How Not to Totally Put Your Children Off God

Parenting can be the best or worst of times. It can be a role we love best or one that causes great insecurity. There is no formal training for parenthood. There are no clear benchmarks of success and yet it demands all our resources, skills and attention. Parenting has no blueprint.

This book is the merging of the author''s deep convictions of parenting with examples of both "When it worked" and "When it did not work". He has also elicited the help of his sons to write their perspectives on how their experiences and memories connect (or differ from) his own.

Each chapter has two sections. Section A contains reflections on habits that seemed to work in passing on faith. Section B then reflects on the same habit but from a more critical perspective.
These five chapters come from the author''s experiences as a dad, as a Christian leader and as a theologian. The first section in each chapter marks those habits that he believes in passionately. They are the ''Do''s'', those habits formed in parenting for faith. They emerged in the business of parenting and have become clearer over life. The second section notes when parenting seemed to go wrong. These are the nightmares that skulk around the edges of a parent''s consciousness, the failures, when high hopes are not realised. However it could be that in these ''cock ups'' in being a parent are when the actual parenting for faith is really carried out. That at least is the comment made by the three sons commenting on the script.

Parenting can be the best or worst of times. It can be a role we love best or one that causes great insecurity. There is no formal training for parenthood. There are no clear benchmarks of success and yet it demands all our resources, skills and attention. Parenting has no blueprint.

This book is the merging of the author's deep convictions of parenting with examples of both "When it worked" and "When it did not work". He has also elicited the help of his sons to write their perspectives on how their experiences and memories connect (or differ from) his own.

Each chapter has two sections. Section A contains reflections on habits that seemed to work in passing on faith. Section B then reflects on the same habit but from a more critical perspective.
These five chapters come from the author's experiences as a dad, as a Christian leader and as a theologian. The first section in each chapter marks those habits that he believes in passionately. They are the 'Do's', those habits formed in parenting for faith. They emerged in the business of parenting and have become clearer over life. The second section notes when parenting seemed to go wrong. These are the nightmares that skulk around the edges of a parent's consciousness, the failures, when high hopes are not realised. However it could be that in these 'cock ups' in being a parent are when the actual parenting for faith is really carried out. That at least is the comment made by the three sons commenting on the script.

Foreword by Ruth Worsley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Chapter 1: Telling Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
(A) When Storytelling Revealed Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
(B) When Storytelling Became Myth (Fluffing your lines) . . . . . 43
Chapter 2: Going on Adventures and Making Memories 66
(A) When We Went on Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
(B) When We Created Nightmares (When adventures . . . . . . . 80
became health and safety disasters)
Chapter 3: Praying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
(A) When We Prayed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
(B) When We Found God to Be Absent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 4: Philosophizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
(A) When We Philosophized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
(B) When Our Philosophizing Was as Blowing in the Wind . . . 125
Chapter 5: Going to Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
(A) When We Included Church as Part of the Kingdom Dream . 136
(B) When We Despised the Church (Failing to accept God’s body) 160
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174