Treasuring God in Our Traditions (11) - Rethinking our traditions

Before we leave all thoughts of traditions behind, I want to encourage you to take some time and think about ways you can implement some new traditions in your homes. Here are some questions that you might find useful as you do this:

1. Think about what an average day looks like in your home (write the general daily routine down if it helps!).

a) What are some things that you do together? What do these things say about your family? Are there things you can introduce into your daily/weekly patterns to create your own unique family culture?

b) Are there regular times in the day when you read the Bible and pray with your children? If not, is there a time in the day where you could plan to do this?

2. Since Christmas is coming up, spend a bit of time thinking about what you normally do. What things could you introduce into your family Christmas this year to make it more:

• Christ-focussed,
• evangelistic,
• generous, and
• and fun!

I do hope this book has encouraged you to see how the special occasions and everyday patterns of our lives can add up to something that glorifies God and passes on a kind of inheritance to our children and those who live after us.

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (10) - Worship

Before I wrap up this series, I wanted to share some thoughts on the Appendix of this book: 'The Family Together in God's Presence'. I was not altogether persuaded by this part of the book, mostly because I have some disagreements with the theology of worship that undergirds it.

Within the appendix the language of 'worship' is used, OT-style, for the ritual gathering of God's people in the 'sanctuary' of the church building, and the atmospherics of the Sunday church service are depicted as a kind of conduit for the encounter with God. On this issue, I think that the NT points us in a different direction, catching up the OT language for the 'cultic' worship of the tabernacle and the temple and applying it (mainly, at least) not to what we do in church on Sundays but to what Christ has done for us on the cross and to what we do in response in the whole of our lives. (If you're interested in reading some more about a Biblical theology of worship, you might want to check out this book, by David Peterson, or this article, by Tony Payne.)

Not all churches have a gathering that is as formal as the one described in this chapter. But if we are going to meet in a more 'traditional' format when we gather on Sundays I do agree that it is a good thing for children to learn how to be involved as well. I think this will mean, as Noel Piper says, that they will need to be quiet for a while (although I probably wouldn't expect quite as much 'quietness' as she seemed to expect, I must admit!). They will need to do this for the sake of others and for themselves as well because they need to learn self-control. I expect my younger kids to do this at the school assembly too - not because the school assembly hall is sacred, but because it is polite and respectful to behave that way.

I also think that children should be as involved as possible from a young age and should be encouraged to sing the songs, pray during corporate prayer, eat communion and even listen to the sermon when they're old enough to understand. I don't think that a model of church that only ever shunts children off to kids church is helpful to them if we want them to feel that they belong to the family of God's people.

For this reason, I did appreciate some of the ideas that Noel Piper had for including children in the the Sunday service. I liked her idea of getting them to draw pictures of the ideas raised by the sermon and the idea of reading the Bible passage with the kids beforehand. And while I would probably not expect as high a level of 'quietness', it was helpful to have a list of what another parent thinks is reasonable to expect of children - it gave me a bit to think about.

What did you think?

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (9) - Easter

Moving on from Christmas, chapter 9 has suggestions for creating traditions that are Christ-centred at Easter. As with the Christmas ideas, I haven't followed all of these suggestions but have found them useful for working out what to do with my own family.

But it seems way too early to think too much about Easter - especially since we need to get through Christmas first! So I thought I would just share some of the traditions I wrote about last Easter on my own blog:

Christ-centred Easter traditions

Evangelistic Easter traditions

Fun Easter traditions

I also interviewed Roni, a CMS missionary in Slovenia, about what they do at Easter time, and how that fits with their efforts to point Slovenes to Jesus - it's worth a read!

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (8) - Christmas

Noel Piper's thoughts on Christmas and Easter have probably been the most helpful for me practically. Her chapter on Christmas (ch. 8) heavily influenced Dave and me when we first became parents, as we tried to work out whether to include Santa Claus in our Christmas celebrations.

What I also appreciated about this chapter was included so many positive examples of how to celebrate Christmas in a way that focuses on Jesus' birth. I didn't get the sense that they had simply said 'no Santa' and then left it at that. They filled the vacuum with meaningful traditions. I didn't get the sense that her family have 'missed out' because they have chosen to do things differently.

I haven't followed all the Piper family traditions (I've given the candles a miss for example!), but our family have adopted a few over the years. The one that I have probably found most helpful is the idea of having an Advent calendar and using it to teach our kids in a fun way. We have a Bible readings in each pocket as well as something extra (like a lolly or balloon or sticker). It's a fun way of 'counting down' to December 25 in a way that places the focus on the story of Jesus' birth, rather than on a slowly-growing pile of presents accumulating under the tree.

I've written about other Christmas traditions we have implemented, (as well as others we've observed) at my blog if you're interested in more ideas:

Christ-focussed traditions

Evangelistic traditions

Generous traditions

Fun traditions

I'd love to hear what you do as a family, or what your family did when you were growing up. What's worked? What hasn't? What would you keep? What would you change?

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (7) - Especially traditions

Did you know that the Puritans didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter? They associated these celebrations with drunkenness and idolatry and called Christmas 'foolstide'. In England, there was a law passed in 1647 abolishing Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. The Puritans in New England soon passed a law that made Christmas illegal. Even after it became legal again to celebrate, it was still frowned upon by Puritans until the 1850s - meaning that in New England in particular it was virtually non-existent.

There's no doubt that the way our culture celebrates special days is steeped in materialism and not Christ glorifying. So should we follow the Puritans' example? Should say: "every day should be Christmas (and Good Friday, and Easter Sunday)" and leave it at that?

Noel Piper thinks not and I agree. It's pretty clear in the New Testament that we are not under the law of Moses, and not obliged to keep the particular yearly festivals and celebrations that God gave to the nation of Israel. But it's also pretty clear, I think, that the general idea of having celebrations and festivals and remembrances is something good that we can learn from the Old Testament about how to rejoice together in the stories of God's mighty works, remember them and pass them on from generation to generation. And it's pretty clear, too, that there is room for a whole lot of freedom in the particular ways in which we decide to do that.

So I think we ought to celebrate, but we ought to celebrate in counter-cultural ways. We can embrace the chance to teach our kids about Jesus' birth at Christmas, but we need to find ways to shun the materialism and the triviality of secular Christmas. We can take the chance to celebrate God's good gift of life at birthday time - but make sure we're thanking him for the life. We can remember Jesus' death and resurrection at Easter - without adopting the gluttonous traditions of the rest of our culture.

What do you think? Have you seen good examples of ways that families have celebrated some of these sorts of special occasions (including the 'secular' ones like birthdays as well as the 'sacred' ones like Easter and Christmas) in ways that are counter-cultural and memorable and God-honouring and fun? (In the next couple of posts I'll be focusing on Christmas and Easter in particular, so I guess that in this post it might be best to focus on the broader, general issue and on the other, non-Christmas-and-Easter kinds of examples.)

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (6) - Other everyday traditions

In my last post I looked at chapter 5, where Noel Piper wrote about the necessity of daily prayer and Bible reading as part of the fabric of our everyday traditions.

In chapter 6, Noel Piper moves on to the kind of everyday-type traditions that are are good but not necessities. They are the type of traditions that celebrate the good gifts God has given us and create a unique family culture.

Again, this chapter included examples from the Piper family, that I found helpful in examining our own family traditions with fresh eyes. I liked reading about the reasoning that lay behind many of their family traditions. Many of them are similar to ours, many of them aren't, but it got me thinking again about the philosophy undergirding all the little details of the average day in the Starling family. It helps to think about questions like 'why do we do it this way?' and 'what does this communicate to our kids?'.

One thing I thought about as I read this chapter was that in many of these everyday traditions, what we are doing is showing our kids how to receive God's good gifts with thanksgiving. But with so many good gifts that God has given us, we can only ever pass on a representative sample. One family might have a culture which majors on sport, another on reading, another on music or art or making stuff. And that's OK! Part of the joy of fostering your own family culture is showing your kids how to take pleasure in the ways your family is different.

But there's also a danger here isn't there? There's the danger of squeezing kids into an inflexible mould of their parents' preferences and quirks and oddities. In thinking about how we implement everyday traditions in our families, I think we also need to think about how we'll teach our kids to appreciate the difference of others.

Here are some everyday things our family does:

- reading books before bed
- each taking turns to choose which cd to listen to as they go to sleep
- Pizza Saturday
- dessert night (and visitors-special-dessert nights)
- joke time
- Saturday sport

What about you? What do you do and why?

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (5) - Everyday Traditions

God is the most precious heirloom our children can ever receive, and receiving him means knowing and loving him. Our personal habits and family traditions of the Word and prayer are the ones that are not optional if we want God as our eternal inheritance. (p. 49)

I remember when I first read this book, that chapter 5 was the one that I felt most overwhelmed by. Probably because I knew that Noel Piper was absolutely correct - that as Christian parents, teaching our kids to pray and read God's word isn't optional!

And, while they aren't optional, the ways we do this can vary widely from family to family. I appreciated the fact that she shared how her family have done things in this chapter, but I wasn't sure if we would (or could!) copy what the Piper family have done. In the end, Dave and I have slowly put our own traditions and habits in place in our home - some of which are similar to those of the Pipers and some which aren't (eg. we have decided to wait until each child can read before we start them on their own individual, daily Bible reading times).

So I thought I'd quickly share some resources that have worked well for our family, and then I'm hoping that you can comment and share what has worked with yours, or (if you were raised in a Christian family) what you found helpful in the ways your parents taught you these things as you were growing up.

XTB and Table Talk

Regular readers of my blog will already know that our family have found the Good Book Company's XTB and Table Talk enormously helpful in teaching our kids to read the Bible.

Table Talk is designed to help families do devotions together. They include really helpful notes to help explain the Bible passage, as well as questions to ask, and even some activities for the kids to do together. It's not unusual to have all sorts of role playing happening at our breakfast table as a result (along with the occasional more ambitious adventure)!

XTB (Explore the Bible), is designed to work with Table Talk, having books that correspond to each other). It's meant to be used for personal devotions for children who are old enough to start reading the Bible for themselves. We started Jacob using these when he started reading, and he loves them. It includes a passage to read as well as some questions and activities to help the kids understand the Bible passage a little better.


Reading the Bible one to one

We have also found that with 3 kids all at different developmental stages, we need to read the Bible with each of them separately. We usually do this at the end of the day, after stories and before bed.

While I agree with Noel Piper that it's good for kids to hear the Bible read whatever their age (and we do that in the morning with Table Talk), we have decided to use children's Bibles as well, in order to help them understand what they are hearing a little better. Jean has compiled a very useful list of Children's Bibles that is worth a read if you're trying to decide which version to read to your child. With Jacob, when he was ready, we moved on to an easy-to-read Bible (NIrV).

'Colin' Books

At the moment another little tradition we have with our kids is that we're slowly reading through some of the books written by Colin Buchanan. We bought Jacob and Rebecca Remember the Lord and Practise Being Godly for Easter. The books are kind of devotional in style, but correspond with the songs on each respective album. At the moment, we read one section on a Sunday night to each of them. We look at the pictures that he's drawn and read what he's written and sing the songs. It's a lot of fun and the kids really look forward to that time on a Sunday night.

Prayer

Another we do is pray with our kids at various times in the day - before meals, after we read the Bible, when something comes up. We don't have any grand strategies with this - just encourage them to 'talk to God'.

Memorisation

We have done a bit of Bible memorisation with our kids at Christmas and Easter time in a more 'formal' way. During the rest of the year, we mainly consolidate what they've been learning at Sunday School. It's amazing how quickly kids can memorise things - and what a wonderful thing the Bible is to memorise! This is actually something I want to do a bit more of in our family having been inspired by Jean's example of memorising the Bible at breakfast and teaching her children the psalms.

Songs

Another thing that we try to do with our kids is sing songs about Jesus with them. We are so blessed in Australia to have wonderful kids cds made by Emu music and musicians like Colin Buchanan. We listen to them in car trips, the kids listen as they go to sleep at night, we sing them during the day - it's amazing how much our kids seem to have learned from the songs they've listened to!

Modelling it ourselves

And of course, we can hardly expect our kids to learn everyday habits of reading the Bible and praying and memorising God's word if we aren't doing these things as parents. This really hit home for me a year or so ago when I noticed Jacob copying the way Dave and I shut the door when we read our Bibles in the morning.

So these are just some of the things that we've tried so far with our little family. I'd love to hear from you though. What has worked for you and your family?

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (4) - Another reason traditions are important

In my last post I wrote about how important traditions are for teaching our kids about God. But it's not just about us and our kids, as if our families were little islands, disconnected from everything around us. Traditions are also important because of what they say to (and what they say about) the wider culture around us.

The context of the avowedly post-Christian society we now live in means that ‘family traditions’ have a function that is more critical than ever before, both within our families and in our mission to the wider society.

Traditions create and express culture; now that the culture we live in is no longer even nominally Christian, we can expect that the gulf between the traditions of a Christian family and the traditions of the surrounding culture will become wider and wider.

As that cultural gap widens, basic Christan faithfulness will require us to be conscious and deliberate in forming and preserving the traditions that will shape the culture of our families. Gone are the days (if they were ever more than an illusion!) when we could unthinkingly absorb the traditions and patterns of life that we saw in the culture around us and make them the traditions of our families.

The importance of this for our task of passing on the gospel to our children and grandchildren is obvious, but it has an importance beyond the family as well. Sharing the gospel is about more than just clever individuals mounting logical arguments that defend Christian beliefs and expose the flaws in alternative belief systems. The New Testament calls us not only to defend the gospel with our ideas but also to adorn the gospel by the lives and families and communities that it creates.

A crucial way we can contribute to this broader missionary task is by creating family culture and traditions that critique the culture and traditions of the wider society. That requires:

a) That our families have a culture of their own;
b) That this culture is consciously, deliberately Christian; and
c) That our families are not insular and selfish but visible and hospitable.

Because, until recently, social traditions have been ‘Christian’ traditions, this is an area that a lot of Christians haven’t given much thought to. But now that our social context is shifting, this gives us an even greater opportunity to present an image of Christ through our family, to the families around us.

Noel Piper writes:

We need to remember, too, that when our traditions are displaying the Treasure of our lives, he is there to be seen by everyone who comes within our circle. Jesus said, “Let you light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5: 16). God wants our family and others to give glory to him because they’ve seen his light through us. Paul says we should be “children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Philippians 2: 15-16).

Next week, we'll move on from the broad framework and rationale of family traditions and start start thinking a little more specifically about how it works out in practice, beginning with the habits and traditions of everyday life.

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (2) - What is tradition?

What is it that you most want for your kids? If we've been Christians for long enough, we probably all know the 'right' answer to this question. We answer instinctively that we want them to grow up to become Christians, who fear and love and serve God, trusting in Jesus and following him as disciples. But the implied answer that our lives give to our children is not always the same as that!

In the first chapter of this book Noel Piper makes it clear from the start that this book is not about sickly-sweet, cutesy, folk-arty quaintness. Nor is it about some sort of arcane and archaic code of rules that need to be followed to belong to a particular group. What this book is really about is living our lives in a way that displays to all who come within our circle that Christ is our greatest treasure.

At the heart of her concern (though not her only concern) is the task we have to pass on to the next generation the story of the greatness of our God. She wants those of us who are parents to feel the weight and wonder of our responsibility to teach our children about Jesus. Of course, our children can't actually inherit our faith, but:

...although we cannot bequeath God to our children, we can help them know him and understand him in ways that prepare them to believe in his name. “Everyday” and “especially” traditions in a family are an important part of that teaching, of picturing who God is and what he’s done in our home and in the world. Traditions are a vital way of displaying our greatest treasure, of showing what—Who—is most important to us.

So what does Noel Piper mean by tradition? When I first picked up this book, I assumed that it only involved the kind of momentous occasions or activities that only happened once a year, like Christmas, birthdays and Easter, and the ceremonial (and sometimes centuries-old) ways that we mark them. But she defines it a lot more broadly than that (in chapter 2) to include the pattern and shape and significance that is carried by the everyday details of our lives. An everyday part of life can become a 'tradition' when some deeper or more significant meaning is attached to it.

The things we do regularly that help us in our deepest being to know and love and want God, the things that help our lives to be infiltrated with God—those things are tradition. And then if there are children in our lives, to pass these God-focused activities to the next generation—that’s what tradition is for a Christian. (p. 25)

If we want to work out what we really want for our kids, the details of our lives will reveal what our heart's desires are.

In the next two posts, I'll be looking at chapters 3 and 4 and thinking about why traditions are so important.

Treasuring God in Our Traditions (1) - Introduction

When Dave and I first got married, we began the task of building a family and establishing a kind of family culture. From the beginning, we were setting the patterns and habits and ways of doing things that would prevail in this new household. Some of them we inherited (thinkingly or unthinkingly) from my family and some from Dave's; some we adopted from friends and neighbours and the surrounding culture; and some we just made up for ourselves.

And then, when Jacob our first-born came along, the task took on a whole new level of complexity and importance. Not only were we establishing patterns that we ourselves would live by; we were also creating a culture within which our children would be raised, which they would receive from us as a kind of inheritance.*

We talked and deliberated about how we would teach our children about God in the everyday details of our lives; how we would pray and read the Bible with them. We wondered about how we should celebrate the big occasions like Christmas and Easter. (If we didn't do Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, then what would we do? And would our kids hate us for making their lives miserable?). How would we establish a family that is different because we treasure Christ above all other things?

It was in that context, six months or so after Jacob was born, I first read Noel Piper's book, Treasuring God in Our Traditions, and I immediately fell in love with it!

I loved the framework established in the early chapters, with its big, God-centred vision, its serious purposefulness, and the room that it retained in the midst of that for the quirky, the fun and the everyday. And I loved the fact that so much of the book is made up of material that is unique and particular to the writer’s own family – poems written by her husband John for their children’s birthdays; hymns sung for each child, family recipes... It would be foolish to try to slavishly emulate them all - but I enjoyed the ‘worked example’ they provided of one family’s attempt to create a God-centred, grace-saturated family culture. There were points I disagreed with here and there, but the overall message and the example provided by some of the tiniest details added up to something that has been hugely influential for Dave and me in the way that we have tried to shape the life of our family.

So I'm looking forward to re-reading this book again in October, and I'm hoping that this month will be a good opportunity for each of us to think critically about the traditions we have in our own families. I'm planning on doing 2-3 posts a week and roughly following the order of the chapters. I'll be asking for suggestions, tips, strategies throughout the month, so the more people that join in, the more helpful it will be for each of us!

Next Monday, I'm going to be focusing on chapters 1 and 2 and thinking about what 'tradition' is and why it is important. If you haven't got a copy of the book yet, you can buy it OR download it for free online. (A free book - how good is that!)

* Of course, it's not only married people and parents who have the task of sifting through the traditions that they have inherited from their family of origin and adopted from the surrounding culture, and establishing the patterns and habits that will prevail in their lives and in their households and in the 'household' of the church. And it's not only married people and parents who have the opportunity to pass some of these things to others and leave some sort of legacy and example after them. But (partly because of what my own experience has been, and partly because of the content of the book, and partly because of the important particular role that marriage and parenting play in shaping a culture and passing on the stories of God's greatness) the main focus in my posts will be on how this plays out in a family context. If you're not (yet) married or if you don't (yet) have kids, I hope you'll still find some things that are interesting and useful, and that you'll still feel that you have something to contribute to the conversation!

Meet Nicole Starling

Nicole Starling will be contributing our notes for October on Treasuring God in our Traditions, so I thought we'd ask her a few more questions to get to know some more about her.

Favourite book you've read in 2009?

I'm going to cheat and choose a few!

My favourite novel of the year would definitely be The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer. Set in Guernsey during WWII, the story is told entirely through letters between the various characters. It was a real 'page turner', and I loved it.

As for a Christian book though, I would have to say You Can Change by Tim Chester. Reading that helped me see many of the more 'hidden' sins in my life that I had been unaware of and gave me fresh hope that God will continue to change me.

I also loved reading No Ordinary View by Naomi Reed. I was encouraged by her willingness to serve Jesus in a country that was not only gripped by poverty, but was also in the midst of a civil war at the time.

And my 4 year old daughter Rebecca and I read Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barrie earlier in the year. It was the first time I had read it and we both loved it!

Favourite new author you've discovered over the last 12 months?

Probably Mary Ann Schaffer. Sadly, she died shortly after completing this book, so there won't be any more where The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came from.

Who have been your role models of Christian womanhood?

Well, definitely my mum. I have been very blessed in being given a wonderful mum who became a Christian when I was 6, and since then has modelled how to live as a Christian woman.

Also Sarah Edwards (from afar!) and some of the great Scripture teachers and Sunday school teachers and friends' mums from the country Baptist churches that I grew up in.

Favourite traditions growing up?

Saturday morning pancakes (we picked that one up when we lived in America for six months)
Sunday lunches in Machattie Park (when we lived in Bathurst)
Going to the cricket once a year with Dad
Reading How The Grinch Stole Christmas on Christmas Eve.