Revolutionary Parenting: Raising Your Kids to Become Spiritual Champions by George Barna

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Experts who author books on parenting suggest that good parenting—or, at least, survival as a parent—encompasses five dimensions:

  1. Personal attributes, such as patience, love, a positive attitude, and self-confidence.
  2. Parental practices, including playing with children; establishing parental authority and control; meting out discipline and punishment; resolving conflict with the child; developing an emotional connection; utilizing drugs and vaccinations to foster physical and mental health; and praying together.
  3. Parenting philosophy and perspectives like coming to peace with one’s own past as well as knowing how to plan for effective parenting.
  4. Parental skills, including the use of logic, creating efficient developmental systems, communicating effectively, and being well-organized.
  5. Producing tangible outcomes in the child’s life, including articulation, generosity, contentment, independence, a love of learning, physical fitness, and cultural sensitivity.

Parenting by default is adopting the parenting habits and patterns driven by cultural forces.  The second set of influences that shapes our parenting choices and behaviors is that derived from personal experience and outcomes.  Third, the trial-and-error approach might be considered experimental parenting.

Barna offers a different model—one that I recognize was used by both Wayne & Connie Smith in raising my wife and my parents in raising me.  In this parenting model, God’s Word provides the perspective and the marching orders on how to raise a young person. The goal of such child rearing is to raise children who make their faith in God, and relationship with Him, their highest priority in life, and proceed to live as intentional and devoted servants of God. The role of parents is to guide the child to understand the principles and outcomes that honor God and advance His purposes. Success in this venture is measured by transformed lives.  Barna labels this approach “Revolutionary Parenting.”

By “spiritual champions,” Barna means individuals who have embraced Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord; accept the Bible as truth and as the guide for life; and seek to live in obedience to its principles and in search of ways to continually deepen their relationship with God. Spiritual champions live in ways that are noticeably different from the norm—even when compared to the average churchgoer.

Barna and his team combed through more than ten thousand personal interviews conducted over several years to identify people in their twenties who were leading “transformed” lives.  Barna wanted young adults whose faith was robust: In addition to being active in church life, they were engaged in spiritual activities apart from the control or management of their churches, and they had significant personal faith lives that were mature and still in active development.

As his research suggested, there was tremendous consistency between what the parents said they did and what their spiritually transformed children remembered experiencing.

Barna is convinced based on his research related to child development and spiritual growth that the spiritual war occurring in individual lives is pretty much won or lost by the age of thirteen. As Barna concludes, “What parents do with their youngsters prior to the teen years is of paramount importance to the Kingdom of God on earth.”

There was not one single set of practices or approaches identified, however.  Every one of the Revolutionary Parents pieced the puzzle together differently. But knowing the pieces, and what the puzzle might look like in the end, is itself valuable as we seek to honor God and advance His Kingdom through our efforts to raise our children.

What does God measure? Our hearts. He created us to love, serve, and obey Him. So He studies the indicators of our devotion to Him. As parents, then, our job is to raise spiritual champions. The responsibility for raising spiritual champions, according to the Bible, belongs to parents. The spiritual nurture of children is supposed to take place in the home. Organizations and people from outside the home might support those efforts, but the responsibility is squarely laid at the feet of the family. This is not a job for specialists. It is a job for parents.

As deeply as you desire to do what is best for your children, God wants it even more urgently. As we rely upon Him rather than our own ideas and wisdom, we can be assured that our young ones will experience the best that God has to offer, through us and others.

What specific outcomes are you committed to facilitating in your child’s life? A parent who lacks clear goals for his or her child is not likely to achieve desirable results.

5 Tips from Revolutionary Parents

  1. Your impact on your children’s lives is proportional to the depth of the relationship you have fostered with them, which implies devoting substantial amounts of time to building your relationship with each child. (Barna’s research underscores the silliness of the “quality time” argument; there is no substitute for investing substantial time in your relationship with your children.)
  2. You must wholeheartedly embrace the outcomes you are pushing the child to achieve.
  3. Impact is derived by coaching “in the moment.” Your parenting efforts must take place in “real time,” not days, hours, or even minutes after an event occurs.
  4. Great parents are great communicators, which includes not only telling your children what they need to know, but also observing pertinent behavior closely and listening carefully.
  5. The parent must have a comprehensive plan for reaching the “promised land.”

Parenting Is Job One: A final condition for success that Barna discovered is that those who produce spiritual champions embrace parenting as their primary job in life.

Growing Spiritually, Together

One of the idiosyncrasies of these families is that they tend to delve into faith matters as a family unit with two different themes:

  1. Family conversations that bring biblical views into their shared lives, and
  2. Efforts to regularly engage in faith activities (Bible study, worship, prayer) that model the integration of faith into their lives.

Barna’s research revealed an amazing insight into just how much time was spent in dialogue between parent and child on a typical day. The figures ranged between 90 and 120 minutes (verified by both the parent and child, independent of each other). To place that in context, the typical American family registers less than fifteen minutes of direct parent-child conversation each day.

Most parents have a survival-based philosophy rather than a goal-oriented philosophy.  Revolutionary Parents “Plan It, Measure It, Revise It.”  They set tangible and measurable parenting goals and held themselves accountable. Three out of every four of these parents (73 percent) developed and pursued goals. That’s about fifteen times the proportion among other parents.

Ninety-six percent of the Revolutionary Parents interviewed took the time and made the effort to learn the unique nature of each of their children and to build a parenting framework around each child’s distinctives.  (This was certainly the approach Wayne & Connie Smith took, as they had two very different daughters!)

Yet every single Revolutionary Parent interviewed agreed that the most important focus of their children’s training was the development of godly character.

One factor that repeatedly drew attention among the children who became spiritual champions was the dependability they had in their home environment. The consistency of people, roles, and choices seemed to provide these young people with a series of lifestyle variables they could eliminate as possible anxiety factors.

96 percent of them said you would wear yourself out and lose your relationship with your child if you fought them over every circumstance on which you disagreed. Those who have raised spiritual champions see their parenting as establishing the certainty of their love for their children, knowing what wisdom to impart, sharing significant experiences to train them for the future, providing pointed feedback regarding the choices they make, and backing off the rest of the time to allow the children to grow through personal experience.

When asking Revolutionary Parents to identify the chief rules they relied upon with their children, these were the common threads that might serve as a valuable foundation to consider:

  • Always tell the truth, regardless of the circumstances or consequences; strive to be known as honest, reliable, and trustworthy.
  • Never cheat or steal; that brings dishonor on yourself and disrespect to the victim.
  • Always show respect to other people, no matter how you feel about them, through your attitude and language; it reflects the love that God has for them.
  • Help others whenever the opportunity arises; we are servants.
  • Control your tongue: Swearing and angry words are inappropriate.
  • Do not judge other people’s motives; only judge their behavior insofar as it personally affects you or family members.
  • Take good care of your body; consistent hygiene and physical exercise are important to maintain.
  • Be active in the pursuit of your faith, in whatever form that journey takes.
  • Work hard in school to produce the best grades and most excellent work possible.
  • Carry out your household chores as a means of pulling your weight in the family, honoring family members through service, and developing good habits.
  • Make sure at least one parent knows where you are at all times; if you’re away from home and want to go somewhere else, get parental approval first.
  • Accept the penalties for inappropriate behavior; it is not a sign of anger or dislike by the elders who discipline you but a sign of caring and love designed to facilitate growth.

Surveys show that the typical preteen child devotes an average of more than forty hours per week to ingesting media content. Giving children the freedom to determine their own media diet was ranked as one of the most insidious weaknesses of today’s parents, producing outcomes that will haunt their children—and our society—for years to come.

As one Revolutionary Parent explained, “I’ve concluded that if God’s will is to be done in Brandon’s life, the most important thing is not whether he has a college degree, but whether he serves God. I’ve come to appreciate the fact—and to thank God for it—that Brandon is a committed follower of Christ and lives in ways that are consistent with our beliefs. I know that pleases God. Having a college degree would have pleased me, but it’s more important that he honor the Lord.”

73 percent of the Revolutionary Parents placed “a lot of emphasis” upon protecting their children from negative influences. That goal led to measures such as limiting their child’s media exposure and assisting in their selection of friends.

It wasn’t just mothers who made sacrifices for the good of their children; Revolutionary fathers did so as well. Whether it was their refusal to pursue occupational advancement because of the time and travel demands or not participating in sports leagues or professional organizations because of their time commitments, the willingness to prioritize the family was a hallmark of fathers who were intent upon raising spiritual champions.

Various studies and researchers have tried to estimate the importance of learning through modeling, producing a vast array of results, but it seems likely that somewhere around 60 percent of the learning that affects people’s behavior is based upon watching someone they know and trust doing something significant.

Approved by God

One of the nonnegotiable factors imbedded within the parenting behaviors of the great parents was their insistence on faith in God and obedience to biblical principles as the driving force behind the household culture and their child-rearing practices.

While it might be ideal to engage in such Bible study every day, Barna found that few parents in our research did so; they were more likely to deal with Bible content once or twice a week (excluding times when they were at church together).

Faith Is the Foundation

Most Americans (84 percent of all adults) claim they are Christian. However, research clearly delineates different types of Christians. There are Revolutionaries, who are “People for whom God is their priority in life, and everything they do stems from their perception that they live only to love, obey, and serve God.”

Revolutionary Parents use a lot of “God talk”—not empty phrases, but a genuine intermingling of their relationship with God and their daily experiences and choices.  Most Revolutionary Parents interviewed came from a range of backgrounds and had diverse levels of educational achievement, but they tended to believe in the power of planning for the future. Their plans were based upon specific goals they sought to achieve in their parenting efforts. There were, of course, two distinct types of goals: those for themselves (which we have touched upon in previous chapters as we have moved through the research results) and those relevant to their children.

Revolutionary Parents used spiritual growth tools. First, they desired their children to develop critical skills pertaining to their faith. The skills they emphasized most often had to do with teaching their children how to pray, how to study the Bible, and how to worship. Those goals were pursued in the context of the type of child they hoped to raise: one who always did his or her best, who thought carefully and aggressively about truth and appropriate living, and who attempted to honor God and family in everything he or she did. The evidence shows that these parents finished well.

Parenting, then, is a never-ending process of learning more about God, ourselves, and how we can enhance the quality of the lives He has entrusted to us. Consequently, just as we know that our obedience to God’s commands and principles blesses Him, that commitment to obedience also blesses our own children.

In the course of creating a comforting and nurturing environment, as well as providing their children with valuable resources and relationships, parents also have another task: to nudge their children’s development forward by introducing them to the value of hard work.  One benefit of reading the Bible is not simply gleaning knowledge that produces personal holiness. The ultimate objective is to generate an urgency to honor God at all times, not only through personal obedience but also through expressions of worship.

To succeed, parents must answer a very fundamental question, “Am I making over these children in my image or God’s?”

How do you translate God’s principles and commands into “success” in your children, and what are you doing to increase the chances of producing such outcomes?”

Have you—like most parents—become comfortable outsourcing the spiritual growth of your children?  Sure, you may pray together a few times a day and talk about spiritual matters regularly, but is there an unconscious reliance upon “them” to teach a lot of the critical biblical content and to provide a variety of experiences designed to lock down their relationship with God and many core principles?

To be a Revolutionary Parent, we need not only be cognizant of the differences in personality and capabilities of each of our children but conceive a distinct plan for each of them!

May these lessons from Revolutionary Parents—and honoring the legacy I see in Wayne Smith—serve you well, as you shoot for the stars and have children who do the same!