“Why don’t we just call it a baby dedication?”
Several times per year, following the tradition of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church — the church that planted us — we observe what we call a parent-congregational prayer covenant. We invite both new families and families who have added children to their family to stand before the church and make commitments to raise their children according to Biblical priorities. Then, we invite the congregation to stand and make commitments to love and support the families. During this ceremony, church and family “covenants” together to raise these children to know Christ.
We do not call it a baby dedication, because that’s not what we’re doing. In the new covenant, each person, regardless of family, must stand before Christ. Parents do not have the ability to dedicate their babies to Christ any more than to dedicate each other. Undoubtedly, children raised in Christian homes benefit immensely by growing up hearing the gospel repeatedly and witnessing its impact in the church. But they must repent and believe for themselves.
Our parent-congregational prayer covenant is a celebration of the partnership that exists between the family and the church. The Bible is clear that families are primarily responsible for instructing children in the Lord and providing loving discipline toward flourishing in Christ. The church supports families through prayer, training, encouragement, reinforcement and assistance. When it’s working like it should, it’s a beautiful picture of mutual dependence and love toward a goal that depends completely on God’s grace.
I often encounter two errors in how families view the church. On the one hand, many families err by completely delegating the discipleship of their children to the church. They view the church like a sports training facility. Just as you drop your son off at the basketball gym to work on his jump shot, so you drop him off at church to learn Christian morality. But discipleship is not like basketball. We’re not talking about a set of skills or even basic morality.
When it comes to following Christ, we are attempting to model what it looks like for an entire life to be submitted to Christ’s lordship. A couple hours per week doing church stuff will never suffice. Just as Jesus modeled his new way of living daily before his disciples, parents are called by God to implore their own children, with 1 Corinthians 11:1 reading like this ... “Follow me as I follow Christ.” This task demands that each parent models a life that prioritizes Christ in the home daily.
But there’s another error that I’m seeing increasingly these days. Many Christian families view the church as a threat to their family’s health and flourishing. In a world where families are being pulled in so many different directions, the church often feels like just another time-consuming commitment among many. When the church asks for commitment, many families sense threat and instinctually move to shield their kids from discomfort. They’re so busy already. Do we really need another commitment? This view may seem the opposite of the first error, but its root cause is the same. Both views underappreciate the role of the church in God’s plan by relegating it to just another commitment among many.
Two to three hours per week is not sufficient to adequately train your child to follow Jesus, but those two to three hours per week are irreplaceably important in supporting and reinforcing you as you daily labor to train your child to follow Jesus. The church, when it’s firing on all cylinders, offers your children weekly examples of saints at all stages of life fighting to abide in Christ and persevere in the faith. You simply won’t find that anywhere else on earth.
Every Sunday, a 50-something-year-old church member picks up one of my sons and brings him to church early to pray for the service. Every Monday morning, a deacon and his wife drive two cars to my house so that they can transport four of my children to a weekly ministry they started for high-school students called Donuts and Devotions. Every Wednesday morning, another son of mine walks to a local breakfast joint to meet a group of grown men — some more than three times his age — to pray and talk about life and the Bible. Every Friday, a young man picks up two of my sons and takes them to McDonald’s for discipleship. My two daughters participate in a similar meeting with a young woman.
I don’t make my kids do any of these activities, and I didn’t ask any of these church members to serve my kids in these ways. All these commitments arose organically through my children participating in the life of the church, and I have no doubt that my children benefit immeasurably from spending time with these dear saints. Every time my kids leave the house to participate in one of these excursions, I thank God for the partnership of the church.