I frequently have parents ask me what type of discipline they should use with their children. I’m glad parents are asking the question, but I seldom can give a standard answer for every situation. I prefer to use a paradigm through which parents can make their own decisions.
That’s the purpose of this post. Perhaps these steps will help you make wiser decisions regarding discipline. Here are 8 paradigm shapers for making discipline decisions as a parent:
The statistics are staggering. The older a child gets today, the greater his or her chances are of disappearing from the church. The church must intentionally plan to reverse this trend.
Grace Community Church is built around a desire to reach people who may not have previously been interested in church. We love when people bring their friends. This vision extends to reaching the youth of our community. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things.
If the church wants to reach young people these days, here are 7 things we must do:
I wrote a post recently about how to lead people older than you. (Read that post HERE.) Recently I was meeting with Ben Reed and another gentleman who kept referring to how young Ben appeared to be. It bothered me and I realized I needed to write the opposite post. Ben is a phenomenal leader and agreed to help me with this post.
Here are 8 ways to lead people younger than you
Tweet This is a guest post by my son Nate: My name is Nate, and I’m a millennial. That means I must love liturgy, hate big production in church, want…
Tweet Recently my friend Guy Chmieleski asked me to write for his blog Faith on Campus. I wrote under the heading “If I were a college pastor today.” Here is…
Tweet I watched my oldest son make a life decision recently and it confirmed how proud I am of my two boys. He wrestled through it with wisdom and landed…
When I was a teenager, if I wanted to view porn, I would have had to find a magazine. Honestly, even though I may have wanted to, I never had or found a stash. I knew everyone where I might have bought some and if my friends had their own stash of pictures, they never shared them with me.
I did a little babysitting as a teenager in addition to my grocery store work and I did manage to find some magazines at one of the houses where I worked late one night. Those images are still with me today. As much as pornography was probably a part of my generation, it wasn’t that accessible to me.
My boys have grown up in a different generation….
It took years before I felt comfortable teaching about parenting. I don’t feel adequate to teach about parenting adult children now, since I’m still doing that, but I feel better about helping parents of younger children. Our boys have become healthy, well-adjusted, God-fearing children.
This week is Orange Week; a ministry of The ReThink Group. It’s a week to talk about the Orange strategy of partnering churches with parents, believing that the combined effort works better than either one of them working independent of each other. I’m happy to participate. Our church uses and believes in the Orange strategy.
We owe all our success at parenting to God’s grace, but…
The Grace Community Church middle school camp is this week. Thanks to our family pastor Michael Bayne for letting me grab this video from his blog. (I didn’t ask permission, so I hope he’s okay with this.) Our youngest son Nate is serving as student pastor this summer and so he’s at the camp and in the video. I wish they would let me go sometime. I’d show them a water party!
I’m working on some blog posts, messages, and perhaps even a book on fathering. I’m especially interested in addressing the absence of a strong father figure in a person’s life, since I see it as a huge scar in many people’s life.
You can help me with this part of my ministry. Please consider completing my survey on fathering. It’s quick and easy and all responses are anonymous.
