WRITE IT ON THEIR HEARTS:
Practical Help For Discipling Your Kids
By Chris Swain and Melissa Swain
The Good Book Company. 149 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 784 987 749
‘Discipling your children will be one of the greatest challenges you ever embrace’ (p.54). With such a huge task before us as parents (and one that could not matter more) we are grateful for wise counsel in this area and Write It On Their Hearts is certainly a book which gives this.
The book is structured around six principles which Jesus modelled in his discipleship (love, prayer, connection, scripture, accountability and rest), with a chapter developing each of these themes. The writer encourages us to use time we already spend with our children for discipleship, rather than trying to shoehorn extras into our already busy schedules.
Put into practice
The book is littered with examples of how this has worked in practice for the writer with his own children, between the ages of eight and the teenage years. Families with younger children could still learn much from the book, though it is not written with direct application to them.
Whilst the writer does not expound in detail many Bible passages, he is very clear that discipleship starts and ends with the word of God. This is an encouraging note and makes the book less of a ‘how-to’ guide and rather one to inspire our hearts and actions. The book suggests structures for the six principles with memorable acronyms and aims to be realistic for parents. Each chapter ends with a list of bullet-point applications and questions, which helps prevent it becoming overwhelming. At the end of the book there is also a plan of how it could work across the year, focusing on different aspects of discipleship for each day or week.
Cultural context
A few small points might need adjustment from an American context and the book may have benefited from more detail about how the mother’s and father’s roles may differ and complement one another. However, overall this book has much to offer: my husband and I will be chatting, thinking and praying through how it could benefit our own family.
