How to Prioritize Family Discipleship

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Collin Hansen: No one can help or hurt a child like a parent can. Don’t believe me? Well, try finding a memoir that isn’t an extended meditation on the author’s parents. And if you’ve read the memoirs I have, you don’t want your children to grow up and write one. A story of growing up with two parents who loved you and loved the Lord doesn’t make good drama, but it can help set you up for a lifetime of faithfully serving God and neighbors.

Collin Hansen: Matt Chandler aims to help parents toward this goal in his new book, Family Discipleship: Leading Your Home Through Time Moments and Milestones, coauthored with Adam Griffin and published by Crossway. Chandler, lead pastor of teaching at The Village Church in Dallas, Texas, his three children with his wife, Lauren, I’m thankful they’ve extended this glimpse into their home to learn what family discipleship can look like. Because what better time than a global pandemic lockdown to turn our attention toward this call to family discipleship.

Collin Hansen: If you don’t think you have time now to make this a priority, then it’s time for new priorities. This is what Chandler and Griffin write in their book. They say this: “Your child is not only your progeny, he or she is your protege. Everything you have learned from and about following Christ is to be passed on to your children to the best of your ability. And rest assured, they are watching you closely. Matt Chandler joins me on Gospelbound to discuss moments and milestones, models and mishaps in family discipleship. Once again, Matt, it’s good to talk to you. Thanks for joining me on Gospelbound.

Matt Chandler: I’m glad to be here. It’s been a long time, Collin.

Collin Hansen: I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time, about to send off my first born child to kindergarten, Lord willing here, the schools will open up. And so your book is especially timely for us. One of the things you write is that a well-behaved child is not the same thing as a discipled child. As parents, how do you tell the difference?

Matt Chandler: Yeah, I mean, you’re going to have to do some work to tell the difference. And I mean, probably more work on yourself as much as work to navigate your children’s mind and heart. Especially if you have a child that wants to please you, wants to obey you. I don’t know how much people have read about kind of firstborn, second born, third born, those kinds of dynamics, but you might have a child that wants to please you more than anything else. It’s almost the child’s idol.

Collin Hansen: That’s my firstborn.

Matt Chandler: Well, there you go. That’s a lot of people’s first born. It’s not my first born, a lot of people’s first born. And so you need to be really careful with a child whose only goal in life is to please you, because then what they’re going to do is say what you want them to say and do what you want them to do. And it becomes very easy in that moment to become real passive about searching what’s really going on underneath the surface. Like is there a doubt that if they didn’t measure up that your love would remain steadfast? So you have to do… Now the kid that’s naturally bent the opposite direction and-

Collin Hansen: My second.

Matt Chandler: There you go. Yeah, maybe all of them, maybe all. But that child that wants to push the boundaries, doesn’t understand the rules, sure wants to please you. It’s one of their top six or seven priorities, but not certainly not the driving personality, that child’s almost easier in some ways in regards to knowing whether or not we’re discipling or rather we’re just doing behavioral modification. And there’ve been several books written on this about the good girl mentality or the golden child, the kid that just always behaves perfectly, and therefore the parent gets more passive with that child. But as Christian parents, we need to make sure that our children aren’t, without us knowing, taking on kind of a moralistic deism around their relationship with Christ because they are going to fall short. They’re falling short all the time with the Lord. They’re just unaware that they’re doing it, mainly because how we parent is far more rules-based than it is relationship-based, oftentimes.

Matt Chandler: And I think the law is important. Like without the law, kids will burn down the Western hemisphere, but we also need to make sure that they understand that when a law is broken, there’s grace, and be the kind of parent that doesn’t freak out when they don’t look like they’re going the way we wanted them to go or doing the things that we want them to do. Sure, there can be repercussions. There can be discipline. In fact, I would encourage that strongly. But there has to be this underlying current of grace for the child, because we are projecting to our kids how to think rightly about the Lord. And they’re not picking up on that just by the information we’re giving them, they’re picking up on that in how we react to their failures, how we react to their wins, whether we get cold and distant, whether we get angry and blow up. All of those things are dynamics that a kid’s absorbing. And man, it’s not ideal, but they project, if we’re not careful, they project our weaknesses onto God.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. The whole book on family discipleship is a whole vision for how and why your family can start to do this. But the reason you’re writing a book is because so many families don’t ever catch that vision. What’s the biggest challenge you typically see that inhibits parents from being able to follow through on this?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. I mean, I think that the issue is parents don’t think they can. They don’t think they’re equipped. They don’t think they have the answers. They don’t, I think the number one hurdle isn’t even a lack of vision. It’s the parents’ belief that they can’t offer spiritual food to their child, that they don’t know enough. And I’ve found this to be true even of church members who are very involved, very active and yet feel as though . . . And I think maybe the models of church that we do help this. Because what do we want? We’ve got big children’s ministries and big student ministries. It’s easy for a parent right now to punt that to the church because they feel like they don’t have what it takes to be the primary discipler. The problem with that is they are, regardless.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. It’s not an option. I tell people all the time, especially when I’m working on catechesis, sometimes somebody will react really negatively and say, “Why would I want to ever catechize my child?” And I’ll say, “I mean, it’s not an option. You can do it or everybody else can do it for you. You can just pick one.” I think you probably would prefer to do that yourself in that case. I live in a town that very much values conformity. I think a lot about this then raising my own children to stand up and to stand out for Jesus. You and Adam write this in the book: “If God graciously saves your child, many in the culture will be repulsed by your child.” Some nice warm-and-fuzzy parenting advice and counsel right there, Matt. It’s what we’ve come to expect from you. I mean, you’re telling us to raise children who will be hated. And that definitely seems to go against most parenting advice that I hear today.

Collin Hansen: What would you say you’ve seen as a pastor, as a parent ,is the typical put up or shut up moment for parents when it comes to following this advice? Because it’s easy to say, at one point when there’s not a lot of peer pressure on your kids. You get things like sleepovers, cutting down on activities, smartphones, all kinds of different stuff like that. At what point does it really become actionable? You’ve got to take a stand.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. I think especially, it happens around, in 2020, it happens early and it happens around questions of sexuality. What I have found is that a lot of people want their kids to be good kids. They don’t want them doing drugs. They don’t want them sleeping around. But they also want them to be loved and liked. And they want them to be sports stars and they want them to be, they don’t want there to be any real, they don’t want them to be weird. Maybe that’s the best word. They don’t want their kids to be weird. They don’t, gosh, I found even most adult Christians don’t want to be weird Christians. They want to be cool Christians. And I’ve argued for over a decade, that the cooler you want to be, I think the less power you’ll walk in as an evangelizing, Bible believing, orthodox Christian.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. So, questions of sexuality. Just in terms of like them lining up, like having the right positions, or certain behaviors, what exactly, how does it usually come up? Paint the scenario a little bit.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. A scenario, the majority of the time will be, depending on your context, right? This is going to play out a little bit different in the South then it would maybe the Northeast or Northwest or West Coast. But if I think through how it plays out in our area, where once you hit that sex ed talk, then in our area, it’s still very tame compared to what it is in other parts of the U.S.

Collin Hansen: Or maybe later.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. Or, yeah. So in that moment, when you’ve been raised a certain way your whole life, the kid will for the first time feel like an outsider. And so in that moment that the kid has to wrestle with, okay, here’s what I’m hearing about sex, sexuality, gender, what it is, what it’s not, at school and with my friends and on social media and on shows that are on TV and on. And yet, this is what I’m hearing at church, and this is what I’m hearing from my parents.

Matt Chandler: Now, if you’ve got a good relationship with Mom and Dad, that almost always brings up the question with Mom and Dad, because most concerned Christian parents want to have a conversation with their kids after that breaks out. And if the mom and dad are unwilling to encourage the kid towards courage, right? That’s what the word encourage means, to pour courage into. If they’re not willing to pour courage into and remind the kid, yeah, we are a part of a different kingdom. We do stand in prophetic contrast, loving prophetic contrast to the world that we live in. And this is part of our ethic that makes us different than the world. And if the parent won’t in that moment go, “My kid’s going to be weird because he loves Jesus,” then man, the kid is going to be picking up on the fears of the parents to not be weird. And now you’ve got another generation that’s trying not to be weird.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. I sense that this is probably something that’s a little bit more taken for granted in San Francisco or something like that. But you and I are both in predominantly in Southern contexts, even in urban contexts, but still where, you’re exactly right. A lot of the Christian adults and parents are not expecting themselves to stand out. And so it’s not something they think about preparing their kids for. And then especially, you get into white middle class, upper middle class communities, such a heavy emphasis on conformity there. It’s just like, well, wait a minute. Why would we stand out?

Matt Chandler: And I would confess my own naivety about how powerful the culture would pull on my children and how odd I would seem to them. I mean, I did not see that… I’ve got a soon to be senior in high school. My son’s going into his freshman year. My youngest is going into her sixth grade year. And I don’t feel like the fundamentalist dad from Footloose. I don’t. I don’t feel that way. We don’t live that way. We don’t. But man, if they don’t see me that way sometimes because of the world that they live in. Where I think I’m being so relaxed in some ways, they can look at the landscape of their friends and their friend’s parents and I can look like a tyrant. And so I think I was a bit naive, especially with my two oldest ones of just how powerful the culture pulls on them. Just how, even though there’s not a free for all for media in my home. And yet even what they have absorbed from school [inaudible 00:13:12], it is so powerful. So that to them on many occasions, I am the dad in Footloose.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s means you’re doing your job.

Matt Chandler: That’s so good.

Collin Hansen: Now you’ve also had an opportunity to be able to walk with , some parents in your congregation and others whose kids have grown. Your kids again, still at home with you. But if you look at some of those Christian families on the other side of this, do you find through family discipleship there’s any one activity or quality of parenting that you most often observe that tends to correspond with those children growing up in a Christian home and still walking with Christ as adults?

Matt Chandler: Yeah, there were two things. One was actually a point of data that we didn’t come up with, but that had come up out of Fuller’s research data, where parents who attended church with their children, like the children, whether they be teenagers or whether they be sixth, seventh, eighth, if they sat together in church, and then that’s what they talked about on the way home. It was unbelievable. The data around what happened if you just went to church together. Not drove there together, but you actually sat together as a church. So that would be easily number one.

Matt Chandler: The ancillary, the second one would be more ancillary, just from people I know here. If you are quasi stable as a parent, then the long game tends to play out well. And what I mean by that is when your kid accidentally cusses or slips a cuss word, and you know in your mind that probably means they’re doing much more than that when they’re not in your space, and you freak out about that and jam a bar of soap down their mouth and take away all their devices and ground them for their friends for two years, like that… Bad things happen when that’s our reaction.

Collin Hansen: Overreactions, you’re talking.

Matt Chandler: Yeah, overreaction, like crazy or frenetic reactions. If you’re unable, and if you . . . What I don’t want to do is have any parent freak out here because they’re like, oh my gosh, I have freaked out.

Collin Hansen: I’ve already done it. Yeah.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. And who hasn’t done it in the last eight months, right?

Collin Hansen: No kidding.

Matt Chandler: But there’s nowhere to go. And so there you are, wherever you are…

Collin Hansen: Thanks for reminding us, Matt.

Matt Chandler: But I think some other things we saw that is parents who will own that, and they’ll circle back around and say, “Hey, that wasn’t about you. That was about me. Will you please forgive me? My reaction to that was not okay. Daddy needs the Lord. Just like he’s telling you you need the Lord. And right there, that was not pleasing to the Lord. And certainly was a sin against you. Will you please forgive me?” That doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it owns our sinful behavior in a way that models to the child, that forgiveness is available to those who seek it. And so the two things I would say, would be one, going to church together was huge. So-

Collin Hansen: So no age segregation then, at least at-

Matt Chandler: Well, yeah.

Collin Hansen: At any age, or just older children?

Matt Chandler: The data that we looked at was kind of middle school up.

Collin Hansen: Got it. Okay. Yep.

Matt Chandler: So middle school up, if you’re sitting together as a family, that had long-term impact. I was startled by that. Certainly not the model most churches operate by, where your middle school and high school have their own fun, high energy thing and parents go to big church, or at least I think they still call it that.

Collin Hansen: There was a study that came out earlier this year, researcher, Lyman Stone for the American Enterprise Institute, talking about the decline of religiosity. One of the things he found was an 85 percent to 100 percent correlation between somebody who grew up in a Christian home and walked as an old with evidence of four religious activities per week with the parents and the kids. Some people might hear that and say, that’s a ton. Maybe so. Or I think, maybe it wasn’t even just parents and kids, it was actually just for religious activities or something like that. Then you basically say, okay, you got a youth group, you got a church. Okay. But it seems like basically family worship would have been in many cases that second or third thing. I don’t think two times a week would be too much for most parents in that case. But I think all he was trying to illustrate is that if your faith starts with church and is seriously involved with church, and it also is at home. It’s not only at church. The statistics are pretty overwhelming. It’s not as complicated as people might want to make it out to be.

Collin Hansen: And another thing you found that was pretty scary is that we talk a lot about how kids fall away in college because of their atheist professors or something like that, or debauchery. He says actually, almost all of the faith decline is in high school.

Matt Chandler: That’s true.

Collin Hansen: While they’re still at your home. And now I’ve heard you say, I don’t think I picked that up in this book, but you more than anybody else, has taught me about, or warned me about the role of activities in regular church going. You still see the same problems when it comes to that?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. I do. I think I do.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. I mean, I tell people all the time, if you think your kids are going to grow up and think church is important and have no evidence of having seen that in their lives growing up, whatever you might profess, it doesn’t add up to them.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. There’s a knowing and a knowing, right? And so if you’re just trying to get content into them, that’s a lot different than the modeling, I think, required for them to get a sense of what it really means to belong to Jesus.

Collin Hansen: Right. One of the things you all say in the book is that family discipleship needs to be normal and simple. Let’s dive down a little bit more on this. Give one normal, simple thing a parent could do right now that would make the biggest difference. And I’ll just start, give my own thoughts here. My kids are younger and this is something that works well for us, but grab a hymn book, open it up, sing together every night. That’s just one simple thing that, I’m not talking about any evidence of them being 20 or 30 or 40 or something like that. I’m just saying, it’s one thing that really sets a major tone in our house. What would you recommend?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. And a game that we play, or it started as a game when they were little, probably when they were your kids’ ages, and then now we still do it and they’re in high school, is at dinner we play a game called LowHigh. And so it was what was the lowest moment of your day and what was the best part of your day? So this isn’t a yes/no question. So they have to give, and so-

Collin Hansen: Have to answer.

Matt Chandler: Even when they try to go around it with a, “Well, I didn’t really have a low today.” I can go, “Well then what was your least favorite thing that happened? And then that opens up a dialogue about their hearts, about what’s going on. Because a lot of times we’ll follow up, “Well, why was that the best part of your day? Or why did that bother you so much?” And then before you know it, it can end up in us praying over one another or encouraging one another. And sometimes that person is Lauren or me being prayed for. And so that’s just a normal, like the kids will bring it up if I forget, “Are we going to play?”

Collin Hansen: Yeah, it just becomes part of the expectation of the family.

Matt Chandler: Yeah. It’s what we do at dinner.

Collin Hansen: Normal and simple. Yeah. I love that there. Another phrasing I thought was especially helpful in the book, you talk about godly role models as being reliable and relatable. I’m wondering, with your generation of parents, do you see anything in particular that your peers are trying to do that is offering a good and healthy correction to what perhaps a previous generation or generations of parents had done?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. I think the jury’s out. [inaudible 00:21:20] over corrected in some ways. If I think about what I see in my peers, as opposed to what I saw growing up, I think that this generation of parents is a bit more emotionally available, a bit more vulnerable about their struggles. Like I can’t remember a time that my mom or dad showed any kind of real weakness, or they just got on with it, man. And that had repercussions of its own, right? But there was no needing of help. There was never any admission of weakness. There was never seeking of forgiveness. If they knew they blew it, then man, people do that in life. Get over it and move on. Whereas we tend to be more emotionally attuned and vulnerable.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. So I have to think also, dads on the whole are much more involved.

Matt Chandler: Oh, I think so.

Collin Hansen: Just much more hands on. I love the comedian, Jim Gaffigan says, “I have more pictures of my children than times my father ever looked at me.

Matt Chandler: It’s that emotional attunement where our dad, that generation, they just didn’t know how to do it.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. Certainly not been modeled from many of their parents there as well. You say that regular family discipleship times, we’re not talking here about the concept, but the specific practice, they are a hill to die on. They should be sacred and mandatory. I agree with you on that. And I’m convinced basically, that it’s less important what you do, in terms of content, than simply that you do it consistently. How do you then respond to a parent who says, “Oh, we just prefer a more fluid, unscheduled approach to things.”

Matt Chandler: Yeah. I think if a parent is telling me they prefer the more fluid, basically do we have, are we going to do it tonight or we’re going to do it tomorrow night? I’m wondering, in all honesty, how long that’s actually going on and with what kind of consistency that actually happens. My experience is anything in life, not just this, but anything in life that’s not scheduled and prioritized happens like an adrenaline burst and not like the kind of rhythm that’s truly formational.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s something that at least I’ve become much more attuned to in the last number of years is just the role of ritual, the role of habit in life transformation. And that’s why I’m saying I don’t think necessarily, it’s always that you have to have all the right content. Of course, if you have content and consistency, then you’ve got a winning picture right there. But if nothing else, the consistency wins out. Let’s talk about, aim toward pastors elders here specifically, and you guys address this passage, 1 Timothy 3:4-5. Matt, when you’re evaluating a pastor or elder, how do you judge whether he manages his household well, according to that requirement for a church leader?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. So I’ve seen a couple of different ways to approach this. The first, to look at the kid and see where the kid is and how the kid lives and whether the kid loves Jesus, and whether the… I don’t think that’s a fair way to look at it. I don’t, certainly in my own soteriology, I’m not comfortable with looking at it that way. What I’m looking for is a father and husband that has ordered his home well, who has sought with his life, with his mouth, with his time, to create an environment that points to Jesus, that nurtures hearts and minds to love and cherish Jesus. And then all of that, my soteriology is all of that is just kindling around the heart. Only the spirit of God can ignite it. And so if the spirit has not ignited that kindling, then I don’t think that that man is disqualified then as a pastor or an elder. I think he should be lamented with and prayed with, not punished.

Matt Chandler: But then I know there are others that actually interpret that passage the exact opposite way. That if the kid isn’t following after Jesus and in love with Jesus and is morally upright, then this man has obviously done something wrong. And I’m so uncomfortable with that interpretation of that passage. I find it inconsistent with the rest of scripture.

Collin Hansen: One of the scary things is that, I mean, I can look at examples of our friends. I can look at the Ortlunds. I can look at the Kellers and you can see not just one child walking with the Lord, but many children walking with the Lord and not just walking with the Lord, but serving in ministry. But I’ve always been cautioned by the Kellers, by the Ortlunds, by anybody else, to not make assumptions about that, because we all have friends and peers in ministry where the complete opposite is the case. And it isn’t necessarily because of the quality of the parenting, at least in any possible way to be able to discern.

Collin Hansen: I mean, I think one thing that, media love a story about a child falling away, especially if that child’s parents are famous and especially if they’re in ministry. And even though I see a lot of bad news, which I’m often numb to this, those stories always just seem to hit me hard. They seem to relate of like, I just immediately begin to think of how I would feel. I look at my young children and then I just think, imagine a moment where they would just hate me that much and hate Jesus. I mean, that’s what it comes right down to. Even though the outcomes belong to God, do you still think there is anything that we can discern about how we can or should behave in faith as parents, in light of how these things go?

Matt Chandler: Yeah. And that’s partly why we wrote the book to kind of create this, did this man spend time? Did he mark milestones? Did he take advantage of moments? Did he set a path towards maturity for his child? Did he discipline when the child rebelled to a point that would be godly but not domineering? Did he… Right? So even this framework for me would be if I’m assessing an elder candidate and they have children in the home or their children are at an age where maybe they’re in a season of rebellion, this is where I want to press, but man, these things are, nothing will make us feel more primal than our kids.

Matt Chandler: I’ve oftentimes said I’ve got the skin of a rhinoceros, but there are four people on earth who can undo me in a moment. And that’s my kids and my wife. They could cut me in ways that nobody else can. And I would know, like some of the things that my kids have done historically, and I know it ain’t personal, but still it hurts. And so I’m looking for those kinds of husbands and fathers that were intentional with their children, but I don’t feel like a man should ever be punished whose kids are following the Lord in a given moment. Plus, parenting is the long game, isn’t it?

Collin Hansen: Yeah, it’s a long game. Yeah.

Matt Chandler: I have great friends who deeply love Jesus. They evangelize. I mean, there’s… Every time we do celebration service, they’re baptizing somebody else who had a child that for the longest time just seemed to hate the Lord, out of… Like it just didn’t make any sense. They had other kids that love the Lord, but just had this one that was just, wanted nothing to do. And then now that she’s like 28, all of a sudden, man, she’s joined a church and she’s starting to grow again. And she’s, so there are dynamics at play here that I don’t think we understand. So I’m trying to encourage parents, one, you can do this. Two, be intentional. Three, it’s not as hard as you think it is. And then four, let me come alongside you and help in any way I can.

Collin Hansen: Right. Well, I think, if we can look at the negative and we can look at, see people in therapy and talking about their parents and talking about these wounds and things like that, that’s the negative side. But if we can flip that around, even if your child runs far away, fast and far away from the Lord, the formation of being in that home is so powerful.

Matt Chandler: I agree.

Collin Hansen: If it’s powerful enough to be used by Satan for evil, then it’s powerful enough to be used by God to be able to bring revival and renewal of faith to a grown child. I think we should be encouraged by that. And it’s one reason why, even though I’ve shifted religious traditions, I’ve left behind some of the things that I grew up with, those are still, in some ways, the default wiring for me. In some really good ways, including the music, which is why I use this hymn book that’s from the Methodist church that I’d grown up in. And so I think there’s a hopeful opportunity there. Just one last question and then sort of a bonus here, but let’s say Matt, your children are interviewed just prepare for that one. Let’s say your children are interviewed someday about what it was like to grow up in Matt Chandler’s home. What do you hope they say?

Matt Chandler: Yeah, I would hope that they would say that we laughed a lot and there was a lot of joy in our home, that they watched people be set free from sin and death at our dining room table and in our living rooms and on the back patios. And that our house was filled with a lot of joy in Jesus. And that my dad seemed to be tuned into where my heart was at any given moment.

Collin Hansen: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s a hopeful vision that I think that I certainly would share as well for my own children. I’ve been talking with Matt Chandler, coauthor with Adam Griffin of Family Discipleship: Leading Your Home Through Time, Moments, and Milestones, published by Crossway.

Collin Hansen: Last bonus question here, Matt. We love on Gospelbound just to talk about books, talk with authors. And so we like to ask authors, what’s the best book you recently read, Matt?

Matt Chandler: I just finished this today, but Robert Iger’s book, The Ride of a Lifetime. He was Disney’s CEO, brought it back from the brink, did all the mergers with Pixar and Fox. And it became one of two of the communication empires in the world right now. And so I was just fascinated by that book. So I might even listen to it again.

Collin Hansen: All right, very good. Again, Matt, it’s always good talking with you and especially on a topic like this, that’s so near and dear to your heart. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Chandler: All right. Thank you.