A belated Happy New Year to you all! I’m not sure what happened to January. Let’s move on.
We live in Chelsea. It’s strange but it’s true. I grew up in an industrial town in the North East of England. Occasionally my children say things now which make me shudder slightly, such as:
“Mummy can we get some avocados?”
“Mummy can I have a babyccino?”
“I’m going for Chelsea FC.”
“Look, we’re nearly at Raffles!”
(If you’re not sure what Raffles is, it’s just a fancy night club which celebrities frequent. We went there once, but that’s a story for another day.)
Babyccinos are the sort of thing I would scoff and roll my eyes at before my children started drinking them. How pretentious! But one day I just gave in. Although they are just another way of trying to make children look like absurdly small grown-ups, they do have this going for them – they’re free. In some places, anyway. They’re also just frothy milk, so it’s not doing anyone any harm, unless you count my pride.
Now the thing about a babyccino is, it’s not actually a small cappuccino. It looks like one, so the kiddywinks feel grown up, but it doesn’t taste like one. It won’t make them like cappuccinos when they’re older. It’ll have no bearing on their taste for coffee. And that’s fine, because I have no desire to instill in them a love for coffee.
Sometimes, the Christian input children get can be a bit like a babyccino. It looks like discipleship, so it can make them look like Christians, but when they get older they’ll have no taste for the real Jesus.
For example, when I was at my CofE Primary School, we learnt to say “grace” before lunch. The prayer was “For these, and all Thy many gifts, we give Thee thanks our Lord, Amen.” Nothing wrong with that, although why the “thee” and “thy” I’ve no idea. I wasn’t at Primary School in the 19th Century. But I never, not once, actually thought about what I was saying. I used to say, “FORTHESEANDALLTHYMANYGIFTSWEGIVETHEETHANKSOURLORDAMEN!” The faster the better. I may as well have prayed it in Latin for all the meaning it had to me. It was a babyccino prayer. Once I grew out of saying it, I did not thank God for my food because I wasn’t thankful to Him.
Sometimes at church we can fall into the trap of making it look like the children have learnt something in crèche or Sunday School, when in fact nothing has gone in. They emerge with a beautiful craft about how Jesus Loves Me, or I’m a sheep, or A fish swallowed Jonah, but it’s just froth. The children haven’t actually heard God speak to them through his Word, by the Holy Spirit. But the parents are happy (for now), because their children look like Christians. (I’m really thankful that my children emerge from Sunday School usually craftless, having gotten to know God better through his Word.)
At home, we parents should be the ones bringing up our children in the training and instruction of the Lord. This is hard work, long term and messy. It requires prayer and huge dependence on God. Often it’s so tempting to settle for making them look and act like Chrisitans, rather than actually discipling them. Of course, only the Holy Spirit can give them new life and change their hearts, so we need to depend on His grace. But if I’m not looking at the attitudes of my children’s hearts, and instead simply dealing with their behaviour and habits, then when they’re older they’re no more likely to love Jesus than if they’d never had the babyccino Christianity I’ve been serving them for 16 years. In fact, I might have put them off him forever. They might be able to rattle off the Ten Commandments, or the Lord’s Prayer, and they might be on the serving rota at church. But hand them a cappuccino and they’ll say it just tastes bitter. They’ll opt for something else instead.
I do (really, really) want my children to behave nicely in church. I want them to know the right answers in Sunday School. I want them to be kind and have good manners. If you met them, you might not be able to tell any of that, by the way. However, what I want more than those things is that they would genuinely love the Lord Jesus Christ, and that they’d know how desperately they need God’s grace. Sometimes they won’t look like little Christians, because real discipleship is messy. But I’ll keep trying to remember not to opt for the easier, neater, babyccino version of bringing them up in the training and discipline of the Lord.
Mum in Zone One 