Can You Fool Your Children?

What this page is asking

Start with two scenes. Both are composed by this page.

Nothing in the second scene is dramatic. There is no scandal, no crime and nothing a church would discipline. That is why it matters. The congregation has seen the first scene and formed a judgement of the man’s spiritual life. The son has seen both, and he has seen them hundreds of times. He is forming a judgement too — not only of his father, but of what his father’s religion is, and what kind of God it is about.

This page asks what Scripture and the historic Church say about that second judgement. It follows ten lines of inquiry supplied by the page’s author, set out in full in the prompt below: that children see the private life and not only the public one; that spiritual appearance can be manufactured while fruit is harder to manufacture; that treatment of the neighbour teaches children what their parents believe about God; that the treatment of a spouse may teach more than family devotions; that children are unusually well placed to detect religious hypocrisy, and that prolonged inconsistency may produce suspicion of Christianity itself; that repentance may be more formative than the appearance of spiritual success; that service gives credibility to instruction; that religious activity can become a substitute for Christian character; that what children remember may differ from what parents measure; and that the goal is not to convince children their parents are spiritual, but to direct them to Christ.

So the question, as the page’s author put it: can a parent’s performed spirituality — prayer, Bible knowledge, attendance, ministry — stand in for the faith his children watch him live over years? And if children learn what their parents believe about God chiefly by watching ordinary conduct, what does Scripture say that conduct should be, and what is the parent actually for?

Two positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

People arguing about this usually talk past one another. One side hears the other saying that family devotions and church attendance do not matter; the other hears the first saying that a parent who prays well can behave as he likes at home. Neither is saying that. So the page labels two positions and keeps them apart from here to the end. Each is stated as a thoughtful and sincere holder would state it.

Notice what the two do not disagree about. Both hold that prayer, Scripture and worship matter. Both want the children to believe. Both hold that parents are to teach the faith explicitly: “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The disagreement is about what the practices are for and what counts as evidence: whether a home’s faith is shown chiefly by what is done in religion’s name, or by what the household is like to live in — and whether a parent’s standing with his children is protected by appearing successful or by confessing when he is not.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so that you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that a home’s faith is best shown and passed on through its religious practices, and see which texts and studies it leans on. Second, narrow it: ask only for every passage in Scripture that ties a person’s worship or prayer to the way he treats a named person — a spouse, a brother, a parent, a neighbour — and read the list in one sitting. Third, turn it round: ask the same question of a pastor and his congregation instead of a parent and his children, and compare the answers.

Write a detailed, source-first investigation of the following question, in
British English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote
scripture from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and the
page where possible. Where a date, authorship, text or translation is
disputed by scholars, say so at the point of use.

  TITLE. Can You Fool Your Children?

  THE QUESTION. Contrast performed spirituality with the kind of faith
  children observe over years. Can a parent's visible religion -
  prayer, Bible knowledge, attendance, ministry - stand in for the faith
  his children watch him live? If children learn what their parents
  believe about God chiefly by watching ordinary conduct, what does
  Scripture say that conduct should be, and what is the parent for?

  DIRECTIONS TO EXPLORE.
  1. Children see the private life, not just the public one. A parent
     may impress a congregation with prayer, Bible knowledge or
     ministry, but children also see anger, selfishness, dishonesty,
     and how family members are treated.
  2. Spiritual appearance can be manufactured; fruit is harder to
     manufacture. Explore Jesus' emphasis on fruit: love, mercy,
     faithfulness, humility, forgiveness and service reveal something
     religious vocabulary alone cannot.
  3. Your treatment of your neighbour teaches your children what you
     believe about God. The Good Samaritan connects love of God with
     costly love of neighbour. Children learn theology by watching whom
     their parents notice, welcome, forgive and help.
  4. How you treat your spouse may teach more than family devotions. A
     parent can lead impressive prayers while being harsh, contemptuous
     or selfish afterward. Children compare religious claims with
     ordinary household conduct.
  5. Children are unusually well positioned to detect religious
     hypocrisy: the Sunday personality and the Monday personality.
     Explore whether prolonged inconsistency produces not merely
     disappointment in the parent but suspicion toward Christianity.
  6. Repentance may be more formative than pretending to be spiritually
     successful. "I was wrong; please forgive me" demonstrates sin,
     repentance, grace and reconciliation in concrete form.
     Christianity does not require parents to appear sinless.
  7. Service gives credibility to instruction. "Love your neighbour"
     means something different when children see parents sacrificing
     time, money, comfort and status for people who cannot repay them.
  8. Beware of substituting religious activity for Christian character.
     Attendance, Bible studies, ministry, long prayers and "quiet time"
     can all be good while becoming visible markers of spiritual
     credibility. Ask what Scripture presents as evidence of maturity.
  9. What children remember may differ from what parents measure.
     Parents remember the devotions they led; children may remember
     whether home was patient, safe, generous, forgiving and joyful.
     Which memories are most likely to shape their idea of God?
  10. The goal is not to convince children that their parents are
     spiritual. The deeper vocation may be to direct them toward Christ
     through ordinary faithfulness: loving God, serving neighbour,
     confessing sin, forgiving, keeping promises, caring for those
     entrusted to them.

Distinguish two positions throughout and use the labels consistently:

  E - THE EMBODIED. Faith is shown and handed on chiefly in ordinary
  conduct over years. The practices of faith are real means of grace
  and are kept, but they are means, not credentials; confession is
  itself part of the fruit. HOLD THIS POSITION, stated as its best
  defenders state it.

  P - THE PERFORMED. Faith is shown and handed on chiefly in visible
  religious practice; keep the practices strong and character will
  follow; admitting failure to children undermines authority. State
  it as a thoughtful, sincere holder would.

Answer objections INSIDE the argument, at the point where they arise,
not in a separate counter-case section. The strongest must be met
head-on: Deuteronomy 6 commands explicit instruction; Matthew 23:3 lets
hearers separate a true message from a false messenger; confessing to
children may undermine authority; Proverbs 22:6 seems to promise
results, while Ezekiel 18:20 and the kings of Judah show that children
of faithful parents can fall away and the reverse; and the research
finds that family religious practice itself predicts later practice.

COVER, in roughly this order, one Part per direction:
1. Who is positioned to see what (composed examples only).
2. Fruit: Matthew 7:15-20; Galatians 5:22-23; 1 Corinthians 13:1-7;
   Ignatius to the Ephesians 14-15; Thomas a Kempis; Edwards's
   "no signs" in Religious Affections (1746).
3. The neighbour: Luke 10:25-37 step by step; Matthew 7:9-11 and the
   analogy from fathers to God; Deuteronomy 6:6-7.
4. The spouse: 1 Peter 3:7; Malachi 2:13-16; Colossians 3:19;
   Ephesians 5:21-25; Chrysostom's "little Church"; Edwards 1750.
5. Sunday and Monday: Matthew 23:3; Romans 2:21-24; Gregory the Great,
   Pastoral Rule I.2; Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656).
6. Repentance: 1 John 1:8-9; James 5:16; Matthew 5:23-24; Psalm 51;
   Luther's first thesis (1517); Bonhoeffer, Life Together (1939).
7. Service: Luke 14:12-14; John 13:14-15; James 2:15-16; 1 John 3:17-18.
8. Activity and character: Mark 7:9-13 (Corban); Isaiah 58; Matthew
   6:1-6 and 23:5; 1 Timothy 3:2-7 and 5:8; James 1:26-27.
9. Memory: Matthew 25:31-46; 2 Timothy 1:5 and 3:14-15; Augustine,
   Confessions IX.9; Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522).
10. ONE Part on social-science research on religious transmission
   (Bengtson, Families and Faith, 2013; Smith and Adamczyk, Handing
   Down the Faith, 2021; credibility-enhancing displays; marital
   quality and adolescent religiosity), clearly marked as research,
   cited as contested, with its limits stated. Scripture and the
   historic Church carry the argument.
11. The parent's vocation: 1 Corinthians 11:1; 2 Corinthians 4:5;
   Deuteronomy 6:20-25; why a child's faith is not a verdict on the
   parent.
12. CLOSE with two paired instruments: a parent's self-audit ("what
   would my children say?") placed first, and a memory exercise for
   the reader about his own childhood home.

CONSTRAINTS.
- Name no living person as an example of anything; identify no church
  or ministry. Compose all modern examples and label them as composed.
- Cite researchers only by their published work.
- Make no claim about any individual's sincerity, salvation or
  standing before God, and no claim that a child's faith is a verdict
  on his parents.
- Offer no parenting method and no advice on discipline. Do not
  address abusive homes except to say they need protection and help,
  not this page.
- Label every evaluative conclusion as opinion.
- Where the reader is asked to decide something, ask him to commit
  before he is told the answer.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional and
readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section rather than only
something to read. Also produce a plain-English quick version of about
fifteen minutes with three short exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked against the editions listed in Part XIII. Where a claim could not be verified against a published source, it was cut rather than softened. In three places the checking qualified the brief. The research in Part X associates transmission with warmth and with parents’ actions, but it also finds that the family’s religious practice itself predicts later practice, so the page does not set practice against character; Position E keeps both. The research is probabilistic, and its own authors say so. And Scripture’s households are not tidy: faithful fathers had faithless sons and faithless fathers had faithful ones, so Part XI refuses to treat a child’s eventual faith as a grade on the parent.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one of them yourself in Part XIII. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XII with the sources beside them. The score does not matter much. The point of answering first is that it is much harder to notice you have changed your mind if you never wrote down what you thought.

What follows

The audience with the best seats

Begin with a plain question of access. Who is actually in a position to see a Christian’s life?

A congregation sees what happens in church and in church activities. It sees the prayer, the Bible knowledge, the ministry, the handshake at the door. It sees these at their best, because people come to church washed, dressed and prepared, and because most of us behave better when we are watched by people whose opinion we value. That is not hypocrisy. It is simply the nature of public life.

Children see something else. They see nearly everything the congregation sees, because they are usually in church too. And then they see the rest: the morning before church, the drive home, the argument about money, the silence at dinner, the phone call with the difficult relative, the treatment of the man who cleans the building, the promise made in passing and forgotten. They see it without trying, over years, at an age when they are forming their first ideas of what an adult is, what love is, and what the God their parents speak of must be like.

This is the first observation the page wants to test, and it is best tested by doing it rather than being told it.

Try it: who is positioned to see it?

Twelve pieces of an ordinary Christian parent’s week. For each, decide who is usually in a position to see it. Commit before you are told. There is room for argument on one or two, and the reveal says so; the pattern is what matters.

0 of 12 answered.

The pattern is not subtle. The congregation’s view is almost entirely contained within the household’s. There is very little a congregation sees that children do not, and a great deal that children see and a congregation never will. A reputation for spirituality is built in front of the smaller audience. The larger audience has the whole record.

Scripture knows this. When Paul lists what a church should look for in its leaders, he does not ask only how a man performs in public. He asks what his household is like, and he gives the reason in the form of a question: “For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?” (1 Timothy 3:5). The house is where a man’s character is visible to people who cannot be managed by his public persona. Part VIII returns to that list, because what is on it, and what is not, is striking.

One objection belongs here. Surely children are not neutral observers. They see their parents at their most tired, and they misread things. They do not see the private prayers either. All true, and the page does not claim children are infallible judges. It claims something narrower: that they are the only observers who see the whole of ordinary life over a long time, and that whatever conclusions they draw are drawn from that fuller record. A child may misjudge a single evening. It is much harder to misjudge ten years.

Fruit and foliage

Jesus gave his hearers a test for telling the true from the false, and it was not a test of vocabulary.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Matthew 7:16–17 (Authorised Version).

A tree can be dressed. Leaves can be polished, a trunk painted, a sign hung on a branch saying “apple”. What cannot be arranged at short notice is apples. Fruit takes a season to grow and it grows from what the tree is. That is why Jesus chose it as the test: it is the part of the tree that cannot be performed.

Paul named the fruit. It is not a list of religious activities:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

Galatians 5:22–23. “Faith” here translates pistis, which in a list of dispositions towards others is widely rendered “faithfulness” in modern versions.

Every item on that list is a way of treating people, and nearly every one is tested most severely at home, where there is no audience to be patient for. Longsuffering is not exercised in a well-run meeting. It is exercised with a child who has asked the same question nine times. Gentleness is exercised when one is contradicted by someone smaller. Temperance is exercised at the end of a long day.

Then, in the chapter now often read at weddings, Paul does something more unsettling. He takes the most impressive religious attainments he can think of and subtracts love from them:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. … Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.

1 Corinthians 13:1–2, 4–5.

Tongues, prophecy, knowledge of mysteries, mountain-moving faith: these are the credentials of a spiritual reputation. Without love they are noise. And the love Paul then describes is not a feeling but a set of behaviours, most of which are visible chiefly to the people one lives with. “Is not easily provoked” is known by the family, not the fellowship.

The early Church put the point in a sentence. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom in Rome, wrote to the Christians at Ephesus:

The tree is made manifest by its fruit; so those that profess themselves to be Christians shall be recognised by their conduct. For there is not now a demand for mere profession, but that a man be found continuing in the power of faith to the end. It is better for a man to be silent and be a Christian, than to talk and not to be one. It is good to teach, if he who speaks also acts.

Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 14–15 (c. 107–110, written from Smyrna). Trans. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885). The date is approximate; the letters are generally placed in the reign of Trajan.

Thirteen centuries later, The Imitation of Christ made the same point about knowledge: “What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? … I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.” (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ I.1, c. 1418–27; the translation at CCEL. Authorship has occasionally been disputed; it is generally accepted.)

The most careful examination of the question in Protestant history came from someone with every reason to value religious intensity. Jonathan Edwards was a revival preacher in Northampton, Massachusetts. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) he set out to separate true religion from its imitations, and he did it with two lists of twelve. The first list is of things that are “no sign” either way — things that may accompany true grace or may not, and so prove nothing. Among them: that religious affections are very high; that they make a person fluent and fervent in talking about religion; that they dispose a person to spend much time in religious duties and worship; that they make a person eager to praise God with his mouth; that they make him very confident of his own good estate; and that their outward show is moving and pleasing to other Christians. The second list is of true signs, and it ends with the one Edwards treats at greatest length: that gracious affections “have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice.” The eighth sign is that they are attended with “the lamblike, dovelike spirit and temper of Jesus Christ”. (Edwards, Religious Affections, Part II and Part III, signs 8 and 12; free at CCEL.)

Notice how exactly Edwards’s first list describes what a congregation is able to see, and his second what a household is able to see. A church can observe fluency, fervour, time spent in religion and a moving public manner. It is the family that knows whether the man is lamblike.

Try it: fruit, or no sign either way?

Twelve things a Christian parent might be known for. For each, decide whether Scripture presents it as fruit — the kind of thing Galatians 5 and 1 Corinthians 13 list — or as something that is good but, in Edwards’s phrase, no sign either way. None of the second kind is bad. The question is only what it proves.

0 of 12 answered.

The objection here is obvious and fair: you are setting the practices against the fruit. But the practices are how the fruit grows. Position E agrees entirely. Prayer, Scripture, worship and the sacraments are the means by which God feeds a Christian; Dossier 09 argues the point at length, with its distinction that a tree is recognised by its fruit, not by how much time it spends absorbing water. The page is not arguing that a parent should pray less. It is arguing that the prayer is the root and the patience is the fruit, and only the fruit is evidence. A parent who uses the root as the evidence has mistaken what the tree is for.

Whom they stop for

Children rarely learn theology first from statements about God. They learn it from watching whom their parents notice. Who is greeted and who is ignored; who is spoken of with warmth and who with contempt; whose need is an interruption and whose is an opportunity. By the time a child can recite that God loves the world, he already has a working theory, drawn from home, of which parts of the world his family’s God is interested in.

Jesus’ most famous answer to the question of what loving God requires is a story about exactly this. Walk through it one step at a time, as the lawyer who asked the question heard it. At each step, commit before you are told.

Three details in the parable bear directly on this page’s question.

First, who passes by. The priest and the Levite are not villains in a costume. They are the two most visibly religious people in the story, the men whose lives were given to the worship of God, travelling the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. The text does not tell us why they passed by, and the page will not invent a reason; commentators have suggested ritual purity, fear of robbers or simple haste, and the parable declines to say. What it does say is that their religious standing did not produce compassion on the road, and that the man who stopped was the one the lawyer would have considered theologically wrong.

Second, the lawyer’s motive. “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). His question is a question about the boundary: whom may I leave out? Jesus answers with a question about conduct: “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” (10:36). A household can teach either question. It can teach children to ask who qualifies for their family’s kindness, or it can teach them to be the kind of people who stop.

Third, the ending. The lawyer is not told to learn more. He knew the law well enough to summarise it correctly, and Jesus told him so: “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live” (10:28). He is told, “Go, and do thou likewise” (10:37). Knowledge was not his problem.

There is a deeper reason why the neighbour teaches children about God, and Jesus himself supplies it. When he wanted to persuade his hearers of the Father’s goodness, he argued from fathers:

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Matthew 7:9–11. Compare Psalm 103:13, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him”, and Isaiah 66:13, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”

Scripture uses parents as a picture of God, and it expects the picture to be understood. That is a gift and a warning. It means a child whose father is generous has been given a way into the words “how much more”. It also means a child whose father is harsh, or selectively kind, has been given a picture he may have to unlearn. Part X sets out what the research says about this, with its limits; Part XI says why no child is finally bound by the picture his parents drew.

And the instruction was always meant to happen in ordinary life. The great command of Deuteronomy 6 is not confined to a set time: “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (6:7). The classroom is the house and the road. That cuts both ways. The words are to be spoken there, and the children are watching there.

“That your prayers be not hindered”

Of all the relationships a child watches, the one between his parents is the one he watches longest and understands least while it is happening. He does not need to understand it to learn from it. He learns what love sounds like, what disagreement is allowed to look like, whether the stronger person gives way or insists, and whether the people who pray together at night also speak kindly to each other in the morning.

It would be easy to treat this as a matter of family harmony rather than faith. Scripture does not allow that. It ties worship to the treatment of a spouse, and it does so more than once. Before the page says more, try to place the texts yourself.

Try it: where is it written?

Eight sentences. For each, identify the source before the page tells you. Six are from Scripture, two from the historic Church. Notice how often the subject is worship and the test is the home.

The two texts that bind hardest are the first two. Peter tells husbands to live with their wives “according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife … as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered” (1 Peter 3:7). The prayers of a man who dishonours his wife are not merely inconsistent with his conduct. They are obstructed by it. Malachi is blunter still. The men of Judah are weeping at the altar, “covering the altar of the LORD with tears”, and asking why God does not accept their offerings. The answer: “Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant” (Malachi 2:13–14). The emotion at the altar is real. It is also beside the point.

These texts are addressed to husbands, because the husband held the power in the households they describe, and Scripture’s warnings run towards power. The principle is not confined to husbands. Paul introduces his household instructions with a sentence addressed to everyone: “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21). Jesus’ saying about the altar is about any brother: “Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Matthew 5:24). The order is explicit. Reconciliation first; worship second.

The Church took the household to be a church in miniature, which is to say that what happens there is worship or its contradiction. John Chrysostom, preaching on Ephesians 5 in Antioch around 390: “If we thus regulate our own houses, we shall be also fit for the management of the Church. For indeed a house is a little Church. Thus it is possible for us by becoming good husbands and wives, to surpass all others.” (Homilies on Ephesians 20, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13.) And Jonathan Edwards, in the farewell sermon he preached after his congregation dismissed him in 1750, left them this: “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by His rules.” (A Farewell Sermon, 22 June 1750; The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 25, Yale, 2006, p. 484.)

Consider what that means for family devotions. A household that holds evening prayers and then carries a cold silence between husband and wife to bed has held two services, and the children attended both. The page does not say the first service was worthless. It says the children will ask which one was true, and Malachi suggests God asks the same.

The objection deserves a direct answer: no marriage is free of conflict, and children need to see that. Are parents supposed to hide every disagreement? No. The texts do not condemn disagreement; they condemn treachery, bitterness and dishonour (“Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them”, Colossians 3:19). A child who sees his parents disagree, speak honestly, and reconcile has been shown something true about love that a child who never sees conflict has not. What forms a child badly is not conflict but contempt, and conflict that is never repaired. Part VI is about the repair.

The Sunday self and the Monday self

Every adult has a public manner. Children are among the first people to notice that their parents have one, and among the last to be fooled by it. A child who has heard his mother’s voice change as she answers the phone to the pastor has learned something about his mother. He may, over time, learn something about religion.

That second step is the one this Part is about. Does prolonged inconsistency in a parent produce only disappointment in the parent, or does it teach suspicion of Christianity itself?

Scripture does not treat the question as speculative. Paul, addressing a man confident in his religious instruction, asks him a series of questions and then states the consequence:

Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? … Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written.

Romans 2:21–24, quoting Isaiah 52:5 (and compare Ezekiel 36:20–23).

The claim is precise. When the people who carry the Name behave in contradiction to it, the observers do not merely think less of them. They think less of the Name. Paul is speaking of outsiders watching Israel. Children are the closest observers any Christian has.

Jesus, it is true, gave his hearers a way of separating a message from a messenger. Of the scribes and Pharisees: “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). This is the strongest objection to the concern of this Part, and it should be taken seriously. Children, like everyone else, are responsible for distinguishing the truth of the faith from the failures of its adherents. They are. Many do. The page does not claim a child is excused from faith because his father was a hypocrite; Part XI insists on the opposite. But notice the price of Jesus’ distinction. To follow it, a hearer has to hold two things at once: that the teaching is true and that the teacher is not to be imitated. Adults find that hard. A child, whose parent is his first picture of what the faith looks like when it is lived, is being asked to do it about the person he most naturally imitates. Jesus’ saying protects the teaching. It does not protect the teacher, and in the same chapter he pronounces seven woes on him.

The Church has always feared this particular failure more than most, because it does damage twice. Gregory the Great, writing his handbook for pastors around 591:

For certainly no one does more harm in the Church than one who has the name and rank of sanctity, while he acts perversely.

Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule I.2 (c. 590–91). Trans. J. Barmby, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 12 (1895). Gregory says of such men that “what in words they preach by their manners they impugn”.

And Richard Baxter, the Puritan pastor of Kidderminster, addressing fellow ministers in 1656 in words that fit a parent at least as well as a preacher:

Take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine, and lest you lay such stumbling-blocks before the blind, as may be the occasion of their ruin; lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues; and be the greatest hinderers of the success of your own labours.

Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), ch. I, sect. 1. Baxter adds that some “study hard to preach exactly, and study little or not at all to live exactly”, and that one selfish act “may cut the throat of many a sermon”.

“Unsay with your lives what you say with your tongues” is exactly the mechanism a child experiences. The parent says, in family prayers, that God is patient and kind. The parent then says, with his life, something else. The child hears both. Baxter’s point is that the second saying can cancel the first.

Try it: a week, step by step

Seven moments in one week of a composed family’s life, seen from the point of view of a twelve-year-old daughter. The family is invented by this page. At each moment, choose what you think she is most likely to be learning. There is no single right answer here, and the page does not mark you; each step then says what Scripture says about the moment. The point is to notice how quickly the lessons accumulate.

Try it: put them in their period

The worry about saying and not doing runs through the whole history of the Church. Here are ten sentences on it. Place each in its century before the page tells you. Notice that the concern does not belong to any one tradition or age.

0 of 10 answered.

“I was wrong”

If Parts I to V were the whole story, this would be a discouraging page. Every parent fails, daily and visibly. If children see everything, then every child has seen his parents be impatient, unfair, selfish and wrong. Is every Christian parent therefore a hypocrite in his children’s eyes?

No, and the reason is at the centre of Christianity rather than at its edge. A hypocrite is not a person who sins. A hypocrite is a person who pretends not to. The word Jesus used, hypokritês, meant an actor on a stage. The failure Jesus condemned in the Pharisees was not that they had sins, but that they performed a righteousness they did not have and would not admit the difference.

Christianity does not ask parents to appear sinless. It cannot, because it begins by denying that anyone is:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1:8–9. And James 5:16: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.”

Luther put the same conviction at the head of the document that began the Reformation. The first of the Ninety-Five Theses (1517): “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” (LW 31:25.) Not the beginning of the Christian life; the entire life. A parent is a believer, and a household is where most of a believer’s life is lived.

Now picture what a child sees when a parent says, plainly and without excuse, “I was wrong to speak to you like that. Will you forgive me?” He sees four things that no devotion can show him as vividly. He sees sin named as sin, by the person with the power in the room. He sees repentance: a turning, at a cost to pride. He sees grace, because he is being asked to give it, and learns what it is to have it received. And he sees reconciliation: the relationship restored, not by pretending nothing happened, but by facing it. That is the gospel’s shape, acted out at the kitchen table.

Scripture’s own great penitent draws the connection between confession and teaching. After Nathan confronted him, David prayed: “For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. … Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee” (Psalm 51:3, 12–13). His authority to teach sinners came after his confession, not despite it.

The failure to confess has a name in the Church’s literature, and one of its sharpest descriptions was written by a Lutheran pastor in 1938, from the life of the illegal seminary he had run:

The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben, written 1938, published 1939), ch. 5, “Confession and Communion”. Trans. J. W. Doberstein (1954). In the same chapter: “He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone.”

A household can be a pious fellowship in exactly Bonhoeffer’s sense: a place where the parents must be seen as spiritually successful, and so cannot be sinners in front of the children. The children then learn one of two things. Either they learn that Christians do not sin, which they know from observation to be false; or they learn that Christians sin and hide it, which is the definition of hypocrisy. Both lessons are corrosive. The parent who confesses teaches a third thing, which is the true one.

The objection from Position P is serious and should be met head-on: won’t confessing to children undermine a parent’s authority? Children need parents they can trust to be right. The page answers in three parts. First, authority is not infallibility. Scripture gives parents real authority (“Children, obey your parents in the Lord”, Ephesians 6:1) and in the next sentence limits how it is used (“ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath”, 6:4). Nothing in it requires the parent to be always right. Second, children already know. The parent who never admits a fault is not protecting an illusion of perfection; he is teaching that power need not tell the truth. A child trusts an authority that tells the truth about itself far more than one that does not. Third, the page is careful about scope. Confessing to a child means owning the wrongs done to that child or in his sight. It does not mean burdening a child with adult matters he cannot carry, and it does not mean a parent handing over his authority. It means using it honestly.

Try it: confession or evasion?

Ten sentences a parent might say after doing something wrong in front of, or to, a child. All are composed by this page. For each, decide whether it is a confession — the wrong named, owned and put right as far as possible — or an evasion that sounds like one. Commit before you are told. Several of the evasions are extremely common, and one of them uses religious language.

0 of 10 answered.

“For they cannot recompense thee”

“Love your neighbour” is one of the first things a Christian child is taught to say. What it means to him depends almost entirely on what he has seen his parents do with it.

There is a difference between being told that kindness matters and watching a parent give up an evening, a sum of money, a comfortable reputation or a position of status for someone who cannot give anything back. The first is instruction. The second is evidence that the instruction is meant. Jesus was specific about which kind of service carries that evidence:

When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.

Luke 14:12–14.

The test Jesus sets is not how much is given but whether it can come back. Hospitality to people who can return it is pleasant and good, and it teaches a child that generosity is a kind of exchange. Hospitality to people who cannot return it teaches a child that generosity is a kind of love. The first can be explained without God. The second is hard to explain any other way.

James is concrete about what happens when instruction has no deeds behind it: “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?” (James 2:15–16). John draws the conclusion: “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). Jesus, having washed his disciples’ feet — the task of the lowest servant — explained what he had done in one word: “I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). He taught service by performing it on the people he was teaching.

Researchers who study how beliefs pass between people have a technical name for this: credibility-enhancing displays. The idea, set out by the anthropologist Joseph Henrich in 2009, is that people, and especially children, judge whether a teacher really believes what he says partly by whether he acts on it at a cost to himself. Words are cheap; costly actions are hard to fake, so learners weight them heavily. Part X gives the evidence and its limits. The point here is that the research gives a secular name to something Jesus, James and John had already said: service that costs something is what makes the instruction believable.

Try it: can they repay?

Ten acts of kindness a family might do. All are composed by this page. For each, decide whether the recipient is usually in a position to repay — with money, favour, status, friendship or a return invitation — or not. All ten are good. Jesus’ question in Luke 14 is only which ones prove something.

0 of 10 answered.

Activity and character

Church attendance, Bible studies, ministry involvement, long prayers and the daily quiet time are all good. The page has said so and will keep saying so. They can also become something else: visible markers by which a person establishes his spiritual credibility with others and with himself. When that happens, they can quietly substitute for the thing they were meant to produce.

Jesus gave a precise example of religious activity substituting for family duty, and it is worth reading slowly:

Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother … But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.

Mark 7:9–13.

“Corban” was a vow dedicating money or goods to God. The practice Jesus condemns used a religious dedication to release a man from supporting his own parents. What makes it instructive is that the vow looked more spiritual than the duty it replaced. Giving to God is holier than giving to your aged father, surely? Jesus says no: the dedication that cancels the duty makes “the word of God of none effect”. The modern equivalents are not hard to imagine. The evening ministry that is always more urgent than the child’s evening. The committee that makes a man unavailable to his wife. The public service that makes private neglect feel justified. Dossier 12 argues the point from the doctrine of vocation; Paul states it bluntly: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8).

Isaiah had heard the same complaint about fasting. The people ask why God does not notice their fasts, and God replies that they “fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness”. Then he describes the fast he wants: “to loose the bands of wickedness … to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house … and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh” (Isaiah 58:4–7). The last clause is about family. A fast that coexists with hiding from one’s own kin is not the fast God chose.

And Jesus described the whole pattern in a sentence about the religious leaders of his day: “But all their works they do for to be seen of men” (Matthew 23:5). His instruction on prayer points in the opposite direction: “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). The prayer that matters most is the prayer no one sees. That is the reverse of a reputation.

So what does Scripture present as the evidence of mature faith? The clearest single answer is the list Paul gives for choosing the leaders of a church, because it is a list of what he thought mature Christians should be recognised by. Try it yourself.

Try it: what does Paul look for?

The sixteen qualifications for an overseer, or bishop, in 1 Timothy 3:2–7, in the Authorised Version’s words and order. For each, decide what kind of thing it is. Commit before you are told. One or two are arguable, and the reveal says so. Keep an eye on the last category.

0 of 16 answered.

James gives the same answer in a single verse, and it contains both the tongue and the household: “If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:26–27). “Seem to be religious” is the performed life. An unbridled tongue is what the children hear.

And John gives it in a sentence no parent can read without discomfort: “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 brother whom he hath seen. The people in the house are the ones most seen.

What children remember

Ask a parent what he did to pass on the faith, and he will usually name things that can be counted: the devotions led, the verses memorised, the services attended, the camps paid for. Ask the grown child what he remembers of his parents’ faith, and he will often name something else. Whether home was safe. Whether Father kept his temper. Whether Mother told the truth. What happened when a stranger came to the door. What was said about the neighbours after they left.

These are not in competition, and Position E does not ask a parent to stop counting the first list. But there is a strong strand in Scripture which suggests that the things that matter most are often the things the doer did not count. The clearest case is the last judgment scene in Matthew 25. Walk through it and commit at each step.

The righteous did not keep a record. They are credited with feeding, clothing and visiting, and their response is bewilderment: “Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee?” (25:37). Jesus had taught the same thing earlier: “let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (6:3). Whatever else the scene teaches, it teaches that the conduct God treasures is often conduct that was not being performed, because it was not being watched, even by the person doing it.

Children are the people most likely to see that kind of conduct, precisely because it is not done for them. Paul, writing to Timothy near the end of his life, remembered where Timothy’s faith had come from:

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. … But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures.

2 Timothy 1:5; 3:14–15. “Unfeigned” translates anypokritos, literally “without hypocrisy” — the same root as hypokritês, the actor. Timothy’s father was a Greek (Acts 16:1); the faith came through the women of the house.

Two details matter. The faith that passed down was described by its absence of performance: unhypocritical. And Paul tells Timothy to hold to what he learned “knowing of whom thou hast learned them”. The Scriptures were taught from childhood, and the page insists that they must be; but part of their authority for Timothy lay in the people who taught them, and in what those people were like.

The most famous memory of a Christian parent in the ancient Church is Augustine’s, written about 397, a decade after his mother’s death. What he chose to record about Monica is not her devotions, though she was devout, but her conduct in a difficult household: that she was “such a peacemaker between any differing and discordant spirits” that when she heard bitter words from either side she would disclose “nothing about the one unto the other, save what might avail to their reconcilement”; and that her husband, a hot-tempered and unfaithful man, she did at last “gain over” to Christ before his death. (Confessions IX.9.19–22, trans. J. G. Pilkington, NPNF 1st series, vol. 1.) The same chapter records counsel Monica gave other wives about bearing a husband’s anger in silence, written in a world with no protection for women; the page quotes it neither as a model nor as advice to anyone in danger. What matters here is what her son chose to remember, decades on: a woman who made peace.

And Luther, in The Estate of Marriage (1522), mocked the “natural reason” that looks at family life and complains, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it …?” Faith, he says, sees otherwise: when a father “goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child … God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.” (LW 45:39–40, trans. W. I. Brandt.) Luther’s point is not sentimental. It is that the unrecorded tasks of the household are among the places where faith is actually exercised. They are also, as it happens, among the things children remember.

What the research does and does not show

Families and Faith (2013). The sociologist Vern L. Bengtson, with Norella Putney and Susan Harris, drew on the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which followed some 350 families across several generations from 1970. Their most-quoted finding concerns warmth: in Bengtson’s summary, “the highest generational transmission occurs in families with a high degree of warmth — particularly if the father is perceived as warm and close”. Role modelling, church attendance and devotions at home were described as good, but the factor that stood out was what the authors called intergenerational solidarity, or family cohesion. They also found that grandparents often mattered, sometimes reinforcing the parents and sometimes supplying what the parents did not. (Bengtson, Putney and Harris, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations, Oxford University Press, 2013; Bengtson’s summary quoted from an interview in The Christian Century, December 2013.)

Handing Down the Faith (2021). Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk combined three nationally representative American surveys with more than 230 interviews. They found that parents are the most important influence on their children’s religious lives, more than congregations; that the most effective style combines warmth with clear expectations (what psychologists call “authoritative” parenting); that parents who talk about faith as part of ordinary life, in two-way conversation rather than lecture, transmit it more; and that parents’ own practice matters. Adamczyk, in an interview about the book: “Parents have to really believe it. The kids can kind of tell how much of this is fake.” (Smith and Adamczyk, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation, Oxford University Press, 2021; Adamczyk quoted in the Deseret News, 6 May 2021.)

Credibility-enhancing displays (2009–2017). Joseph Henrich proposed in 2009 that learners weight costly actions above words when deciding whether a teacher truly believes what he teaches (“The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion”, Evolution and Human Behavior 30, 2009). Jonathan Lanman and Michael Buhrmester tested it on 316 Americans, asking about the religious actions of the adults who raised them — for example whether caregivers acted fairly to others, or avoided harming others, because their religion taught them so. Greater exposure to such displays predicted belief in God; less exposure predicted confident unbelief. Their title states the finding: “Religious actions speak louder than words” (Religion, Brain & Behavior 7, 2017). Lanman is careful to add that the claim “is a probabilistic claim, not a deterministic one”.

Marriage and adolescent religiosity (2008). A study for the US Department of Health and Human Services by Randal Day and colleagues, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 cohort, 3,316 young people from married-parent families), found that “the closeness and quality of the marital relationship and relationship between adolescent and parents significantly contributes to the strength of adolescent religious conviction and practice”. It also found — and this is the qualification — that “the overwhelmingly single most important indicator of religious attendance at 20 years old was family religious attendance when the adolescent was 16 years old”. (Day, Jones-Sanpei, Price, Orthner, Hair and Moore, Marital Quality, Parent-Adolescent Relationships, and Effects on Adolescent Religiousness and Religious Practice, ASPE, December 2008.)

That last finding matters for the fairness of this page. The research does not show that practice is irrelevant and only character counts. It shows, if anything, that both matter: the family’s practice predicts the child’s later practice, and the warmth and integrity of the household predict whether the faith is held with conviction. That is Position E, not a refutation of it. Position E keeps the practices. What the research does not support is Position P’s confidence that the practices will carry the faith on their own while the household contradicts them.

One more line of research deserves mention because it complicates any simple story. Psychologists studying attachment and religion have proposed two patterns that pull against each other: a correspondence pattern, in which people’s picture of God tends to resemble their experience of their parents, and a compensation pattern, in which some people whose early relationships were cold or insecure turn to God as the secure figure they lacked, sometimes suddenly. (Lee Kirkpatrick and Phillip Shaver, “Attachment theory and religion”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29, 1990, and a large literature since.) Both are observed. That is a reminder, in the data, of something Scripture says outright: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10).

Try it: did the research find this?

Ten claims of the kind often made about “what studies show” on faith and families. For each, decide whether the research summarised above found it, did not find or claim it, or found it only with an important qualification. Commit before you are told.

0 of 10 answered.

Not to convince them

Everything so far could be heard as a new and heavier burden: children see everything, so perform better. That would be exactly the wrong conclusion, because it would turn the household into a larger stage. The last of the author’s ten lines of inquiry is the one that takes the burden off. The goal is not to convince children that their parents are spiritual.

Paul, who more than once told his churches to imitate him, never let the imitation stop at himself: “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). John the Baptist, the most famous preacher of his day, described his whole ministry as getting out of the way: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). A parent is not the object of his children’s faith. He is, at best, a signpost, and a signpost that insists on being admired has stopped doing its job.

Deuteronomy 6, the Old Testament’s great charter of household instruction, makes the same point in the answer it gives. It expects the child to ask: “And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you?” And the parent is not told to answer with his own devotion. He is told to tell a story about God: “Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (6:20–21). The parent’s part is to have been rescued, to say so, and to live like it. The historic churches have always pointed the child in the same direction — to what God has done and given, in Christ, in baptism, in the Word and at the Table — and Dossier 17 argues why that external anchor matters for a child’s assurance.

This is also where the page must say something that protects parents from the argument of the rest of it. A child’s eventual faith, or lack of it, is not a verdict on his parents. Scripture records too many exceptions for that to be true. Eli was a priest whose sons “made themselves vile, and he restrained them not” (1 Samuel 3:13); but Samuel, whom Scripture never faults as a father, also had sons who “walked not in his ways” (8:3). Hezekiah, one of the most faithful kings of Judah, was succeeded by Manasseh, one of the worst; Amon, who “did that which was evil”, was the father of Josiah, who “did that which was right in the sight of the LORD” (2 Kings 21:20–22:2). Ezekiel states the principle: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”) is a proverb, describing how things tend to go, not a contract; the book’s own form tells the reader so. What a parent is responsible for is his own faithfulness. What his children do with it is theirs, and God’s.

So the deeper vocation, in the author’s words, is ordinary faithfulness: loving God, serving the neighbour, confessing sin, forgiving, keeping promises, and caring for those entrusted to you. None of that requires a gift for public prayer. All of it is visible to children.

Put the two positions side by side and ask each the same questions.

Try it, first: what would my children say?

Two closing exercises, paired, and the parent’s comes first, because the page is addressed first to those who are forming a household now. If you are not a parent, answer for the household you live in, or for the children in your care as a grandparent, godparent or teacher, or go straight to the second exercise. Eight questions. The exercise measures two things: how far the way you measure your home’s faith leans towards Position P, and how many gaps between the practised and the lived a child in your house could see. It produces no verdict on your faith or your parenting, and nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.

Try it, second: what did your home teach you?

Now turn the page around. Everyone reading this was once a child in someone’s house, and learned something about God there before he could have put it into words. Eight questions about the home you grew up in. There are no scores. At the end, the page gathers what your answers suggest your home may have taught you about God, alongside what Scripture says, so that you can see which lessons to keep and which you may need to unlearn. If a question is painful, skip it. Nothing you enter, including the optional note at the end, is stored or sent anywhere; it disappears when you close the page.

One closing observation, offered as opinion

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped the quiz, this section will be empty. Go back to the top, answer them, and return.

Check it yourself

Fifteen items. Nearly everything this page relies on is out of copyright, free online, and short. If you read only three, read the first three. Together they take under an hour. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. 1 Timothy 3:1–13 and Titus 1:5–9. Read this first. Ten minutes. Count how many qualifications concern skill, how many character, how many the household, and how many religious activity.
2. 2. 1 Peter 3:1–7, Malachi 2:13–16, and Matthew 5:23–24. Read this first. Ten minutes. What each says about the connection between worship and the treatment of a particular person.
3. 3. Luke 10:25–37 and Luke 14:12–14. Read this first. Ten minutes. Who passes by, who stops, and whom Jesus says to invite.
4. 4. Galatians 5:16–26 and 1 Corinthians 13. Ten minutes. Mark each item of fruit you would learn about a person chiefly by living with him.
5. 5. Mark 7:1–13; Isaiah 58:1–12; Matthew 6:1–18; Matthew 23:1–12. Twenty minutes. Religious activity that substitutes for duty, and religion done “to be seen of men”.
6. 6. Deuteronomy 6:1–25; 2 Timothy 1:1–7 and 3:14–17. Fifteen minutes. Household instruction, the child’s question and its answer, and “unfeigned” faith.
7. 7. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 14–15. Five minutes, free (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1).
8. 8. Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians 20 and 21. Forty minutes, free (NPNF 1st series, vol. 13). “A house is a little Church”; and his sermon on Ephesians 6:1–4. His Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children (trans. M. L. W. Laistner, 1951) is worth reading alongside it.
9. 9. Augustine, Confessions IX.8–13. Thirty minutes, free (NPNF 1st series, vol. 1). A son’s memory of his mother.
10. 10. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule I.1–2; Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, ch. I, sect. 1. Thirty minutes, both free. On saying and not doing.
11. 11. Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522), Part III; the Small Catechism, with its prefaces addressed to “the head of the family” and its Table of Duties. Thirty minutes, LW 45 and bookofconcord.org. The household as a place of vocation, and of instruction.
12. 12. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (1746), Part II and Part III, sign 12; and the Farewell Sermon (1750). An hour, free at CCEL. The “no signs”, the sign of practice, and the family as a little church.
13. 13. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 5. Twenty minutes. Confession, and the pious fellowship that permits no one to be a sinner.
14. 14. The research in Part X. Bengtson et al., Families and Faith (2013); Smith and Adamczyk, Handing Down the Faith (2021); Lanman and Buhrmester (2017); Day et al. (ASPE, 2008, free online). Read at least one in full rather than in summary, including its limitations section, and decide whether Part X has represented it fairly.
15. 15. One question, put to someone who grew up in your house. Do this one. If you have grown children, or siblings, ask courteously, as a real question, and be ready to hear the answer: what do you remember about how our faith was lived at home, as opposed to how it was taught? Whatever they say, you will know more than this page can tell you.

Every historical individual named on this page is deceased and is quoted from a dated, published source. Researchers are cited by their published work only. No church, ministry or organisation is identified. Where a text, date or reading is uncertain, the page says so at the point of use: the dating of Ignatius’s letters, the authorship of the Imitation, the rendering of pistis in Galatians 5:22, the textual variant in 1 Timothy 3:3, the motives of the priest and Levite, and the limits of the research in Part X. Every example of family or church life is composed by this page and labelled as composed.