This document is a set of guidelines on how children fit into the People of Praise. It includes topics such as: who has responsibility for the children, whether children are members of the community or not, the environments of our children, community standards for raising children and the delicate interaction of parental and community authority over children.
I. Because we are a community, we belong to each other. A. We belong to each other by virtue of our commitment (whether it is covenant or underway). B. What we have, or own, or are, or what we are responsible for, we have put in common. 1. Everything we have and are is at the disposal of the community, subject to the other legitimate commitments that we have. 2. Other legitimate commitments would be our churches, support of our family, etc. C. In this common holding and sharing of life that the community is, many people in the P/P have children they are rearing. 1. These children are first of all, children of God, created by him out of love, for his purposes. 2. As children of God, they have been entrusted in a special way to their own parents. D. The primary responsibility for rearing children belongs to the parents to whom they have been entrusted. 1. But it is also true that the parents, who have this primary responsibility, have voluntarily and freely committed themselves and all that they have to our common life. 2. Therefore, we can say that the children of adult members of the community also belong to the community are [sic] the ‎responsibility of the community. 3. A parallel example from CFS II: a) We teach that no one heads a man’s wife except the man himself. b) Yet because the couple has joined the community, the community has something to say to the husband about how he heads his wife. 4. In same way parents have the responsibility before God of raising their family but by joining the community, they give the community a right to teach and to say something about how they exercise their parenthood. 5. Therefore, how we raise our kids is not just our own business, but it is the business of the whole community. 6. As community members, whether we are parents or not, we have to understand that the children are our concern and the concern of the whole community. II. Are the children members of the People of Praise? A. One point of view is that the People of Praise is a voluntary association and the voluntary commitment to join the community can only be made by adults. Therefore, we would say basically it is adults who are members of the People of Praise. B. But, when adults join the community, they bring their families with them. The children are part of our families. C. We need to regard the children basically as young Christians living out their Christianity in this body to which they belong because their parents have voluntarily committed themselves and all they have to this body. D. From this point of view the children are members of the community. III. What responsibility do the kids have in the community as members of it? A. Clearly they are not committed to the covenant or to the teachings of the community themselves. B. Their fundamental responsibility as Christians living in this body is to obey their parents, to be docile, teachable and to accept the training, teaching and discipline that comes from their parents and from those to whom their parents have entrusted their care. IV. To whom do the parents entrust the care of their children? A. Variety of environments in which parents place their children and to whom parents commit their children for training. B. Some of these environments are within the community and some are outside. C. As a community and as parents we need to reflect on and analyze all the different environments in which the community child lives and is formed in. D. Some of these environments we control and some we do not. V. Environments A. Home life 1. First environment of a child. 2. Includes: a) The quality of the husband–wife relationship and the quality of their love for their children, b) The example, verbal teaching and the applied discipline approach of the parents, c) Quality of prayer, peace, hospitality, etc. B. Neighborhood 1. Neighborhood means everybody who lives in a certain area. 2. May have within them clusters, that is homes or households of the community in reasonably close proximity to each others. 3. As we look at the quality of neighborhood life in regard to our children we need to pay particular attention and place particular emphasis on the relationship of our own children to the other children in the neighborhood. 4. Especially true of the relationship between our own children and other community children who live in the same neighborhood or cluster. C. Schools 1. We need to look at the schools intellectually, religiously, ethically, environmentally. 2. School greatly affects not only the intellectual formation of our children, but also their character formation. 3. What are the values held up by the people responsible for that school, who manage and administer it and teach there? 4. What is the quality of personal relationships? a) Between the students and the faculty? b) Among the students themselves? 5. What is the standard of living like in terms of social morality? 6. What is going on in terms of sexuality, drugs, alcohol, materialism? D. Recreation 1. Recreation is media, sports, music, video games, movies, tv, the crowd my children run around with. 2. How available to our kid is contemporary music, tv, movies? 3. What is going on in the after school hours peer group? 4. Give examples. E. Internal within the community: Youth ministry programs 1. We need to look at what is the quality of relationships and the quality of effort and expertise that goes into our youth ministry programs. a) reconciliation, forgiveness b) relationships between adults and kids, between kids F. Meetings of the Community 1. Do we encourage them to pray, admire role models, to expect the Lord to speak to them? 2. Do we encourage them to enter into what is going on? 3. Do we work with them either at home or at school in such a way that they expect to meet God, to hear his word, to experience his action when when the community gathers? G. No one of us can oversee all of these environments. 1. Each of us needs to participate in the oversight of those areas for which we are responsible. 2. If all of these areas are not overseen and if adjustments are not made to bring the children’s participation in each environment up to community standards, we will allow unacceptable environments to form our children and we will undercut the good formation that we may be providing in other areas. VI. Community standards A. As a People of Praise we do have a point of view, an approach, a teaching on raising and training children. B. We communicate this in community teachings, particularly CFS II, in our men’s and women’s groups, etc. C. Here we come to a delicate point—where the sovereignty and authority and responsibility of the parents before God gets compared to the authority of community teaching to govern or guide the way parents actually raise their children. 1. On one hand parents have authority from God to raise their children and are responsible to God. 2. On the other hand, parents have voluntarily joined the community and placed their lives under the teaching of the community. D. What do you do when there’s a conflict between how parents in the community decide to raise their children and the approach that has been given in the community teaching? 1. Is it okay for parents to dissent from community teaching? a) From certain point of view it is okay if they seriously disagree with it. b) At same time, it is foolish to do so. 2. Problem becomes more complicated if dissention is expressed in how they raise their children and then their children come into conflict with other children raised according to the lines of community teaching. a) Dissent in action has its social ramifications in the community. When poorly raised community children misbehave, that threatens the environment of other community children. b) For example, community has teaching on discipline. Some people may disagree and may not apply that teaching in the ‎ raising of their own children. However, if their children are undisciplined, then we have problems when those children come into relationship with other children in other environments such as youth ministry or community ‎meetings. c) The community does and will assert its teaching authority seeking to protect other community children from the offending child and from the dissenting parent. d) Very delicate situation, requires great deal of wisdom. VII. Problems A. If a youngster is having a problem living according to community standards that does not automatically imply that the problem is with the parents. The fault may come from peer groups, the media, the school or from other community kids. B. Examples of some kinds of problems with kids: 1. Unexplained no-shows at youth ministry, community gatherings, etc. 2. Children who won’t play with other children in the community because of unresolved problems. 3. Children who are regularly and publicly disrespectful to their parents and other adults. 4. Children who steal school property. 5. Children who settle disputes through the use of obscenity, pornography, and physical attack. 6. Children coming home from school with obscene stories and stories of drug abuse. C. We need to face the fact that problems such as these exist with community children and that it indicates that we are not yet as successful as we want to be in freeing our children from bad influences. D. We need to come together and to have a unified view of the kids’ needs, to be mutually supportive of each other and to understand that the work that each one of us does is part of a much larger mosaic that is extremely important in the building of our community. E. Important to remember that kids are human, that they have a fallen nature and are attacked by the world, the flesh and the devil. But they are called in grace to become at first young and then mature Christians. 1. We should expect our children, even when they are very young to be personally converted to Jesus, be baptized in the Holy Spirit and exercise the spiritual gifts at an early age, e.g., tongues. 2. We should treat them as insiders, not as outsiders; as family members rather than the children of club members; as brothers and sisters, not as our patients. 3. We should be praying for and ministering to our children using all the gifts that we would use ministering and praying for adults, especially spiritual warfare. VIII. We do not want to build 2 or 3 parallel societies in the People of Praise. A. Not a society of adults, a society of teenagers and a society of little kids. We are one society. B. It is an adult society into which we are continually integrating our children and into which we are constantly trying to raise our children up. C. There are peer activities but the vertical relationships between adults and children and the training up of the children through those vertical relationships are more important for leading them to full Christian maturity than peer group relationships.
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