Who Do They Belong To?

One of the idols of our age is the state. And education is very important to the state, particularly the leftist state which seeks to control and manipulate every area of life to achieve utopia. They need to produce compliant citizens who will follow their dictates mindlessly. Part of this of course is that much of what they say is arrant nonsense, and it takes a certain type of idiot to listen to them. For example, only someone bereft of sanity – an idiot – can sagely proclaim that a man with a few bits chopped off and given some hormone treatment is a woman. So you see, they believe they must control education, and education is not about developing critical thinking and intelligence as much as they try to tell you that. If it was, they would free it up to different views and approaches.

You don’t believe me? At teacher’s college, I wrote an essay suggesting that teacher registration was a waste of time, because it didn’t protect students, and it didn’t improve teacher standards. Moreover, I argued that independent schools should have the freedom to employ people who have not jumped through the ideological hoops required by registration since to attract students who pay fees when the government holds a monopoly of ‘free’ schools obviously forces those schools to provide a superior service. Predictably, my essay was not looked upon favourably. Written comments from more than one lecturer were recorded on the paper which I had never seen before. One comment in particular stuck with me. “We must have gatekeepers.” Yes, quite. The statists have to control who teaches your children. That is an assumed good.

So statists, and unfortunately most teachers are statists, do not believe that parents are responsible for the education and training of their children. Setting themselves against Christ, they believe that children must be rendered unto Caesar and his bureaucratic minions. They arrogate to themselves what belongs to parents. In New Zealand, we see this in their monopolistic control of education generally, and in their zoning rules (and a host of other rules) specifically. We also see it in the way teachers think they have the right to teach values contrary to the wishes of parents.

Indeed, this evil has saturated the Western world. A couple of recent examples are in order. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the district educational leaders have proposed policies requiring teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. At a public meeting on this issue, parents were so opposed to this, that the board closed public comments at the meeting, and the police declared an unlawful assembly. Two parents were apparently arrested for refusing to leave the meeting. There is nothing so frustrating to these control freaks than to have parents arrogantly assume they have a say in what their children are being taught.

In other parts of the US, teachers, are complaining about the crackdown by conservatives on critical race theory being taught in schools. Here’s one example of the kind of ill-educated brainwashing robots government schools tend to attract.

So what should you do? Get your children out of government schools. Seriously. What are you waiting for? Do not render to Caesar what belongs to God. Give your children an actual education. “Free compulsory education” gets a one out of three. Yes, there is compulsion. It’s not free and it’s not education. It costs the souls of our children and stifles their ability to think and challenge the idolatrous State.

Parent-Controlled Childhood

The truth is…yesterday’s parent-controlled childhood protected children not only from sex, from work, and from adult decisions but also from the dominance of peers and from the market, with all its pressures to achieve, its push for status, its false lures, its passing fads. – Kay Hymowitz in Ready or Not – Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future – and Ours

Think about the impact and control your child’s peers are having on them. How are they being shaped by them? As parents our role is to shape our children, and part of that is controlling how they are shaped and who shapes them. Hannah Arendt is quoted by Hymowitz as pointing out that the authority of a group is stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person. We would do well to recognise this and protect our children.

Reddit Parenting Advice #11 – Reading Advice

As mentioned in previous posts, ensuring your child develops a love and aptitude for reading is one of the single most important things you can do for them educationally. Today’s reddit parenting advice comes from a parent wondering about a child who seems uninterested in stories.

I have a kid who doesn’t really care for story books. Almost all day long, he reads non-fiction books on butterflies, construction, flower, trees, bugs, ships, rockets, etc. Is this anything to worry about? Is this a phase? Btw, he’s 4. My concern is that he might become a bit robotic (like me).

There should be no surprises that this child is a boy. Boys tend to develop an interest in the physical world around them. They are often less interested in sitting down for story time than girls who from a young age tend to enjoy sitting on Mum or Dad’s lap for a story. This has been something I have seen in my parenting.

It’s also no surprise that boys tend to enjoy non-fiction books either. Consider your average adult male. What are they more likely to read? Of course you can come up with counter examples and exceptions, but men tend to be interested in non-fiction more than women. In fact one things I have noticed is that many adult women read little to no non-fiction, and where you do see women reading non-fiction it can often be trashy magazine articles that focus on relationship drama. No doubt this commentary will be seen as incredibly sexist, which to be honest makes it all the more enjoyable to write. But getting back to the point – boys and girls are different, and this extends to their reading choices.

Now as a man who does happen to enjoy fiction (whilst not neglecting non-fiction), I happen to believe that we need to encourage our boys to develop a love for narrative. Our faith itself is a great story made up of many smaller narratives. Narrative can teach us things in a powerful way. Good novels extend our experience of life in a way that broadens our understanding of the world and human nature.

From my experience, training a boy to love fiction does take time and patience. My oldest boy still tends to enjoy reading factual books about historical events or how-to books, and it has taken some years to develop his interest in narrative to the point that he will pick up and read fiction.

So how did we approach this? Well, first of all, I did ensure that I read to him. It’s important for boys to see men reading and enjoying reading. They need to see it as a masculine occupation. Secondly, reading became a part of our daily routine. Every night I would read to him, and as boys tend to like routine, this seemed to help. Thirdly I chose books carefully. I would repeat books to him regularly when he was a toddler so that they became familiar. Children seem to enjoy this repetition and knowing what comes next. Then as he grew older I began to read him chapter books. Although he has sisters around his age, I tended to choose books that I thought were more masculine than feminine. My theory, which seemed to work, was that if I find a book that he likes, his sisters will like it too. The reverse of this is not true. The few times I chose a more feminine book, for instance, Anne of Green Gables, he was not impressed and did not enjoy the story. Then as he grew older I set goals for him to achieve in his reading. This year I have set him the goal of 52 fiction books in a year. While his sister would probably achieve that in a month or two, this for him is a significant achievement. And since he seems, like many boys, to be task-oriented, he is intent on insuring he meets this goal.

So I don’t think there is anything to worry about in a four year old boy who loves non-fiction books. Yes you want to broaden his interests – it’s not great to leave him there, but it’s natural for boys to prefer non-fiction. They are the future dominion takers who go out into the earth under Christ extending his kingly reign.

They have no great joy to show for it

We must say to ourselves, “We will not subject our children to the new thing in the world, having them spend vast tracts of their waking hours in the company of people who do not love them and who will not, a few years later, even remember their names. We will not hang our children by the ropes of our ambition and avarice. We will not institutionalize them at age three so that we may place them in a ‘good school system,’ that mythical beast, at age six. We will not mount the treadmill. We do not care what our ‘betters’ think. They have no great joy to show for all their sweat and grumbling.”

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #6

In recent weeks we have been slowly working our way through The Directory for Private Worship which the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved in 1647. Thus far, we have noted the pleasing concern these church leaders had for the discipline of family worship and their understanding that the health of God’s church relies on the spiritual health of the individual families that comprise it. Today we look at the sixth direction.

VI. At family-worship, a special care is to be had that each family keep by themselves; neither requiring, inviting, nor admitting persons from divers families, unless it be those who are lodged with them, or at meals, or otherwise with them upon some lawful occasion.

This provision highlights the importance of families keeping to themselves when they conduct their private worship. What is meant by this? Well, it’s not a blanket rule. There are legitimate reasons the Assembly saw for worship to be conducted with other families. One example is when sharing a meal with another family.

So what is the thinking behind this direction? It seems likely that this rule is included to protect family worship from being hijacked (see rule 5), and to strengthen spiritual bonds in the family. Because family worship is so important, it is necessary that it is not regularly interrupted by outsiders. This no doubt makes it easier to rebuke and encourage members of the family in their ongoing spiritual warfare.

Fathers and Blessing

When there is a fundamental estrangement between fathers and children, the results of that unhappy mess will be that God will come and strike the land with a curse. In short, when fathers are blessed, the land is blessed. When fathers are cursed, the land is cursed.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Reddit Parenting Advice #10 – Changing Identities

The more I look at parenting posts on Reddit, the more I am struck by how inadequately some people are prepared by their faulty worldviews for parenting, but as a connoisseur of human folly, I have to admit I do find I am intensely interested to read how crazy things can get when parents set themselves adrift from the anchor of reality found in Christ alone. My deep hope is that the parenting thread on Reddit somehow attracts all of the very worst parents into a common space where they can encourage and commiserate with each other in their inadequate approaches to parenting and spread their poisonous advice in a space where it will impact only those already infected with their madness. Is that too harsh? Well, check out this latest tragedy. N.B. Spelling and grammatical errors have been left in.

I have a child who has ODD and depression that has latched on to what appears to be a fad. Claiming oppression as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and changing their description over and over in alignment with friends who are doing the same. Sophia was born female and has identified with Pan at one point, lesbian, trans, furry, and it evolves. She has started to get angry if we don’t use the favored pronouns which also change without notice. The name used has been one of about 4 over the last 2 years and has settled on “Robin” recently. If she is accidently referred to as Sophia by me she loses it. The weird thing is that I’ve been extremely involved in activism pertaining to LGBTQIA+ issues for over a decade and have attempted to involve her from early childhood. (walking in pride parades and taking her with me to events) Has anyone else sensed a faddish reaction in their kids to this recently? I know that during the pandemic she has been watching far more influencers online than I’m comfortable with. Her mother and I are in conflict over how much she watches and what she watches.

Let’s analyse this stream of folly droplet by droplet. I have a child who has ODD and depression that has latched on to what appears to be a fad. Alarm bells are already ringing at this point. Why doesn’t anyone question why children today seem to be diagnosed with so many disorders. As we have mentioned previously, ODD is essentially the description of a child who has not learnt to govern themselves. And depression? As a school teacher who has many conversations with children, I can tell you that there are some interesting home commonalities in children who suffer from anxiety and depression. These things seem to be symptoms of a larger problem, not the actual problem itself.

Claiming oppression as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and changing their description over and over in alignment with friends who are doing the same. That right there is a failure in parenting. If you have your children in a government school at the moment, let this be a warning to you. These places are no longer safe for your child. The LGTQIAlphabet cult wants your children, and school is the perfect place to pervert them and enlist them to their unrighteous cause. Unfortunately for you, other children are a powerful influence on your children, and what they do impacts what your children do. The Bible clearly teaches this. In I Corinthians 15:33, Paul says, Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Part of the job of a parent is to be the gatehouse in determining which influences are allowed in your child’s life.

Sophia was born female and has identified with Pan at one point, lesbian, trans, furry, and it evolves. See, poor parenting is definitely part of the problem here. What do you mean she was born female? She is a girl, she has been female from conception. When you say she was born female, you indicate the possibility that sex is mutable. It is not. From conception, she has been female and she will never be anything else no matter how many toddler tantrums she has as she shakes her fist at you and ultimately the God who made her. And for those of you who do not want to be traumatised, I suggest not even finding out what identifying as furry means.

She has started to get angry if we don’t use the favored pronouns which also change without notice. The name used has been one of about 4 over the last 2 years and has settled on “Robin” recently. If she is accidently referred to as Sophia by me she loses it. Interestingly your daughter’s Christian name means wisdom. The very thing you as a parent need to pray for because so far you seem to be lacking in this department. It’s interesting that she has given away the name ‘wisdom’ for a name meaning fame. It seems highly likely that a lot of young girls attracted to this choose your own identity nonsense are seeking fame. They want someone to acknowledge them to take an interest in them as someone special. They are crying out for love.

The weird thing is that I’ve been extremely involved in activism pertaining to LGBTQIA+ issues for over a decade and have attempted to involve her from early childhood. (walking in pride parades and taking her with me to events). Well there we go. What can you expect? What you sow, so shall you reap. You wanted to celebrate this identity nonsense and encourage your child to do so, and you expected her to turn out a well-adjusted young girl?

Has anyone else sensed a faddish reaction in their kids to this recently? I know that during the pandemic she has been watching far more influencers online than I’m comfortable with. Her mother and I are in conflict over how much she watches and what she watches. Here we see some deep underlying issues. Mum and Dad cannot agree on basic parenting philosophy. They can’t agree on who they let influence their children. Dad is correct in that many of these influencers have the nutritional value of a sewer, but there is more going on here than who the child watches online. There is a breakdown in the family dynamic. Dads ought to lead and protect their families. Mums need to support Dads in their leadership role. There needs to be a unified front.

Education and Fathers

Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Thinking Longterm

Joy Pullman executive editor of The Federalist, has written an excellent piece highlighting the dangers of evangelical over-emphasis on evangelism. Before you burn her at the stake for a heretic, hold on. The context for the article I am quoting from is the Southern Baptist Convention where an ageing and declining membership are considered to be an issue.

As I watched my evangelical peers apostatize as they left childhood, it made me reconsider our churches’ frenetic verbal focus on evangelism. What trust — and financing — was it realistic to place in “evangelization” efforts run by people who are clearly unable to retain current members? Why doesn’t evangelization start at home?

In fact, I think it [evangelisation] does start at home. Before running out and attempting to “gain more souls for Christ” (itself theologically suspect, as scripture — at least as Protestants understand it — clearly teaches it is Christ who does all the work to save souls), what about attentiveness to the “feed my sheep” charge Christ gave the Apostle Peter in another mic-drop gospel ending, in John 21?

Shepherds — the antecedent of our word “pastor” — don’t go around rustling sheep. Shepherds tend an existing flock that grows almost exclusively organically, from within the herd. Shepherds cultivate those they are given; they don’t go around trying to convert goats or leaving their flocks to search for others. From where this Christian sits, our Western churches and most of their leaders have done a perfectly horrific job of tending to the lambs Christ has given into their care.

Too many men commissioned as shepherds are off wandering the mountains, leaving their sheep unfed and unprotected while wolves make off with the babies. The answer is not to focus more on wandering around in alleged search of random sheep, nor to steal sheep from other people’s flocks. It is to sacrifice anything necessary to beat off the wolves and protect the lambs.

She makes some excellent points. On the whole, Christianity in the West has been bleeding members. The tap pouring new members into the faith might be going full bore, but the hole in the bottom of our bucket is such that we are losing water at a faster rate. What’s going on? Often church growth is by transfers from other churches. We have Christians moving around from church to church finding the right fit. Some churches become the place where ‘the cool kids’ go. Then local churches can be stripped of their members as people head to the new hip church. There are of course churches that do have relative success in evangelism, and this can be measured in the short term, but what we don’t think about too much is what’s happening in the long term, and the long term trajectory is not looking good.

The evangelical church, as its name suggests, has a real strength in evangelism Our pastors and church leaders are extremely concerned with encouraging members to ensure they are taking opportunities for personal evangelism and as we have mentioned in earlier posts, church sermons are often targetted at ‘level 1’ or entry-level to the Christian faith. Our services are designed to be “seeker-sensitive”. But there are potential disadvantages to this strategy. More mature members can be seen as means to the end of gaining more contacts and therfore converts. These sheep can be left to figure out how to feed themselves.

But there is an even darker side to this. Pullman notes another interesting implication of this approach which she illustrates with Mrs Jellyby from Dickens’ Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby was an evangelical Christian whose every thought and effort was spent in ensuring Africans are evangelised and given opportunities to access wealth from trade while her own family lives in squalor and neglect. She writes of evangelical organisations that “spend so much time, money, and effort on what they claim is evangelization while the majority of children who attend their churches grow up and leave the faith.” She cites Mary Eberstadt’s research on the impact of family disintegration and its connection to church decline.

If that is the case, then Christians need to be doing things like countering the cultural insistence that people wait until they are financially comfortable before starting a family and stay artificially infertile indefinitely to help that happen; making theologically robust Christian K-12 schools the top priority of evangelization efforts; and making it more institutionally possible for young people to get started in life without college loans.

It’s not clear how much American Christianity’s decline stems from unthinkingly accepting our culture’s antagonism to sexual fertility and our refusal to prioritize evangelism in the home, but it’s clear there’s a relationship between these that bears deep introspection.

If we gain 10 converts a year for 20 years, but lose 70% of our children to the faith once they hit adulthood, we might need to rethink our strategy. Imagine if we kept 70% of our children growing up in Christian families, and they kept 70% of their children. Then imagine if we took God’s command to be fruitful and multiply more seriously and still had that rate of success.

Pastors are geared to look at the short term. A pastor, with God’s blessing, may be in a church for 20 years. It’s easy for him to think success looks like unbelievers coming into the church or the church growing in numbers whether by transfers or conversions. He knows he has a short time to ‘prove’ himself. Unfortunately, short term thinking can always get more people in, but long term effects are by their very nature…long term, and therefore harder to judge immediately. Twenty years is the length of time it takes for an infant to be trained for adulthood. It’s a long time to wait to see if families and churches have been successful. We want KPIs for each year – we don’t want to wait for the tree to be fully grown and fruiting. That takes time. But while the short term indicators might look good, if we take the twenty or forty-year view, when the majority of our children have left the faith, things look bleaker.

So what does this mean for churches and our leaders? Churches need to focus on the health of families and training Dads and Mums to raise a godly family. We should stop seeing these families as simply means to the end of reaching new people. These are people in our flocks. They need feeding and shepherding. To that end we need our church leaders to think far more strategically about how they will aid parents in the discipling of children from Christian families. Churches need to start Christian schools that focus on developing Christian worldview and culture or support people who are doing that. Our leaders may retort, “That’s not the business of the church!”. We need to show them that it is, and the reason we are failing on so many levels is precisely because we have not made the education of the next generation our business. How has the evangelical strategy of saving individual souls been working for the church? Not so well. Church leaders need to signal that Christianity is not just a personal faith which we worry about on Sundays, but it is a faith that takes all of life and brings it under Christ’s authority. It’s a faith that develops Christian culture. Getting people to level one is not enough.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #4

In recent weeks we have been working our way through the Directory for Private (Family) Worship. Today we are continuing our look at the Directory for Private (Family) Worship with a brief look at the fourth point.

IV. The head of the family is to take care that none of the family withdraw himself from any part of family-worship: and, seeing the ordinary performance of all the parts of family-worship belongeth properly to the head of the family, the minister is to stir up such as are lazy, and train up such as are weak, to a fitness to these exercises; it being always free to persons of quality to entertain one approved by the presbytery for performing family-exercise. And in other families, where the head of the family is unfit, that another, constantly residing in the family, approved by the minister and session, may be employed in that service, wherein the minister and session are to be countable to the presbytery. And if a minister, by divine Providence, be brought to any family, it is requisite that at no time he convene a part of the family for worship, secluding the rest, except in singular cases especially concerning these parties, which (in Christian prudence) need not, or ought not, to be imparted to others.

In more contemporary English we might put it this way. The head of the family is responsible for ensuring that everyone in the family participates in family worship. To that end, the pastor of his church ought to be encouraging and training heads of households for this duty. In some cases, a head of household might not feel the most qualified in his household to lead in this duty, or he might be unfit for this duty. In this case, the pastor of his church and the elders there may approve another in his place. Finally, if pastor is in a household, he should ensure that he leads family worship with everyone present except in special cases.

There is certainly some wisdom in this part of the directory. It does seem Scriptural that the head of the family ensure all of the family are involved in family worship. Additionally, it seems part of the duties of a pastor and his eldership team to encourage and train the household leaders of their congregations to perform this duty well. This would seem to be part of what it means to shepherd the flock. Thus when Paul writes to fathers, he reminds them of their duties in bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Once again I am not comfortable with this point in its entirety. This may be a result of the cultural blind spots of individualism, but it seems odd to me that this rule assumes that a pastor should lead family worship when he comes into the home of a family in his church. I may be reading this direction incorrectly, but that’s what it seems to imply to me. My understanding (which may be wrong), would be that a pastor is coming into the home of a household leader. That would mean he is entering into the sphere of another man’s authority. While he has spiritual oversight of the flock in his care, and can and should correct error, he should also show respect for a man’s leadership in his own family. Slavishly following this approach potentially undermines the good work this directory is trying to achieve, by elevating the role of the ‘priestly’ class of Christians as if they have more direct access to God than lay Christians. On the other hand, one would hope that the minister is more equipped to teach and lead family worship than most of his congregation given that he inevitably will have spent more time studying the Scriptures. A household leader with a pastor present in his time of family worship will no doubt be blessed by his insight.