How Should I Parent My Non-Christian Teen?
00:00:00.000 | Hey everyone, this is Tony again, and before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you a favor.
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00:00:32.940 | Well, Pastor John and I recorded a handful of episodes live and in person in Nashville this summer,
00:00:42.800 | and we ended our live recording session with an audience question about parenting non-Christian teenagers.
00:00:49.680 | Here's the question and Pastor John's response.
00:00:52.520 | We got some really important valuable emails from people in this room who are parenting non-Christian teenagers.
00:00:58.860 | Teenagers who have not made a profession of faith. A number of questions have to do with like enforcing church attendance.
00:01:05.200 | We heard from a woman named Angela who grew up going to Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday.
00:01:10.480 | Her dad made her go. You have to go. You have to go. So she started to resent Christianity.
00:01:14.740 | She later came to the faith, married a godly man, is now involved in a wonderful church.
00:01:19.580 | But she looks back on that and wonders as you're parenting teens, especially in the mid to late teen years,
00:01:26.020 | and they have made no profession of faith, they don't have any interest in the gospel or church.
00:01:29.460 | How much do you enforce church attendance? Where do you draw that line between
00:01:33.580 | expecting them to attend a church meeting on Sundays and
00:01:38.220 | being patient with them and not making Christianity come across as though it's something being enforced upon them?
00:01:45.480 | I can't just jump in to a 16 year old, 17 year old
00:01:50.280 | behavior without backing up a little bit. And I know that's not the question being asked, but let me just say
00:01:56.080 | we're not God and we do not
00:01:59.720 | create our teenagers
00:02:02.720 | completely, but partly. Okay.
00:02:05.360 | We start rearing teenagers when they're in the womb.
00:02:11.220 | How we pray for them in the womb. We affect the behavior of a teenager when they're two
00:02:18.500 | years old.
00:02:20.740 | I watch a lot of young parents today.
00:02:22.500 | They seem to believe you cannot control the behavior of a child or that it's wrong to.
00:02:27.820 | Child's making an absolute mess or chaos of every relationship and every dinner meeting, every
00:02:33.420 | grocery store, and the parent seems powerless. That's not helpful for teenagers.
00:02:39.300 | It's coming, you know, 12, 13 years later. So a little child needs to feel
00:02:44.500 | profoundly
00:02:48.580 | secure,
00:02:50.540 | profoundly loved,
00:02:52.540 | cherished,
00:02:53.940 | enjoyed, and
00:02:55.940 | profoundly under authority. And those are not contradictory and every child knows it.
00:03:02.940 | Children want
00:03:06.220 | boundaries and
00:03:07.900 | massive love inside the boundaries.
00:03:09.900 | And so there's the setup that I would love to see happen.
00:03:14.900 | So that even when at 14 or 15 or 16 a child starts to question and says finally on one scary
00:03:22.180 | awful night, "Daddy, I
00:03:24.580 | don't believe this anymore. Don't think I ever did."
00:03:28.540 | That the structure of parenting at that point is such
00:03:34.820 | that they may not be a wild-eyed rebel against the family,
00:03:39.900 | but almost a broken-hearted
00:03:42.500 | rebel against the family. Maybe. I mean it's all a continuum, right?
00:03:47.380 | We got kids who are just viciously opposed to mom and dad for whatever and others who are compliant, but unbelieving.
00:03:54.740 | Yeah. And what you do on that
00:03:56.740 | continuum in the middle is really difficult.
00:04:00.500 | I would say if you have a child who after a very serious...
00:04:05.420 | I mean you've got to avoid rage here because I'll tell you everything in you will just collapse at that news, right?
00:04:12.180 | My child that I've invested in for 15 years has told me that the most precious thing in my life is not precious to him.
00:04:19.260 | That's just about as bad as it gets, right? That's worse than death. It's worse than death.
00:04:25.220 | So they tell you and
00:04:28.460 | you've got to avoid rage and
00:04:31.020 | dig in and try to draw out and listen with everything you're worth because stuff is going on you don't know.
00:04:39.620 | You do not know what's going on in this kid. You don't know what he heard at church.
00:04:43.900 | You don't know what he heard at school. You don't know what his friends are treating him.
00:04:48.140 | You don't know anything because he hasn't come forth and you you got to patiently dig in and and then affirm,
00:04:55.060 | "I'm gonna love you no matter what. You're my son. You're my daughter. I'm gonna love you no matter what."
00:05:00.580 | Then you say,
00:05:04.140 | "This is a Christian home.
00:05:06.340 | Mom and dad set the tone here. Mom and dad are the authority here and this is a Christian home.
00:05:12.220 | We have Christian standards. We have Christian practices. While you're part of this house,
00:05:16.780 | we don't expect you to be fake.
00:05:21.660 | We're not saying that the behavior we expect is a
00:05:25.820 | covering, a hypocritical covering for faith so that you can look good to the world and make us look better.
00:05:32.340 | We want nothing to do with that kind of hypocrisy.
00:05:34.340 | We just want you to comply with these
00:05:38.620 | standards while you're here. If by the time you're ready to go, they're not yours. Gonna love you.
00:05:45.700 | You'll go. You'll set your own pattern and see what you can get.
00:05:49.300 | I mean a kid who's big,
00:05:51.780 | I'm thinking boys now because I had four boys and then a girl, a kid who's big and is strong
00:05:58.480 | cannot go if he doesn't want to go. Just get in the car and drive away or he'll leave. You can't make
00:06:06.120 | kids do if they're that rebellious. You can't make them.
00:06:11.940 | But I think you should try and you do it in a real
00:06:17.180 | honest face-to-face, give meaning to it.
00:06:20.020 | Here's what going to church would mean for you as an unbeliever with us on Sunday morning at age 15.
00:06:25.340 | Here's what it would mean. It would mean I respect my mom and dad. They brought me into this world.
00:06:31.020 | They invested in me for 15 years. They're paying me for my food and lodging. They're probably gonna help me go to college.
00:06:36.380 | I owe them some respect. They want me to go to church.
00:06:40.500 | I'm gonna go and sit there and they know it doesn't mean anything to me and I know it doesn't mean anything and so does the
00:06:46.460 | pastor.
00:06:48.020 | And I'm there and
00:06:50.020 | the hope for my parents is that I'll hear something that would lead me to Christ.
00:06:53.940 | My hope is that I can survive and get out of there as soon as possible.
00:06:58.260 | So that's the kind of negotiation you would do.
00:07:01.740 | But I will admit that there are going to be situations where you say to a 16, 17, 18 year old
00:07:09.140 | son, daughter, we do
00:07:12.460 | not have
00:07:15.620 | boyfriends over to sleep here in this house or girlfriends. We don't do that.
00:07:20.900 | If you insist on that, you can't live here. So you will draw a line eventually, but
00:07:27.820 | one of my pastoral strategies and I found it so helpful is that people would come to me at the end of services with the most
00:07:34.540 | mind-boggling
00:07:37.260 | situations in life that I'd never even thought of and I would generally see them
00:07:41.900 | conceiving of them in
00:07:44.900 | realities.
00:07:45.980 | This horrible thing or this glorious thing is going to happen. Help me decide
00:07:51.940 | how to navigate this. And I would say
00:07:55.460 | God is God and he's never shut into those two things.
00:07:59.860 | There's always a third option and
00:08:02.980 | I would say let's pray to see if
00:08:06.500 | something you've never even imagined could happen right here could happen.
00:08:10.860 | We just pray for it because I don't have an answer for them, but God has an answer. That's really good.
00:08:15.900 | We should do this again.
00:08:18.940 | This is great.
00:08:25.740 | Thank you for listening to the podcast. Thanks for sending in your questions.
00:08:28.620 | Pastor John has to get back to Minneapolis. Got to catch a flight. Thank you Pastor John. Appreciate it.
00:08:35.260 | So good. What a great memory. Thinking back to that session and that was the end of our first live recording together.
00:08:42.580 | Pastor John and I this summer in Nashville and it seemed to go so well.
00:08:46.940 | We're planning to do it again in April at Together for the Gospel in Louisville.
00:08:51.380 | Check the T4G schedule for that session and I'm sure we'll see many of you there. Looking forward to that.
00:08:58.560 | Next up, will God give my future spouse a similar calling to the calling he's given me?
00:09:04.580 | How much should we expect marriage to be a matching of vocational callings?
00:09:08.860 | It's a great question from a single woman on Friday.
00:09:12.100 | And until then, if you're willing to help us out, fill out our online survey. And several of you already have. Thank you.
00:09:18.140 | If you want to join them and help us out, go to DesiringGod.org/survey. That's DesiringGod.org/survey.
00:09:27.180 | Thanks.
00:09:30.300 | You
00:09:32.300 | you
00:09:34.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]