Christian Parenting Initiative
R
aising kids in the 21st century is challenging. Trying to pass on your faith to those kids can feel impossible. But even with the obstacles, faith is always going to be sacredly mixed up in family, no matter what that family looks like. We can't just pass the next Gen Alpha off to the church and hope children's ministry takes care of them. If we want to raise children of faith, we need to bring church home. At the same time, so many parents feel overwhelmed, overstressed, overworked. It feels like there isn't any choice but to step back in kids' spiritual lives.
That's why we're partnering with communities throughout the Washington D.C. area to establish the Bringing Church Home project. The goal is to empower parents and caregivers to come alongside community members and churches and steer through the challenges of raising God's children in the difficult social, cultural, and religious landscape of the 21st century.
Bringing Church Home looks like equipping families to build deep, sustaining community between generations. It looks like coming alongside parents and children to imagine together new ways of engaging with the ancient traditions of the people of Christ. It looks like a community that joins together to guide children through growing into the beauty God has set before them.
Want To Be Involved?
Bringing Church Home will gather several teams of at least four to participate in a 14-month program of spiritual formation. Each team will consist of one or more parent(s)/caregiver(s), one or more child(ren), a church staff member, and a supportive member of the family's community (godparent, extended family member, Sunday school teacher, etc). Over the course of the program, each team will receive $1,000 to develop a project with the help of our consultants. These projects will equip the team both to navigate the challenges of spiritually forming their child as well as to help their communities face similar challenges. The program will run from September 2024 to November 2025, and will involve two retreats, bi-monthly trainings/consultations, and regularly working with the team to work on and live out the team’s project.
Each team will choose one of the following parenting contexts to focus their projects on: early childhood (K-6th grade), older childhood (7th - 12th grade), single African-American mothers raising a son, neurodiversity and mental illness, Spanish-speaking households, non-traditional caregiving situations, parenting an LGBTQIA+ child, and parents of third-culture children (children growing up in a different culture from their parents' culture of origin). Teams should be formed with one of these contexts in mind. Though a parent may exist within several of these contexts, each team should choose one as a focus, with the understanding that they may navigate other issues in the process.