016 By In Family and Children, Theology, Wisdom

Raising Expectations

A few weeks ago, the young people at Emmanuel Evangelical Church in North London organised a conference to share with the wider church their own aspirations to stop thinking of themselves as overgrown children and instead to grow towards greater maturity in Christ. The conference was called Raising Expectations, with talks on The Myth of Adolescence, Godly Ambition, Motivation, and Taking Risks, and the videos are now online below.

(Click here for audio recordings only.)

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On October 4, 2016 By In Family and Children, Music

Why Don’t Men Sing in Church?

Why are men not singing in Church? Various articles have attempted to answer that question recently. But before we can try to offer a rationale for such a spectacular question, we need to observe that some are entirely comfortable allowing this trend to continue. After all, music plays a minimal role in their worship expressions. Others find the issue of congregational singing irrelevant due to the trained praise bands that lead worship each Sunday. “Let the professionals lead.”

Certain environments encourage people to hear and feel the music rather than sing it. And some groups have placed such high priority on the preached word that the very idea of a singing congregation seems secondary, if not tertiary in the priority list.

But on to better things.

Fortunately, there are a vast amount of churches and leaders that still treasure congregational singing and long for a time when men return to the old-fashioned task of singing God’s melodies. The cruel reality is that we are far from the mark. In my many visits to evangelical churches over the years, the few men who opened their mouths, timidly read the words like a child attempting to spell out his phonics assignment.

Timid singers make for timid Christians. (more…)

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On August 12, 2016 By In Family and Children

Don’t let worldliness destroy your family

What are the two periods of a child’s life that are most dreaded by most parents?

Answer: the terrible twos, and the teenage years.

It’s obvious why these periods of a child’s life strike such fear into the hearts of the average mum and dad…

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On June 25, 2016 By In Culture, Family and Children, Worship

What do young people really need from church?

In the last two or three generations, so many new and different answers have been given to this question that you could be forgiven for failing to keep up.

What young people need from their church, the gurus tell us, is specialised youth ministry, and specialised youth workers, and contemporary music, and midweek sports clubs to keep kids out of trouble, and midweek social activities to keep teens off the streets, and accessible worship, and youth-centred sermons, and shorter sermons, and interactive sermons, and audio-visual sermons, and online resources, and social media engagement, and a thousand and one other things. If churches don’t provide these things, we are warned, young people will undoubtedly turn away from Christ, we will have failed the next generation, the church will wither and die, and it will all be our fault.

Well, I’m sceptical. It seems to me highly unlikely that any of these activities are essential for young people to keep following Christ, for at least two reasons: First, none of them have a particularly high profile in the Bible. Second, for around 2000 years, countless millions of Christian young people have managed to grow into well-adjusted Christian adults without any of them.

So whatever benefit there might be in some of them (and I’m a fan of some contemporary Christian worship music, for example), none of them can reasonably be regarded as essential.

So then, what do young people really need from church?

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On June 18, 2016 By In Culture, Family and Children

Latin or Greek?

A friend asked a question recently on the subject of Christian education, along these lines: Why Greek rather than Latin? This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself tempted to talk about this subject; as it happens, I’ve had quite a few conversations about it over the years. And so perhaps now is as good a time as any to put a few thoughts in writing.

To begin with, a little background. Some Christian educators, particularly those in the so-called “Classical” tradition, regularly extol the virtues of learning Latin. The reasons are legion: it provides mental training; it helps with the grammar of (many) other languages, including English; it clarifies the etymology of many English words, thus broadening students’ English vocabulary; it opens the door to many great works of classical literature; and so on. I happily add my three-and-a-half cheers to the noisy, happy, Ciceronian throng. All these are, it seems to me, entirely worthy aspirations.

Yet we’ve chosen to teach our kids Greek instead. Why? Well, there are a few reasons. But first, two caveats.

First, I want to make it abundantly clear that this isn’t the sort of thing I want to get hot under the collar about. I think Latin is great. Seriously. Totally, wonderfully, utterly great. I’m not about to criticise anyone for teaching it to their kids. Frankly, if another family is already committed to giving their kids a thoroughly Christian upbringing, including the academic aspects of their training, then I’m 110% on their side. To start throwing brick-ends because they choose the language of Augustine rather than that of Athanasius seems to me rather like setting off across the Atlantic in a two-man rowboat, only to start complaining somewhere just west of the Scilly Isles that the other guy’s paddle is the wrong colour.

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On June 10, 2016 By In Culture, Family and Children

Mutilating A Daughter

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Illustration by Laurel Lynn Leake

About a month ago, This American Life ran a story that gave me the biggest lump in my throat and painful knots in my stomach. It was the story of a young woman who discovered she was the victim of female genital mutilation.

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