Posts by: David de Bruyn
To shape a child’s religious imagination means teaching him to rightly understand, use, and judge the arts. For a Christian parent, music is at the top of the list of the arts to be taught. Music is commanded in worship (Eph 5:19, Col 3:16), commended for worship (Ps 150), and has perhaps the greatest power [...]
Continue Reading →When it comes to shaping a child’s imagination – that part of him that will make sense of ultimate reality – little is more crucial than the arts. Music, poetry, literature, the plastic arts and theatre reach the imagination directly and shape it profoundly.
Unfortunately, many Christian parents have a concept of the [...]
Continue Reading →Ceremonies and rituals are crucial for shaping a child’s imagination. In the last post, we considered the ceremony of corporate worship.
A second ceremony we need to build into our lives is family worship. Family worship does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be sincere and thoughtful. Family worship is a time, ideally [...]
Continue Reading →Some Christians have taken in a kind of Gnosticism or neo-Platonism without knowing it. Both of those doctrines taught that the body is evil (or at least inferior and irrelevant) and the spirit is good. Consequently, under the spell of these ideas, physical matters such as eating, drinking, smelling, tasting, and touching are seen as [...]
Continue Reading →Parents are responsible for helping to form and shape a child’s overall mental map of reality. If they neglect to do so, there is no telling how the child will interpret the ‘facts’ of the gospel. Those facts are not autonomous, and the miracle of regeneration is not usually accomplished without the Spirit’s use of [...]
Continue Reading →A child’s view of ultimate reality does not come through one beautific vision, but through thousands of observations, experiences and lessons. As he grows, his first teachers of the nature of things will be his parents. Their faith teaches him what faith is, if it is desirable, and where he ought to place his. This [...]
Continue Reading →How a child imagines ultimate reality is powerfully shaped by his parents. How his parents live out their faith provides the child with an ongoing example of what a relationship with God is like, what loving God looks like, and why it ought to be chosen over secularism, materialism, or practical atheism.
However, the family [...]
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