Godly Culture

by Kelly Knowlden

As parents, you have more influence on the culture of the school (and this country) than anyone else. The issue is that you LIVE WITH your child. Though the teachers perhaps spend more waking time with them than anyone else and are giving them truth and modeling godliness for them, they primarily operate in the sphere of formal instruction and relationship. You, on the other hand, are shaping their character in powerful ways because you are on display all their other waking hours.

What you believe to be true will be passed on by the way you respond to life. How do you talk about the president? What do you say out loud about the referee when your favorite team loses a game? How do you respond to your child’s poor grades or bad behavior? What comes out of your mouth about what takes place at work? How do you interact with what you see on television or in movies? (Even when you say nothing concerning what is seen - you are saying something very powerful! You are indicating that you think everything on the screen is okay!)

Why is it that what is spoken (or not) is so powerful? It is because it conveys what we believe to be true about God. If I do not speak to my children about my concerns over the head-chopping in movies, then I am saying that God does not care about that issue. If I meet my child’s complaint about his homework with either the “buck up and just do it” or with the “oh, honey - I’m sorry that you have it so hard... I’ll talk to the teacher about it” - I convey that God is a hard and indifferent taskmaster or one who emotes and fixes all the problems of life. If I bad-mouth the referee’s call, then I am not only saying that I can criticize an authority’s work, I am also undermining my own authority, by implicitly allowing my child to criticize my work. More importantly, I am saying it is okay to criticize God’s running of the world.

What your child brings to school is the theology that he gets from life experiences and his interpretation of your response to them. However, if you are taking your family’s life experiences and running them through the grid of WHO GOD HAS REVEALED HIMSELF TO BE IN HIS WORD, then you will have children who gain a sense of who they are designed to be and how the world works. This will impact not only the school culture, but the culture of wherever they live!