Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”

The concept as the home/family being an essential arena for the teaching and modelling of the Christian faith is a thoroughly Biblical one. We find passages like today’s in a number of places in the Bible. We cannot ‘outsource’ discipleship training to the church or the Sunday school. These have important roles to play, to be sure, but they should be supplementary for children from Christian homes. Our young should be able to learn about Christianity in the family, from who their parents are, and from what they say. Instruction and example belong together. In Joyce Huggett’s book, ‘Listening to God’, she says she learned to pray from being very young, because she saw her dad pray every evening before bed. There are things we inhale (good and bad) from the very atmosphere in which we are raised. It will never be perfect. We are all sinners, but is it a God-honouring place, where Jesus is Lord, and church life is appropriately prioritised? Rod Dreher says to parents: your children ‘’need to see that you are serious about the spiritual life.’’

In his book, ‘the Benedict Option’, he has a section headed ‘Turn your home into a Domestic Monastery.’ He goes on to say:

‘’Just as the monastery’s life is ordered toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty). If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family’s life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.” (Pages 124,125)