Leading Other People's Children

I've noticed that in a lot evangelical Christianity parental authority is heavily and sometime overly emphasized. I suspect that this is largely due to the work of Focus on the Family and other similar organizations and is a knee jerk reaction in response to the world. I have two children and I have a tendency to be a bit authoritarian at times so I'm not just someone from the "I think spanking is hitting" camp.

Awhile ago I was having a conversation with some evangelical mothers. One of the woman in the group had a Muslim family living next to them. Her approximately 10 year old son had become friends with their son and had been witnessing to him. The Muslim boy wanted a bible of his own. This mother was wondering if it would be appropriate to give him one. She was concerned that it would anger his parents by undermining their authority thus harming her opportunities to witness to them. She also wondered if it was inappropriate to undermine their authority at all.

I find this mind boggling. That child needs Jesus desperately. Parents do not have an inherent right to teach their children heresy. Loving the child means teaching them how they might be saved regardless of how their parents might feel about that.

I've seen this come up with teenagers as well. They want to become radical, do mission work, street ministry, eschew wealth, etc. They are told to submit to their parents, go to school, keep up the facade and be nice middle class Christians. Another teenage that I knew was told to wait until she was sixteen to become a Christian, the age that her mother would grant her the right to pick her own religion. This is insanity. These teenagers are being told to sin.

I think that there are a couple of things going on here. One reason for this is that I think that we want people to leave us alone with regard to how we parent our children. The verse "do to others as you would have them do to you" has been warped by the lens of our society. We apply this principle where it doesn't directly apply. Essentially we think that because we don't want others to mislead our children against our convictions we shouldn't lead their children to truth. This is buying into the the lie that our convictions are equal to the convictions of the other parents. This is not the case. In reality, if we truly love our children we should desire others to lead them away from any of our false teachings and into greater truth. We should go and treat their children the same way. Similarly, we desire for ourselves to be led away from false teaching and so we ought to lead them children away from false teaching. That is the pure application of that command.

Another issue here is the problem that I mentioned in the previous post. We have become so trained to believe that Christianity should never be offensive. In this situation we are afraid of the offense undermining another's authority would create.

Finally, I think sometimes when the parents are confessing Christian the issue is that we are too shortsighted to realize that they are not necessarily actually following Jesus. We assume that they are and that the moderate road that they desire for their children, rather than the radical route, is equally as God honouring. Often this is not the case. I have a good friend whose "Christian" parents are ashamed that he does full time street ministry. They want him to be middle class yuppies like themselves. This is not uncommon. The church is full of parents that are not truly Christian and will never understand their children's desire to surrender their lives to the kingdom of God.

I know that I have been a little to cautious with sharing the gospel with other people's children. As I've been writing this I have been encouraged to be more bold.