Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everybody. Thanks for listening to wake up, look up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weirock. In today's episode, we're talking about communal parenting, and we're asking the question, who can tell a kid no? And this is prompted by an article I read in the Atlantic by Stephanie Murray.

It was called bring back communal kid discipline. It was prompted by an experience she had as a mother in Prague when she was on a metro and another adult corrected the behavior of her child. They did it in a kind way, in a firm way, and without any regard for how she felt about it. And her immediate and visceral response was, wow. I kind of liked that.

She appreciated that this person saw her kid's behavior as a kind of communal thing, as something to speak into, as even in some ways contributing to her parenting by reinforcing appropriate behavior in a public space from a different adult perspective. Now she acknowledges in her article, this reaction surprised her a little bit because it's not how we as Americans tend to think about parenting. In America, parenting is a privatized thing. You have your way of doing it, I have my way of doing it. I stay out of your approach, and you stay out of mine.

That's kind of how we like it. But historically, even in this country, we people have not thought about parenting this way. Parenting has been understood as a communal enterprise, meaning the community has a collective responsibility for shaping the behavior or character of a child. Now not over and against the parent and not above the parent, but in collaboration with the parent. It's not too long ago in United States history where neighbors actually felt empowered and enabled to tell someone else's kid no, to correct their behavior, to expect them to something more.

And even still around the world, in cultures that are far more communal, that still happens. It begs the question, at least that's the question the article is after, would we be better off if we thought about parenting this way? Well, let's answer that from a biblical perspective, and I'll I'll say this as a starting point. The bible very much so envisions the church as a family. It it goes so far as the apostle Paul in first Corinthians 12 referring to the church as members of one body, Jesus being the head and then all of us playing a part.

That's another way of saying that all that God is doing in the world, he's doing through the church and we all are a part of, but not the whole of that body. Meaning to say, if one of the things God is doing is raising up my children in their own understanding of the gospel and their own understanding of righteousness and of sin and of what is expected of them, then I should anticipate that the body writ large will pay play a role in that. That obviously as their father, I'm primarily responsible under God. Deuteronomy six makes that clear. It's my job to put God's word in front of them, to shape their character, to point them to Jesus, but it's the job of the church, it's the job of the community to come alongside me and to help me in that, especially when I'm not around.

This is the work of the church in kids ministry, student ministry, but also just in social settings, a kind of gentle reinforcing of what's right and what's wrong, of what's expected and what is actually good. We have to keep in mind that children need to hear from multiple voices. Most of us who had a positive childhood would say it wasn't just our parents. It was coaches and teachers and, bible school leaders and Sunday school leaders and different adult voices who who weren't necessarily saying anything different than our parents. But for whatever reason, we could hear it from them in a way that we couldn't hear it from mom and dad.

This is when the writer of Proverbs 22 says to train up a child in the way that it should go. I think we read that as a verse for parents, but I think the way that even Hebrew culture would have understood it is was actually a verse for the community, that the community is training up children in all the different ways we love and care for and serve our kids to live life in a particular way. Keep in mind that discipline or correction is not a sign of a lack of love, but actually the sign of love. The writer of Hebrews says that the Lord disciplines the one he loves. When we're ambivalent about the behavior and character of other people's kids, what we're really saying is they're not our problem and we really couldn't care less.

Neither of those attitudes belong in the church. The apostle Paul says in Galatians six that we're to carry one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And one of those burdens is the task of raising children. Now this is not a podcast about parental abdication. Parents matter.

We've covered that, ad nauseam here on Hulu. But I also wanna elongate that to say, parents matter and they need help. Parents matter and they need reinforcement. And that reinforcement comes through other adults in the church, adults who love Jesus, who understand grace, who love our kids reinforcing gently, softly, but firmly what is good and what is right and what is best. It doesn't take a village to raise a child.

It takes a church. It takes the whole church. So let's get started. Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up Look Up.

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