What this is about
Here are two scenes. Both are made up by this page. On Sunday morning a father closes the service in prayer, and people thank him for it. An hour later, in the car park, he goes silent and cold because his wife kept everyone waiting while she talked to a widow. At lunch he tells the family what he really thinks of the sermon. His eleven-year-old son was there for both.
Nothing in the second scene is a scandal. That is why it matters. The church saw the first scene. The son saw both, and he has seen them hundreds of times. He is working out not only what his father is like, but what his father’s religion is, and what kind of God it is about.
There are two ways of thinking about this:
View one: faith is lived
Children learn what their parents believe mostly by watching ordinary lifePrayer, the Bible, church and family devotions really matter and should be kept. But the evidence of faith is how you treat people: patience, honesty, kindness, forgiveness, keeping your word, helping people who can’t pay you back — and saying sorry when you fail. This is what the page holds.View two: faith is practised
A Christian home is known by its religious activitiesKeep up church, devotions and Bible knowledge, and the children will pick up the faith; character will follow. Admitting your failures to your children could undermine your authority. People who think this way usually mean well: they want their children to believe. This is the view the page tests.Both views agree that prayer and church matter, and that parents should teach the faith. The difference is about what counts as evidence, and what a parent should do when he gets it wrong.
What this page is not doing
It doesn’t offer a parenting method or advice on discipline. It doesn’t say that a child’s faith, or lack of it, is a grade on the parents — the Bible has too many examples the other way. It doesn’t address homes where there is abuse or danger: those need protection and proper help, not a web page. Earlier dossiers cover nearby ground: Did You Have Your Quiet Time?, How Involved Are You at Church? and How to Make a Child Anxious. It names no living person and no church.
The short answer
- Children see nearly everything the church sees, and a great deal more. They’re in church too. Then they’re in the car, at the table and in the kitchen. The church sees a small part of the picture. The children have the whole thing.
- Fruit is harder to fake than words. Jesus said, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). The fruit Paul lists is “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23) — all ways of treating people, and all tested most at home. Around 110, Ignatius wrote: “It is better for a man to be silent and be a Christian, than to talk and not to be one.”
- Children learn about God by watching whom their parents stop for. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the two men who walk past the wounded man are a priest and a Levite: the most religious people in the story. Jesus also said that if earthly fathers give good things to their children, “how much more” will God (Matthew 7:11). Parents are a picture of God. Children notice.
- The Bible ties prayer to how you treat your husband or wife. Husbands are to honour their wives “that your prayers be not hindered” (1 Peter 3:7). In Malachi, God refuses the offerings of men weeping at his altar because of how they have treated “the wife of thy youth” (2:13–14). Around 390, John Chrysostom preached that “a house is a little Church”.
- Saying one thing and doing another teaches something. Paul warned that when religious people act against what they teach, “the name of God is blasphemed” (Romans 2:24) — people think less of God, not just of them. In 1656 the Puritan Richard Baxter warned ministers not to “unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues”.
- Saying sorry isn’t a failure of Christian parenting. It’s one of its most important parts. Christianity doesn’t ask parents to look perfect: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8). A parent who says “I was wrong; will you forgive me?” shows a child sin, repentance, forgiveness and making up, all at once. A hypocrite isn’t someone who sins. It’s someone who pretends not to.
- Helping people who can’t pay you back makes your teaching believable. Jesus said to invite “the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind … for they cannot recompense thee” (Luke 14:13–14). Kindness that can be repaid can be explained without God. Kindness that can’t be repaid is hard to explain any other way.
- Religious activity can quietly replace character. Jesus condemned people who dedicated money to God so they wouldn’t have to support their own parents (Mark 7:11–13). And when Paul listed what to look for in a church leader (1 Timothy 3), he named sixteen things. One is a skill (“apt to teach”). The rest are about character and home life. None is a religious activity.
- What children remember is often what parents never counted. Parents remember the devotions they led. Children remember whether home was safe, whether promises were kept, and what happened when a stranger came to the door. In Matthew 25, the people Jesus praises are surprised: they hadn’t been keeping score.
- Research points the same way, with limits. Studies of how faith passes from parents to children link it with warm homes (especially a warm father), with parents who are loving but have clear expectations, with a good marriage, and with parents whose actions back up their words. They also find that the family’s church-going itself matters. None of it says children are bound to turn out one way or the other.
- The point isn’t to convince your children that you are spiritual. Paul said, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). A parent is a signpost, not the destination. When the child in Deuteronomy 6 asks what it all means, the parent is told to answer with what God did, not with his own goodness.
The first exercise: who sees it?
Eight pieces of an ordinary Christian parent’s week. For each, decide who is usually in a position to see it. Commit before you read the answer.
0 of 8 answered.
Two services, and the children attend both
Think of a family that holds evening prayers and then carries a cold silence between husband and wife to bed. They have held two services that night, and the children were at both. The page doesn’t say the first was worthless. It says the children will wonder which one was true.
This is why the Bible keeps connecting worship with home. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20). The people in your house are the ones you see most.
That can sound like a heavier burden: children see everything, so try harder. But the Bible’s answer isn’t a better performance. It’s honesty. Every parent fails in front of their children, every day. What matters is what happens next. Does the parent pretend it didn’t happen, blame someone else, or say “I was wrong”? Jesus even put making up ahead of worship: “Leave there thy gift before the altar … first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Matthew 5:24).
Some people worry that apologising to your children undermines your authority. The Bible gives parents real authority (“Children, obey your parents in the Lord”), and in the very next sentence tells fathers not to provoke their children (Ephesians 6:1–4). Authority doesn’t mean always being right. Children already know you aren’t. They trust a parent who tells the truth about himself far more than one who doesn’t. In 1938 Dietrich Bonhoeffer described a church where “the pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner”. A home can be like that too — and children who grow up in it learn either that Christians don’t sin, which they can see is false, or that Christians sin and hide it.
The second exercise: saying sorry, or sounding sorry?
Seven things a parent might say after doing something wrong. All are made up by this page. For each, decide whether it’s a real apology — the wrong named and owned — or something that only sounds like one.
0 of 7 answered.
What the Bible measures
Church-going, Bible studies, ministry, long prayers and a daily quiet time are all good. But they can turn into a way of showing you are spiritual — to others and to yourself — and then they can quietly take the place of the thing they were meant to grow. Jesus said of the religious leaders of his day, “all their works they do for to be seen of men” (Matthew 23:5). His advice on prayer was the opposite: “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (6:6).
So what does the Bible actually treat as the sign of a mature Christian? The clearest list is the one Paul gave for choosing church leaders. Try sorting some of it yourself.
The third exercise: what does Paul look for?
Eight of the qualifications for a church leader in 1 Timothy 3, in the old King James wording. For each, decide what kind of thing it is.
0 of 8 answered.
Not to convince them
Paul told Timothy to hold on to what he had learned, “knowing of whom thou hast learned them” — his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. He called their faith “unfeigned”: in Greek, literally without hypocrisy (2 Timothy 1:5; 3:14). What passed down to Timothy was faith that wasn’t an act.
But the goal isn’t for children to admire their parents. When the child in Deuteronomy 6 asks, “What mean the testimonies?”, the parent is told to answer: “We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out” (6:20–21). The answer is about what God did. The parent’s part is to have been rescued, to say so, and to live like it.
And one more thing, to take the weight off. A child’s faith is not a grade on his parents. In the Bible, good King Hezekiah’s son Manasseh was one of the worst kings; wicked Amon’s son Josiah was one of the best. “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). A parent is responsible for his own faithfulness. What his children do with it is theirs, and God’s. And for anyone whose own home was hard: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10).
Check it yourself
Six things, all short, nearly all free.
- 1. 1 Timothy 3:1–7. Do this one. Five minutes. Count how many qualifications are about skill, how many about character and home, and how many about religious activity.
- 2. 1 Peter 3:7 and Malachi 2:13–16. Five minutes. What each says about prayer and marriage.
- 3. Luke 10:25–37 and Luke 14:12–14. Ten minutes. Who walked past, who stopped, and whom Jesus says to invite.
- 4. Galatians 5:22–23 and 1 Corinthians 13. Five minutes. Which of these would you learn about someone mainly by living with them?
- 5. Mark 7:9–13 and Matthew 25:31–46. Ten minutes. Religion that replaces family duty; and the people who didn’t know they had done anything.
- 6. One question, put to someone who grew up in your house. Do this one too. If you have grown children, or brothers and sisters, ask gently: what do you remember about how our faith was lived at home, rather than how it was taught? Then listen.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier walks through the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25 step by step, gathers every text that ties worship to the home, follows the worry about saying and not doing from Ignatius and Chrysostom through Gregory, Kempis, Luther, Baxter and Edwards to Bonhoeffer, sets out four bodies of research with their limits, publishes the prompt that produced it, and ends with a parent’s self-audit and a memory exercise about the home you grew up in.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →