This week I'd like to share some thoughts with you from my book, Beyond Survival: A Guide to Abundant Life Homeschooling. This selection is from the chapter entitled, "Serve the Lord with Gladness - Family Ministry". I hope this ministers to you as much as it has ministered to me.

We have always done the normal things Christian parents do: gone to church with our children, prayed with them at night, read Bible stories, and talked with them about God. But as the Lord began to stretch us and deepen our relationship with Him, He showed us that it was important to include our children in other aspects of life. Over the past few years, our children have started spending time praying earnestly with us about direction: where to live, where to attend church, how to develop new friendships, ministry opportunities, business decisions, finances, and more.

Seeing a need to teach how to study the Bible, Bill began using the Children's Inductive Bible Study program by Janice Southerland with our children on a daily basis. It was an eye-opening experience to see the children delving into the Scriptures with a hunger to know. Strong's Concordance became a familiar tool, and the Greek Lexicon was in hot demand around our living room. Fantastic conversations kept erupting over things being learned, over questions of what was meant by this phrase, over issues mentioned in that phrase, over what it means to be a Christian in the nineties. Our children learned how to handle God's Word for themselves with increasing skill, which immeasurably deepened their relationship with Him.

At about the same time, our tiny church began Saturday morning intercessory prayer for our church, our community, the nation, and the world. After attending one of the prayer meetings, we quickly realized that this was something our children would benefit from. When invited, they responded with great enthusiasm (even though it meant getting up early on Saturday morning). For the past year, they have continued to faithfully attend the prayer meeting, even though they are usually the only children present. In fact, on some Saturday mornings when I would much rather be a lazy bones and stay in bed, my children show up dressed and ready to go!

One of the latest events in our shared family ministry concerned establishing a new city ordinance. A few businesses in our little community suddenly brought in nude dancing. Many Christians were up in arms over this, sending letters to our city council and to the editor and doing all of the other things that moral people do when their town is threatened with blatant immorality. Our church's Saturday morning prayer meeting was exclusively devoted for a time to pray about this blight on our town. Then, as a further response, some of us discussed having prayer walks through downtown. Prayer walks are kind of like putting feet to your prayers. They enable you to go to and pray specifically, quietly, and unobtrusively over a certain place. When this idea was brought up in the prayer meeting, our children couldn't wait to start. They saw themselves as integral members of our prayer walk team, which, indeed, they were. Shortly after the prayer walks were established, the city council voted for an ordinance that would disallow that kind of dancing, and one of the two businesses shut down for lack of funds. Though our children know that there were many things that contributed to this victory, they felt that we also had played a significant part through the prayer walks.

This was not an artificial solution, nor one we tried to capitalize on, but was, we felt, simply obedience to God. Our children gladly followed in that obedience. And they saw the results.

Bill and I are coming to realize that much of the discipleship process with our children means simply bringing them alongside, doing what we do, letting them see how we live out our Christianity, eliminating the artificial separation between "adults'" and "children's" ministry. Many, many, many homeschooled children, having been discipled and taught by adults, having been in constant companionship of adults and not of peers, have shown themselves eager and able to do tasks usually considered fit only for adults. Intercession, decision making, self-employment, ministry, volunteer opportunities are a few of these.

The result is that our children are learning, as we also learn, who God is and how to trust Him in real life, in big decisions as well as the small ones. They are experiencing right alongside us what it means to wait on God. They are coming to understand, along with us, that prayer "availeth much" (James 5:16) and that the Bible contains all they need "for life and godliness" (2 Peter 1:3).

By the grace of God, they are living experientially, though imperfectly, the words of Deuteronomy 6:7, "And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit down in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up."

Blessings,

Diana