Jeffrey C. Long

15 years ago, Deana and I learned that we were going to be bringing our first child into the world. Oh how I wish I had this book back then. Deana and I have always parented from the hope found in scripture that there is an endurance of Godly heritage in passing the faith on from one generation to another. In the face of many Christian families whose children had walked away from Jesus, we held on to the scriptures characterized by the verse “Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6

The implication is clear. We can parent with the hope that God is using us to pass the heritage of faith in Jesus successfully on to our children.

How different this is from the modern belief that our children are individuals guided solely by their choice and providence. No. God has placed them under our care where we can trust that through His power they will persevere in their faith.

As I came into the Mennonite Church, I found a similar hope, especially for young children. In the face of persecutors declaring that by refusing to baptise their infants, the Anabaptists were condemning their children to hell, they turned to scripture and saw that Jesus blessed and welcomed children rather then cursing them.

This book is a wonderful treatise on the scriptural foundation for such hope and the heavy call that God puts on us as parents to fulfill His promises in our family. Neither does it turn a blind eye to the choices our children may make as they grow older. But our culture has turned so far away from the providence of God that we mistakenly believe that hope is only in the individual choices each of us make and in those our children make. This book is a corrective to that notion, centering us back on the hope that God has placed the solitary in families. We are not alone. Our children are not alone. And so they have a gift of spiritual growth that they would not have if they were raised in heathen homes.

I recommend this book to all parents looking for guidance as to the foundation of hope upon which they parent their children. I believe that in our culture of blind humanistic optimism and individualistic Christian pessimism, this is an important topic.