Nursery Facilities

Children's Church

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  Proverbs 22:6

"Children Are Our Future"

For better or worse, you are responsible for much more than you bargained for back when you decided to start a family.  With the esteemed "Mommy" or "Daddy" comes a tremendous responsibility.  Now that you have been thrust into the more important role of your life, your routine, everyday choices suddenly have long-term  implications for your children.  Like it or not, you are faced with the realization that, for good or bad, parents influence the lives of future generations in ways they can't even imagine.

Throughout the progression form diapers to diplomas, there is one overarching issue that confronts every Christian parent: the spiritual growth of our children.  We read in Proverbs 22:6, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it," and we realize that we're not all that clear on what it means.  We promised ourselves that we won't make the same mistakes our parents made with us, but beyond that we're most likely hard-pressed to come up with a clear, coherent, biblical statement of what is involved in training up a child in the way he should go.

Pastors across our country are effectively teaching and preaching God's Word and lighting up many lives as a result.  But they'd be the first to tell you that the spiritual training of children was never meant to be relegated to a single hour on Sunday morning.  Alongside gathering together at church, spiritual training was meant to be lived out every day before children by loving parents and grandparents.

What We Potentially Give Our Children Through Spiritual Training

• Eternal life through Jesus' death.

• A personal, loving relationship with God.

• God's guidance, wisdom and direction for their lives, as well as His discipline, correction, and forgiveness for when they make mistakes.

• A working knowledge of God's principles so that they understand the practical rules that govern life--and the resulting wisdom for life and life's complex situations.

• God's love in their hearts and an understanding of the principles that govern interpersonal relations so they can have healthy relationships with others.

• God's strength and help for and through difficult times.

• Purpose and a sense of value through knowing that God made them unique, loves them, and has a special plan for their lives.

• Strong character through openness to the working of the Holy Spirit.

• A strong understanding of right and wrong.

• Thankful hearts, teachable spirits, strong morals, and a desire for personal growth.

Spiritual training contains the lessons, the foundation, for all that our children will face in life.

Relationship Is Your Priority - The old adage is true--people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.  Our children need more than a list of precepts and principles to embrace.  If we want the values we teach them to stick, we must apply heavy amounts of the glue we call love.  We cannot have one without the other.  Children perceive parental instruction through emotional lenses.  Those lenses are framed by the quality of the parent-child relationship.

The Bible Is Your Handbook - God gave us an instruction manual for life--the Bible.  The Bible is "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness"  2 Timothy 3:16.  Teaching the Bible to our children is not an exercise in teaching religious ideas and ceremonies; it is teaching them how to live and have a good life.  The Bible is their guide-book, their lifeline, their textbook, their help menu, their answer, their emergency first aid kit and, most importantly, their key to knowing God.  If we believe the Bible is God's Word, we will not only teach our children that its contents should guide their lives, but we will also demonstrate our belief by using it as a guide for our own lives.

Life Is Your Classroom - God has designed the world and us so that learning about the things of God and applying them to everyday life happen together.  That's the idea behind Deuteronomy 6:6-9  We're to impress God's commands on our children daily.  We're to talk about them when we sit at home, when we're on the road, when we lie down at night, and when we get up in the morning.  This can't be accomplished merely by taking our children to church and reading them Bible stories.  We need to demonstrate to our children--through our growth, by our example, and by when and what we teach--that our faith is about who we are, how we act, and what we do as well as about what we believe.  When we teach our children about their faith in this way, connecting our teaching with our life, our teaching method matches our message and becomes instantly more effective.

Your Methods Should Target Your Child - This is a very important principle when it comes to teaching our children: We can't expect children to rise to our level; we need to go to theirs.  When Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me.  Mark 10:14, He stopped doing what He was doing to communicate truth to adults and adapted His approach for a new audience.  Mark 10:16 says, "And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them."  Jesus changed what He was doing in order to be effective with the children.