Children are not missionaries

When I made the decision to homeschool my then 3-year-old baby girl, several people tried to chastise me with this statement.

From Christians nonetheless.

It troubled me because I had worked with kids for several years and all I saw was massive failure when it came to leading our children to Christ.

The surveys have consistently shown that the majority of children raised in the church leave by age 18.

And what was particularly devastating was that this fact had shown to be true in my own life. Just about every peer I grew up with in church had chosen to leave.

Why does this not alarm Christian parents?

If a business had a product that had a 60-80% FAILURE rate, who would buy it? Who would trust their “expertise”? Wouldn’t you think that they were doing something wrong?

I wasn’t about to allow the children God entrusted me with to be fed to the wolves.

My children were not missionaries. They were vulnerable prey.

If they don’t have the physical strength to fight off an attacker, what makes anyone believe that they have the strength to fight off a spiritual attacker?

Do your children actually have the strength to “put on the full armor of God, so that [they] can take [their] stand against the devil’s schemes (Eph. 6:11)?

And you’re telling me that your children have the mental capacity to know that , “[their] struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12)?

Read what the Apostle Paul writes about children!! ➡️

“Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth (Eph. 4:14).

It does not sound like Paul thinks children are missionaries.

And we know what Christ warned about those that cause children to fall…

“But if you cause one of these little ones who trust in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matt. 18:6, Mark 9:42).

Children are not missionaries.

Until your child has the mental capacity to separate themselves from you and see themselves as a separate individual, you still need to witness to them and work hard to lead them to Christ.