We did everything right. As Christian parents, we go through the list of steps to take to raise a child in the Lord. We teach them right and wrong. We tell them about Jesus. We take them to Sunday school. We arrive at the church.
Of course, none of us are perfect parents. But seeing a child go through deep spiritual struggles can be disorienting when we have done everything in our power to prevent them, often with a fervor fueled by our own humiliating spiritual history. We have learned painful lessons with God and we want to prevent our children from having to learn them too.
Except that’s not how it works. We cannot stop our children from struggling, and if we try, we risk robbing them of the full truth and beauty of the gospel.
I grew up in what is often called a “broken home,” although I would also say it was a happy home. My mother worked hard and my grandparents lived with us during some of those years. Yet in this context, when my husband and I started having children, we decided to do it perfectly, as many new parents do.
With confidence on the scale of first-year seminary students, we corrected every verse in the Bible about parenting, order, and discipline, and put them into an equation for perfect parenting. Our kids were going to be awesome because we were going to be awesome parents. We were parents according to the Book.
There is no such thing as the arrogance of the young and inexperienced – although, in hindsight, our problem was not limited to youth and pride. We had adopted an evangelical view of thriving family life, integrating the principles of “health and wealth” into the parenting process. More than money or physical well-being, family was the place we most deeply desired to succeed, so this is where the false “gospel of success” took root in our lives.
At the time, we would not have called this teaching legalistic or prosperity gospel teaching. We would have called it “biblical.” We believed that if we could live our Christian lives well, we would not have to depend so much on God’s grace. Grace would just be our backup for the unusual days – for the curveballs.
We didn’t realize then that when we take principles from the Bible and strip them of Christ and His redemption and forgiveness, they become something else entirely. We have adopted the posture of Adam and Eve holding the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thinking that if we could just know what to do and not to do, we would not be so dependent on God’s grace.
This was especially evident in the way we approached the Book of Proverbs. “Show children the way they should go, and even when they are old, they will not turn from it” (Prov. 22:6). We have treated verses like this as guarantees of fortune rather than descriptions of the good that God wants for us. We sought salvation through our own hands, as we humans are apt to do.
And that made sense, because Proverbs are GOOD. But we were too prone to judge quality based on whether something got us the results we wanted in the time frame we preferred.
God judges what is good differently. Chad Bird, Old Testament scholar said that using Proverbs as safeguards is like Job’s friends, examining someone who is suffering and trying to determine which Proverb he did not follow quite correctly: If we do all the right things, everything will be fine! Let’s resolve your failures. Perhaps there is a nugget of wisdom here that can resolve your situation.
Job was a righteous man, and yet Proverbs did not “work” for him. He did everything right, but God still allowed the suffering, seemingly without explanation, and appeared in the final chapters of the book to tell Job and his friends how badly they had misjudged the situation.
We often don’t want to recognize that Jesus didn’t just talk about suffering could It happens to us but I promised it would be (John 16:33). This is what the prosperity gospel understandably ignores: it seems much more positive and productive to focus on the parts of the Bible that give us a sense of control.
We do not want to rejoice in the fact that Christ has overcome the world. We want to take comfort in knowing that at least we did everything we could. We don’t want redemption so much as redemption on our own terms, by our own hands.
As our culture shifts from helicopter parenting to parenting with lawn mower (where parents go above and beyond and remove all obstacles for their children), the temptation for successful evangelical parenting only grows stronger.
We feel like we’ve failed if our children face difficult things. It feels like a failure if they struggle with their faith or struggle with God. We start to think it’s our job to mow down all these struggles, forgetting that it’s actually our job to be with our children and pray for them, in struggle and in joy.
And parents aren’t the only ones who feel this sense of failure. Not long ago, I was speaking with a young adult who told me that she felt pressure to be happy all the time. Her parents kept saying that they just wanted their children to be happy, so when she wasn’t happy, she felt like she was letting them down.
“I just want it to be okay to have a day where I’m sad,” she told me. She wanted the freedom to feel the full range of human emotions without disappointing her parents, without making them feel like they didn’t do everything right.
Of course, a central principle of the gospel is that we can’t do everything right, and that is why we so deeply need God’s redemption. I remember opening my heart to God one day when one of my children was struggling. I screamed because I couldn’t relieve this pain. But then God showed me that if I had the ability to remove all of my children’s difficulties, they would never need Him. They would never have reason to invoke it for themselves.
My limitations help my children seek and see God. His power is manifested in my weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), not in mechanistic promises of family prosperity, and it is a power that my children must learn for themselves. Learning to rely on salvation through Christ alone is often a daily struggle. Our children must fight against this – and rise above all their versions of self-justification – just as we did.
The longer I parent, the more I realize that God is more willing than I am for my children to struggle. I always want to skip the struggle, ignore the struggle, move forward quickly to overcome the struggle. I am often impatient and don’t want to put up with pain.
But if we can let go of prosperity gospel parenting, we can embrace the true gospel of a God who is with us and for us.
We can introduce this God to our children – not a God who counts our parental failures or demands constant happiness, but a compassionate God who meets us in our struggle. Which allows us to fight with him. Who doesn’t ask us to pretend everything is okay when it’s not okay. Who allows us, like Martin Luther Put theto “(call) the thing as it really is,” even if it is uncomfortable or unhappy.
Even though we hate the fact that in this world we will have difficulties – and that our children will too – we can take comfort in God’s honesty, patience, and love. And we can show our children that God is just that, far better than the petty and often incompetent idol of the prosperity gospel could ever be.
What if starting children on the path they should follow wasn’t just about teaching them right and wrong and making sure they went to Sunday school? What if this taught them to fall on the grace of God, every day?
Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and co-host of the Freely given podcast.
