(Chapter 1 from The Homeschooling Father)

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP IS NOT OPTIONAL

All Christian fathers need to exercise real spiritual leadership in their families. In home schooling families, the need for spiritual leadership is particularly acute. Home schooling fathers who fail to provide reliable spiritual leadership are asking their wives and children to fight a Spiritual Revolutionary War without power or weapons.

There is little reason to wonder why a Christian father would want his children to be home schooled. Home schooled kids can read. They can write. They can think. They have deeply ingrained moral and spiritual values. They can get along in a family setting. Home schooled children can "socialize" with children of all ages as well as with adults. As a general rule, a home schooled child will make an excellent worker, spouse, parent, and citizen. Home schooling works.

Parents do not need professional training to become excellent home school instructors. But they do need divine empowerment if they are going to have the stick-to-itiveness necessary to keep to the task for the long years as their children progress from toddler to adult.

There is much talk about "burnout" in home schooling circles. While good academic advice has its place, the only real defense against burnout for the Christian home schooling family is God's mighty power. Academic strategies deserve only a passing reference in building a defense against burnout. The Holy Spirit is no mere academic counselor. He is the indwelling person of the Trinity who can unleash the power of God Almighty in your life. Ask any weary home schooling mom. She doesn't need advice. She usually knows the right thing to do. She simply needs the power to perform what she already knows she should do.

Every home schooling father needs to begin to examine his duty to his wife and children by considering their need for spiritual empowerment. They are going to be mocked by friends, neighbors, and relatives. They may be prosecuted by the authorities. They are going to face spiritual warfare. They are going to have to do a lot of plain old hard work.

Fathers do not have the job of directly supplying the spiritual power their families need. That is God's job. But a father has the responsibility to see to it that God's power is flowing freely to each and every member of his family. A father is to serve as the family "pastor," providing spiritual leadership for his home.

Home schooling holds greater potential for spiritual success than any other form of education. Satan knows this fact as well. He will not willingly let your home schooling thrive. The forces of darkness do not want children to be raised who can not only read and write but also reason biblically and conduct spiritual warfare through godly family living. Every father should realize that his family needs his spiritual leadership in increased measure once the decision to home school has been made.

In other words, Dad, if you want your children to be home schooled, you must commit yourself to becoming a vital spiritual leader for your family.

In real life few Christian homes have any measure of spiritual leadership from Dad. Slipshod mediocrity is the rule in the homes of most born-again fathers. The vast majority of these fathers are dynamic, effective leaders and workers on the job. But things are different, a bit more laid back, at home. The sad truth is that a lot of dynamic business leaders are lackadaisical spiritual leaders.

Let me get real with you at this point. I am a better spiritual visionary in public than I am a spiritual leader at home. There are many things that I will share with you in this book that I can validate with good success in my own life. There are a good many other things, however, with which I am still struggling.

Recently I stumbled onto my wife's prayer journal that she has kept for years. It was very humbling to realize that for a number of years her number one prayer request was "Make Mike the spiritual leader of our family." I know I have made at least some progress because this request is somewhat lower on her prayer list in more recent years. But I think you get my drift.

Sometimes Christian authors and speakers give the impression that they have mastered the ideas they are sharing with the audience. There is a reluctance to share personal weakness for fear that the audience will conclude that the spiritual principles being taught don't really work.

The audience sees it differently. They see these spiritual principles as unattainable because they are being propounded by a person who appears to be living close to spiritual perfection. Audiences tend to get demoralized by apparent spiritual perfection and consequently lose any hope of mastering the principles for themselves.

Spiritual leadership is simply too important to you and your family for me to cause you to stumble on the stone of my false perfection. It is critical to our mutual success that we, reader and author, assume we are going to strive together to attain the goals which God has for each of us. I have learned some of the lessons in this chapter and in this book. There are other lessons I am still learning.

Home schooling is growing rapidly because of a phenomenon I have called the "Great-kid-average-parent" syndrome. People look at the kids produced by home schooling and say, "Those are great kids! I'd like my kids to turn out that way." Then they look at the parents and say, "Those are average parents. If they can do it, I can do it too."

In a similar manner, by writing this book I am committing myself to a high degree of public accountability to do a very responsible job of being the spiritual leader of my own family. I trust that my example will provide encouragement to my fellow "average" dads. If I can raise spiritually successful children, you can too!

The Goals of Family Spiritual Leadership

A father is usually expected to provide spiritual leadership by (1) taking his wife and children to church with him; (2) praying regularly for his wife and children; and (3) conducting regular family devotions. Most Christian fathers attain only the first of these goals with any consistency.

There is no doubt that we should routinely discharge all three of these duties. I recently realized, though, that these tasks are simply methods of family spiritual leadership, not goals.

In fact, when we focus on these three duties rather than on attaining spiritual goals, these duties tend to become distasteful tasks to be endured—the spiritual equivalent of home maintenance projects.

My desire to discharge these duties has been recently invigorated by a new focus on the spiritual goals I have for my own children. I now see these duties as a means to a desired end rather than a mere responsibility that must be discharged.

This shift in focus came as the result of teaching an adult Sunday school class on training families. I suddenly realized afresh that, as a father, I have a responsibility to make sure that my children are spiritually prepared for adulthood when they leave my home. The fact that I have two teenagers rapidly approaching adulthood has no doubt served to crystallize my thinking as well.

The parents in this class and I began to share the spiritual goals that we had for our children. Before this none of us had ever stopped to make a list of such goals. We realized that we were likely to reap vague spiritual results as a consequence of our failure to have a clear set of spiritual goals.

We discovered that another benefit of having clearly defined spiritual goals was to make possible meaningful assessment of how we were doing. It also became possible to map out specific plans for our children's spiritual training and development.

No army general would ever try to train soldiers in the haphazard way we try to train children. The army has an organized plan and a training course of increasing rigor designed to produce soldiers capable of winning the battle. Our duty to train our children is no less important. It is equally necessary for us to develop goals and plans for the training of the spiritual soldiers whom God has entrusted to us.

Our class identified twelve spiritual goals that we want to make sure that our children attain before they leave home as adults:

1. My child will be sure of his or her salvation.
2. My child will love and understand God's Word.
3. My child will know and willingly obey God's rules of right and wrong.
4. My child will be maturely walking with God.
5. My child will know his or her individual spiritual gift(s) and call from God.
6. My child will be able to teach spiritual truths to others.
7. My child will be an effective witness.
8. My child will spend daily time with God.
9. My child will have a servant's heart.
10. My child will be self-disciplined.
11. My child will be in fellowship and under the authority of a local church.
12. My child will understand the power of prayer.

When I examined this list 1 realized that there were several of these goals which my older children had already attained. But I also realized that some of these important goals would slip through the cracks in the busy years of adolescence if I didn't make a planned effort to ingrain these characteristics into my children's lives.

There are other spiritual goals you could identify for your children. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. It simply illustrates the kind of goal-setting that is critical to spiritual leadership.

In short, then, spiritual leadership requires a father to:

1. set spiritual goals for his children,
2. plan activities and training designed to inculcate these goals, and
3. periodically assess his child's progress.

Fathers who have fuzzy spiritual goals for their children
will raise spiritually fuzzy children.

The Methods of Family Spiritual LeadershipYou may be currently frustrated with your attempts 

to plan meaningful spiritual activities for your family. Once you have set spiritual goals for your children, it is easier to plan activities since you will need to make specific plans to reach specific goals. If you want your children to spend daily time in God's Word, then you need to plan activities that are designed to reach this goal. If you want your children to be effective witnesses, then you need to plan activities that will give them an opportunity to witness. They need to see you witnessing. They need to see the value of witnessing. And they need to see witnessing from God's perspective.

For years I tried to encourage my older children to spend daily time in God's Word. I tried to model regularly this behavior for the kids by having my own time in God's Word. I gave them verbal encouragement to have their own daily time. Sometimes I praised them for doing a good job. Sometimes I chastised them for irregularity. But they were typical Christians—they were not faithful every single day.

Then around Christmas of 1988, I had an idea. I told my three oldest children (those old enough to read) that if they read the Bible every single day in 1989 I would pay them $100 each. If they missed one day of reading I would deduct $25. There would be a deduction of $10 per day for every day missed thereafter. Christy, Jayme, and Katie each collected $100 on January 1 the next year.

We have continued this practice and our children continue to faithfully read their Bibles every day. Christy is now seventeen. She recently told me that I didn't need to pay her anymore because daily reading of her Bible had become a habit she thought would last for her whole life. She didn't feel she needed a material reward because she understood the spiritual value of a daily time with God.

Her response was one of the spiritual highlights of my life in terms of raising my children. She gave me solid evidence that my goal for her has truly been ingrained in her life. She reads the Bible every day because she wants to hear from God, not merely because Dad has asked this of her.

The methods you use to inculcate a spiritual goal will, of course, vary according to the goal in question. Financial or material rewards are not always appropriate. In general, you can use one or more of the following methods to encourage your children's spiritual development:

1. Model the desired behavior. If you want your children to know the value of prayer, for example, they need to see you pray. You need to give them the opportunity to see God answer your prayers. When answers come, be sure and take the time to praise the Lord and remind your children that God really answers prayer.

2. Give instruction. Spiritual goals originate in Scripture. Make sure that your children obtain foundational instruction in the Word for each of your goals. Again using the prayer example, you should teach basic scriptural truths about prayer to your children.

3. Give an opportunity to participate. Your children should be given opportunities to pray both privately and publicly. It is equally important to give your child an opportunity to share answers to his or her prayers.

4. Give vision. Giving your child only the rules, e.g., "You should pray," is insufficient. A child who is taught only rules will eventually either burn out or reject the teaching. Children need to be given spiritual vision. They need to understand the importance of the spiritual goal. They need to see the value of this goal in their own lives. They need to see this goal from God's perspective.

5. Assess progress. This simply means checking up on your child. The only method of checking up that makes any sense in this context is to sit down with your child and review things with him. Find out what he is doing and how he feels about it. This time gives you invaluable opportunity to reinforce teaching and vision.

Family devotions, church attendance, and regular prayer for your children still need to figure into your plans and activities. Many fathers have a difficult time determining what they should do in family devotions. Once you have established specific spiritual goals, family devotions become a lot easier to plan. You can use family worship time to emphasize the specific spiritual goal you are working on at the time.

Having spiritual goals and plans is not an absolute guarantee of success. But if you have no goal, you will hit it every time.

The steps of action required of a spiritual leader are not that different from the kind of leadership men are required to demonstrate on the job. We fathers need to exercise at least as much diligence in our spiritual goal setting, planning, and review as we do on our jobs. After all, the stakes are a lot higher.

God is the ultimate foundation of all our endeavors. However, from the perspective of human responsibility, your spiritual leadership is the foundation upon which your home schooling program will be built. You want your children to succeed, so give them a foundation for spiritual success. Be a real spiritual leader.