Light Duties

This is another audio-only stream of consciousness. Cathy talks through some reflections on the changing relationships she's had with music for kids across her 17 years of mothering. Real-time, real sound (complete with the soothing sounds of dishwater). An exercise in trying to think behind the artifacts of Christian resources.

When I was younger, "obedience" was merely uncool. In the 90's and 00's, we didn't use the word because it was daggy, uptight and prudish. Obedience meant deprivation and legalism, the arbitrary spoiling of fun. Thoroughly unappealing. Now, it is counted among the evils of this world.

In this episode, we consider a range of reasons why we don't teach our children to obey Jesus, from fear of stifling them to just not knowing how to go about it.

Jesus tells us to teach obedience to those for whom we have some sort of discipleship responsibility.

The most profoundly connected disciples Christian parents have are their own children. We are obliged to teach our kids to obey Jesus. Every moment and task in our children's young lives is given by Jesus to be used for training them into obedience to Him. Whole body, whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, whole strength obedience. The sort of obedience which grows alongside of, comes from—and feeds—love for Jesus. Our job is to remind our children, in a way they can't ignore, in all of life, that they live under the authority of the Lord. We are to use our temporary season of parental authority to train our children to live for him. Never was the commission to "teach them to obey everything I have commanded" more thorough than for a parent who gets to oversee their children's first experiences of everything.

articles referred to:

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/mothers-abiding

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/feeding-on-bible-when-the-meals-are-interrupted

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/nokidschurch

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/is-worship-the-right-word

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/constantembodiedworship

Here are some problematic assumptions about the Great Commission which end up stifling motherhood (and stifling the mission too):

Wrong Idea 1: We're all meant to be constantly expanding our range of relationships to tell the gospel to new people.

Wrong Idea 2: Our children don't qualify as people to be discipled.

Wrong Idea 3: The Great Commission is only about evangelism.

Wrong Idea 4: Mission to our children is done the same way as mission to our unbelieving neighbour.

Since Jesus is our Head and Lord of everything, since he has appointed us each to our own spheres and duties, we can trust that the limitations of his provisions will achieve his mission.

Are home duties a rival to the Great Commission? Will building an overflowing home waste resources that could otherwise be spent telling the world about Jesus? This is the question that troubled me most as I fumbled around in the early years of motherhood. The word that evangelical Christians often focus on is "go". It's hard to know what to do with that when so much of raising children is not going. This focus on taking the gospel to new people in new places pickles many of us in guilt, because the time of small children is not full of new people and new places. We're trying to work out how to be with the same few people in far fewer places than we used to circuit. The slow smallness which goes with invested mothering can look, on the outside, like apathy about Jesus' mission, or a barrier to it.

Home is meant to be the central place from which we worship and train up worshipers. It is naturally the locus of our maternal responsibilities. It won't be the only place where responsibility and influence happens, but it is the basic place. We can't leap over it. This is a bland thought if we've not known what it's like to be in a home full of vitality; if we're still trying to grow out of our boredom. To say that home is where we are primarily responsible and most influential can be insulting, or at least bewildering, if we have a purely functional view of the home. I've written in article #11 about how the instruction to 'be busy at home' is calling us to more, not less, than we imagine. The problem isn't so much with home, but with its unrealised potential. We underestimate the influence we wield through it.

It's not unusual to divide life into sacred and secular, bits God cares about and the bits he doesn't. Because gathered worship and the Bible and prayer and evangelism matter enormously, we think that everything else doesn't matter at all. But that is an unbiblical view, and a rather disheartening one. Most of our time as mums is given over to things which we would still do even if we weren't Christian. When we think that God doesn't care about the common activities we do, we're behaving as if someone else created ordinary human life in this world and then God came in to rescue us from it. Not so!

We live in a time where home is seen as either a day spa you retreat to, or the site of heavy-duty, mind-numbing labour we're desperate to escape. For the mothers of young children, we long for the former but live with the latter. Both ways of thinking about home are pretty boring and neither help us mature in worship while we raise worshipers. Let's talk about boredom, because it is surprisingly connected with worship.