I was chatting with some parents recently while our children were swimming. One looked especially tired and he told us about what a normal week looks like in their house. To get the bills paid him and his wife both work and to make childcare feasible she works days and he works nights. Good luck explaining to these people that they need a daily family prayer time or a weekly devotional with a craft! There are countless other examples I could give of both couples and single parents working heroically hard just to stay afloat and provide for their kids. If we have anything to say about faith at home then we have to be able to speak into contexts like this.
We know what the Bible says about family units being a place where faith is shared and taught, but we also know the Bible was written in a culture that is so different to ours. We cannot try and draw easy parallels and expect parents to recreate what was possible in such different times. All this will achieve is parents feeling woefully inadequate and guilty - not a great strategy for helping people change!
My feeling is that this might be a problem tackled with a whole load of marginal gains rather than a magic bullet. Marginal gains is the term that the hugely successful British Cycling programme used to describe their approach of looking for loads of small thing they could do to add up to a big difference rather than looking for one thing that might make a dramatic change. (My co-editor Jamie also uses it to justify wearing his socks inside-out.) Perhaps we need to journey with parents to help them find these marginal gains, such as praying together at bedtime, and once you do this, creating a pause for reflection and sensing God’s presence.
This can then begin to equip parents to think about how faith becomes normal in their homes; how prayer fits into to the tiny spaces available; how faith affects the way we relate to our neighbours. This could add up to much more than trying to instigate a big thing which you lack the time and energy to maintain.
We hope that our new family resources might help with this (p.38). by suggesting simple things that can create opportunities to snatch a few moments of ‘God talk’ in the middle of the business of the day. Please give them away to the parents of the children in your group, not as homework but as a gift that might help: a marginal gain, if you like.
