O fathers and mothers, the ruin of your children or their salvation will, under God, very much depend upon you. The gracious Spirit may use you for their conversion, or Satan may employ you as the instruments of their destruction. Which is it like to be?  

C. H. Spurgeon was a 19th century theologian, pastor, father, and fellow cigar smoker.

Most popular boys names of 2011:

1. Aiden

2. Jackson

3. Mason

4. Liam

5. Jacob

6. Jayden

7. Ethan

8. Noah

9. Lucas

10. Logan

Sadly, in 2011, Michael dropped to #16.  If more parents would name their sons after me, Michael could reclaim the top spot.  C’mon parents! Let’s do this thing!

Most popular girl names of 2011:

1. Sophia

2. Emma

3. Isabella

4. Olivia

5. Ava

6. Lily

7. Chloe

8. Madison

9. Emily

10. Abigail

(CitizenLink 9/26/11)

1. Our nation will see the emergence of the largest generational mission field in more than a century. According to our current research, the Millennial generation, those born between 1980 and 2000, will have a very low Christian representation. Our estimates now are that only 15 percent are Christian. With a huge population of nearly 80 million, that means that nearly 70 million young people are not Christians.

2. The dominant attitude of this huge generation toward Christianity will be largely indifferent. Only 13 percent of the Millennials rank any type of spiritual matter as important to their lives. They are not angry at churches and Christians. They simply ignore us because they do not deem us as meaningful or relevant.

3. Family will be a key value for Millennials.  Nearly eight out of ten of the Millennials ranked family as the important issue in their lives. They told us that they had healthy relationships with their parents who, for the most part, are Baby Boomers. Some churches say they are family friendly, but few actually demonstrate that value. Churches that reach both of these generations will make significant changes to become the type of churches that foster healthy family relationships.

Those born between 1980 and 2000 are currently between the ages of 11 and 31.  If the numbers are anywhere near accurate, then there are a couple of things I see as being crucial if this generation is going to be reached for Christ.

Christian parenting.  If we want to reach this generation for Christ, then it may be wise for us to look to minister to the generation ahead of them.  A secular study done in the early 2000′s revealed that the number one determining factor of a child’s religious beliefs and practices once he or she reaches adulthood is the influence of one or both parents.  Parents are the key, so rather than first looking to reach this generation directly for Christ (at least the younger half – ages 11-19), maybe we ought to look at reaching their parents first.

Family Ministry. Churches need to have a strong focus on helping parents raise their children to follow the Lord.  This includes marriage ministry, parenting ministry, children’s ministry, and youth ministry.  All of these ministries must be relevant and must work together to assist parents in the training of their children to walk with the Lord as adults.  Of course, in the absence of godly parents, churches can assume the lead role in helping kids grow in the Lord, but even non-Christian parents must never be excluded from the ministry reach and help of the local church.

Church Integration.  The churches that see the most young adults (ages 18-30) stay connected (to the church and to their faith) are churches that don’t just offer age-specific ministries to young adults, but work diligently at helping them integrate into the life and body of the church as a whole.  Real life is integrated and multi-generational.  Churches that keep young adults separated from the rest of the body are not doing anyone any good. I’m not suggesting that churches do away with age-specific programs for young adults (college and career, etc), but I am suggesting that churches must work diligently to help young adults integrate relationally and in ministry with people from other generations.

These are just a few thoughts off the top of my head.  What are your thoughts as you process Rainer’s findings that I listed above?

In the book, you don’t waste any time getting to the heart of the problem. You say first off that many of us have squeezed living out of life. What do you mean by this?

This is an epidemic in our society today, particularly in any place where a person is in and out of the car a lot. In the very first chapter, we talk about something called “crowded loneliness,” and here’s what that is. If you were to take an individual and draw a picture of them in the center of the page and then have that person identify every relational world that they must manage, the average person and family would have thirty five to forty distinct separate circles that they have to manage. This ends up creating crowded loneliness where we are overexposed to a lot of people, but we don’t have a deep connection with anyone.

This is creating one of the major disconnections with our families. What happens is the family is going in multiple and different directions, so they not only don’t connect with anyone outside of the family, but this way of life that we have created for ourselves has really squeezed the living out of life for the family.

You paint a pretty bleak picture of the American daily schedule in the book…one that unfortunately many of us are all too familiar with. Do you believe that it is really possible for us to break out of this break-neck speed lifestyle?

It really is possible, but it’s going to take two things. Number one, it’s going to take vision. We’re going to have to teach and disciple people what it means to be in a family and how to live life again with all the choices we have.

Number two, it might take a crisis. In my personal life, I ran up against a crisis about seven years ago related to insomnia that really exposed how out of balance my life was as a pastor, a father, and a husband. Typically, it takes those two things to make a difference. I don’t know if it’s going to happen societally, but I do know that it can take place for the individual. We don’t have to wait for society to catch up.

Give us an idea of what this break-neck speed does to us.

There are health problems mentally, physically, and emotionally as well as spiritual and financial problems that are devastating the family.  For me, I developed insomnia. Basically, I lived my life so imbalanced as a pastor for so long that eventually I couldn’t sleep anymore. That kind of insomnia leads to irritability, low productivity, and a sense of fear that really shut my life down. In addition to that, I wasn’t connecting with my kids the way I needed to. I had them involved in lots of activities in the evenings, and it was really hurting us physically. It wasn’t what God intended.

I’m the a pastor of a large church, and there are lots of expectations on me. I have four children; one in college, one in high school, one in junior high, and one in elementary school. I’ve been married for 22 years. In addition to my main job, I also write books.

There are some solutions that we have within our reach that we can choose incrementally that will help us to get our life back. Because of these, I’m able to engage in my hobbies, I’m able to spend time with my kids, and I’m sleeping like a baby!

And you didn’t expand the week to eight days!

No, I did not! I probably would have chosen that first if I could have, but it wasn’t available.

Part of your solution for this breakneck lifestyle is to restructure our relationships. As a matter of fact, you say that if we are not connected with people, we will die. I’m sure many people would say that their busyness is a direct result of relationships, so obviously you’re talking about something a little different and deeper.

That’s why we called it “crowded loneliness.” Crowded loneliness is very deceptive as a type of loneliness because it gives you the feeling as though you’re over-exposed to relationships when in reality, you’re not really in a deep connection with anyone. When you look at Genesis 2, it says that it’s not good for people to be alone. God wasn’t kidding!

We are living in a time of the greatest human disconnection that any place in human history has ever experienced. The studies are coming in and showing that if we do not have the right kind of connections, then it will literally kill us.

There’s a book by a guy named Will Miller called Refrigerator Rights. He points out that we have a lot of relationships, but asks how many people in our lives have been granted refrigerator rights by us – that is, people who come into our home and feel free to get into our refrigerator without permission. That’s the kind of relationships we need. People need to understand that when it comes to community and connection, most people now have linear friendships with lots of exposure but not a deep connection with a circle of people.

How does one begin to foster and develop relationships like that? What are some key things we can do?

Number one, you’re looking to develop a circle of people who not only know you, but who know each other.

Number two, this includes people who live around you so you can actually get at each other’s life in a more frequent and spontaneous way.

Number three, include your family. This is the biggest challenge in the church of the twenty-first century; we continue to model the world by separating our kids from us even at church. Community must include our children.

Number four, you have to stay out of the car. You have to park the car and spend more time sitting in the front yard hanging out. This means you have to decrease the number of evening activities that you’re involved in including organized children’s sports. I know I just became a bad guy, but organized children’s sports really hurts us as a society.

Number five, start experiencing meals again. The meal is the center place of community.

Restructuring our time via what you call The Hebrew Day Planner is a key concept in your book. Talk to us a bit about this.

This is a radical idea, but it’s an old and ancient idea. The basic structure is out of Genesis. The Hebrew day begins at 6:00 p.m. the day before. One of the things that hurts us as a people is that we think of the day as morning to morning, where the Hebrews thought of the day as evening to evening.

The evening hours from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. are the time of day that we were created for. This is the relational season of the day where we share a meal and conversation together. All the work is done and this is what we look forward to all day.

From 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. is the season of sleep. The National Institute of Health tells us that the average person right now needs 8.5 hours of sleep per night in order to be healthy. If you don’t get the full eight hours of sleep per night, your alertness will be reduced by 1/3 during the work hours of the day.

From 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. is the time available for work during the time of the sun. This doesn’t mean you have to work 12 hours; it just means this is the season by which you should get all your work done. Ideally, every member of the family seeks to get all their work done in 12 hours and then from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., there is the relational season of the day.

Our bodies need a sense of pattern and rhythm in order for us to get a full night’s sleep. We should try to go to bed as often as we can at the same time every night so that we can get a full night’s sleep.

It sounds like we need a little more discipline in our lives.

We need boundaries, and we need margins. The average person will say there is no way, but there definitely is. Youth workers will especially say this because they tend to do most of their work in the evenings. I would encourage them to pick up the book The Connecting Church. This is a book I wrote as a companion to Making Room For Life that talks about how we have moved our church over the last eight years to a model where it really promotes family and community over evening programs. As a result, we have deepened the family experience in terms of discipleship and time together, and we have actually increased people’s productivity because they have created boundaries.

When you start to put boundaries on work, then you have a tendency to get more done. As a pastor, that’s how I’m able to get more work done, write books, still enjoy the evenings with my family, and get a full night’s sleep.

Explain what you mean by “leisure sickness,” and tell families what they can do about it.

People actually do need more leisure, but there are two problems that people have by not having boundaries on their time. Number one, they never actually set the work aside. They’re waiting until the weekend to get it done. Number two, the members of the family are not on the same page, so they aren’t doing it as a family.

Leisure sickness is basically a common thing that’s emerging in America where people work so hard during the week without any boundaries that they are worn out. Then on the weekend, they are looking so forward to spending some leisure time, but then their body starts to shut down. Medical specialists say that leisure sickness is essentially where the body starts to create flu-like symptoms so it can crash. This often happens when you are looking forward to actually getting some leisure. Your body is saying that you have pushed it too hard, so now it’s going to shut down.

You have a whole section in your book about bad habits and myths about raising children. What are some of these bad habits and myths that knock our homes out of balance?

One of the major ones took place in the 1980′s. As society was moving to a more mobile society, the idea was to get your children involved in as many adult sponsored evening activities as you can to 1) keep your kids off the street and off of drugs and 2) to give them the advantage later on in life – whether it be with scholarships or success in life. This turned out to be a good idea but overstated.

As parents today, these habits reduce parenting to looking at our children through a chain link fence as we sit on an aluminum bench. As a result, kids want more hang time, more meal time, and more time to just be with their parents and their extended family.

I think one of the things that is going to have to happen is we’re going to have to let our kids play sports, but we’re going to have to put boundaries on them and understand that it was a myth that you do the best for your kid by getting them involved in all these things.

What are you suggesting when you tell parents to put boundaries on sports when everything takes place in the evenings, on Saturdays, and even sometimes on Sundays?

It’s hard! Number one, I would not highly encourage organized sports for children that are 6th grade and under. I would really let sports become a part of their life when it’s a part of the school system in the middle-school and high school years for a couple of reasons. Developmentally, they’re really not ready for sports at the level we’re introducing them to when they’re five years old. Because it’s with the school system – and they have their coaches and their own fields – there’s a tendency for the sports to be right after school, and therefore, the kids are able to get home for the mealtime. I would not do sports aggressively until they are in 7th grade.

Secondly, I would encourage people to pick sports that are predominantly on Saturday mornings. I think we were designed for that 6th day of activity, and we need to prevent the evening hours from being occupied with sports.

The third thing I would suggest is to select sports that do not pull your child out of your community (church, neighborhood, etc.). Try to stay away from specialized sports in a major way. If your children are going to do sports, have them do it with people that live around you so that you can share the experience together.

You also spend some time talking to parents about homework…something that can absolutely threaten to zap the time and energy out of a home. What are you telling parents here?

That’s a huge issue that we have had to address in our own family. One of the things that I would say is that you have to provide incentives for your kids to get their homework done during the school hour. They aren’t going to be motivated because they’re social beings, but you have to find ways to do that.

Number two, reset where the bar needs to be. It may not need to be straight A’s. You might need to reconsider that.

Number three, use Saturday mornings to do projects with them so they can get ahead in school. This will help lighten the load during the weekday evening hours.

A more radical suggestion is to homeschool them. Basically, my kids have doubled up on their schoolwork and are done by noon, and there isn’t any homework. This puts the parents back in control of the situation again.

One of the key ways that parents can de-compartmentalize the life of their family is by bringing church home so that faith oozes into every aspect of family life. How can parents of teens pull this off?

That is the heart and soul of what is driving me and my church. As a church, this is the goal because at the end of the day what ultimately connects our children spiritually is their relationship with their family and their extended spiritual family. We have taken all of our small groups – which include the entire family – and have placed them in neighborhoods. We do church as family. When we do work projects, they are with the family. We try to encourage the family to experience these things together. This is the big need of the day; it is the need for the family to be together as a family and to do life together as a family.

All teenagers are going to go through crisis, problems, and all the stuff the world and the devil will throw at them. I think the difference is that those that are being prayed for survive and come out the other side. Those who aren’t being prayed for are in most cases the casualties. It’s really crucial that those we love the most are prayed for. In James, he says we don’t have because we don’t ask.

Do you want them to have the right friends? Ask for them. Do you want them to have godly instruction, godly counselors, and godly professors? Ask. Do you want them to connect up with the right mate? Ask.

God has a desired plan, but He doesn’t do things until His people ask Him. When it sunk into my head that God waits until His people pray before He moves, I decided that I didn’t want to miss out on all the things He has for me and my family. I vowed to start asking then and there!

Prayer is hard work. The devil fights it, and we don’t often see immediate results or get the immediate gratification we’ve been trained to expect. You have to spend time, you have to hear from God, you have to tie it to His Word, and you have to pray in faith.

Out of that process, He eventually gets us praying the things that He wants. It is then that we really connect with Him; it just takes quality time. It happens best when we set aside a time and place and really cry out to God.

Over the years, I have used some of Tom’s books to help me with my prayer life.  They can all be downloaded for free by clicking here.

Dr. Tim Kimmel’s Grace-Based Parenting is one of the most influential books I’ve read on parenting.  His premise is that parents need to create a grace-based home environment and parent their children the same way God parents them.  Since first picking the book up 5 years ago, I’ve read it twice, taught a class on it, and interviewed him for a radio show I used to host.

Here’s a small portion of that interview.  I found his words to be most helpful in my parenting, and hopefully you will too.

When I generalize a lot of parenting models, one thing that I often see in Christian homes is fear. I see a lot of fear-based parenting. The average parent that is steeped in fear-based parenting would be the last one to admit it, but fear is exactly what drives the decisions they make. They see the world system and how wicked it is, and they see Satan and how sinister he is, and then they see their kids and how vulnerable they are. Based on those three factors, they make their strategy for parenting based on fear.

However, there’s one thing that trumps all three of those fears and that is the fact that God is mighty. God is awesome, and when our focus is on Him and we let Him set the agenda, it often changes the way we go about what we do. We don’t hide as much. There is also evangelical behavior modification and I see this a lot; it’s where we’re trying to get the kids to act a certain way, know certain things, and look a certain way.

Our job isn’t to get our kids to behave right, our job is to get their character right. In fact, we don’t need to worry about their behavior so much; when you get their character right, the right behavior will follow. You can get a kid behaving right, but their heart may not be where it needs to be.

There is a lot of image-control parenting where parents are basically trying to meet a standard set by the people around them. Parents want their kids to do certain things, say certain things, and act a certain way so that they look good.

Then there’s also high-control parenting where parents leverage the strength of their personalities against their children’s weaknesses in order to get them to meet their selfish agendas, which is often the parents’ own insecurities.

The balance between throwing our kids to the wolves and hiding them from the world is grace-based parenting. The problem is that many of the systems that we have created to protect our children actually substitute for the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. They actually negate the kid’s need for the Bible. It doesn’t mean they don’t learn the Bible and know it, they just don’t need the Bible. This creates a spiritual anemia; it’s what happens when you preoccupy yourself with raising a safe kid. I think a lot of parents have that as their main goal; they want to raise a safe Christian kid.

Click the link below and watch as a new star was born today in Albuquerque.

SWAT SITUATION IN ALBUQUERQUE

All eight of us packed into our seven passenger van on Friday afternoon and began the 1425 mile trek from New Mexico to Ohio.  Good thing the eighth person is still in the womb or we would have been really packed in!  With 5 of the 8 of us being licensed drivers, our goal from the start was to drive the 24 hours straight through…and that’s what we did.

About 6 hours into our journey, the adventure began.  My new son-in-law, Aarron, was driving the evening shift through Texas, and I was in the passenger seat.  I told all of the drivers that they could go as fast as they want but that they are each responsible for paying for any tickets they receive.   Aarron was going fast, but I didn’t know how fast…until the Texas State Patrol officer pulled us over. 

The officer came up to my window and asked me where we were from.  I told him that we were from New Mexico and making our way to Ohio for a wedding reception for my newly married daughter.  It was dark, so he flashed his flashlight through the van.  I’m sure he was confused as he went from face-to-face.  A black driver, a white red-headed passenger, then black, white, black, white, white.  He told Aarron that he was going 83 in a 65 mph zone. 

The officer took Aarron’s driver’s license and my van’s paperwork and headed back to his car.  Michelle was the first person to break the silence in the van when she asked Aarron, “You don’t have any outstanding warrants, do you?”  We’ve asked Aarron a thousand questions over the last year, but we’d never asked him that one.  It seemed like an appropriate time to ask, and thankfully, he said no.

About 5 minutes later, the officer came back to my window and asked me, “Which ones just got married?”  I pointed to Aarron in the driver’s seat, and my daughter, Emily, behind him.  He looked Aaron in the eye and said, “Consider this the best wedding gift of all,” and handed him his license with only a warning. 

83 in a 65 mph zone will get you billy-clubbed in some states, but evidently not in Texas…at least not that night.  We all let out a huge sigh of relief, laughed, and made fun of Aarron the rest of the way.

Needless to say, this is a busy time in the life of my family, and this week promises to be busier and even more stressful!  If you think about it, please pray for us this week.

And, when things calm down a bit, I will re-enter the blogosphere.  Lots to blog about, but no time to do so.  Gotta go meet with Franck.  Talk to you soon!