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Podcast: I Want to Disciple My Kids but Don't Know Where to Start (Jared Kennedy)

September 12, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Common Questions about Discipling Kids

In today's episode, Jared Kennedy talks about what it means to disciple your children and about the long-term impact that investment can have.

Keeping Your Children's Ministry on Mission

Keeping Your Children's Ministry on Mission

Jared Kennedy

Jared Kennedy shares a four-fold strategy for gospel-centered, missional children’s ministry.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:44 - The YouTube Generation and Deconversion

Matt Tully
Jared thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jared Kennedy
It’s so good to be here.

Matt Tully
We’re going to talk today about children and how to disciple them for parents, but also thinking about the church’s role in how we as parents are to disciple and train up our children. In your book you tell the deconversion story of two people: Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. They are the hosts of the extremely popular YouTube channel. I actually checked this morning and there are over 17 million subscribers on YouTube of this channel called Good Mythical Morning. Some of our listeners might be familiar with that. They create these funny videos that are generally, historically family friendly, and they very notably claimed to be Christians for a long time and drew a strong Christian base. But you tell a little bit of the story of their deconversion. I wonder if you could just share a little bit about what happened there and the impact that you saw that in particular have on Christian families.

Jared Kennedy
Rhett and Link were part of a large college ministry. They were known even in the children’s and parenting world. They created videos for kids about the Bible. I think my daughters have their song that helps you memorize all of the judges in the book of Judges.

Matt Tully
So they actually were creating Christian-specific content.

Jared Kennedy
They were creating Christian-specific content in affiliation with Phil Vischer, and this was after Veggie Tales, but creating Christian-specific content. As Rhett tells the story, they began to question first of all the Bible’s teaching about judgment and judgment of the lost who haven’t heard the gospel. Then, they began to ask questions about Christianity and science and began to ask questions about matters of sexuality. Slowly but surely, they walked away from the Christian faith. Those in the college ministry world that had served with them were really floored by this, and I think a lot of kids in student ministry were—when I say student ministry, I mean high school ministry—were taken aback by this as well. Alisa Childers wrote for us at The Gospel Coalition, reflecting on that, and she’s an apologist who writes some online. She had youth pastors and parents contacting her saying, This has really hurt my son (or daughter)*.

Matt Tully
Why is that?

Jared Kennedy
I can think back to going to my grandparents’ house, and my granddad had his morning routine every morning He would put his slippers on, come down the hallway, walk outside, get the morning newspaper, and he would sit at the dining room table there and open the newspaper and read through the news as he drank his coffee and ate his breakfast. My grandmother had Spurgeon open at the same time.

Matt Tully
That sounds like a couple of awesome people.

Jared Kennedy
I think it was just a matter of habit for him. That’s the way he lived his life. He was opening up the morning news every day. And I think for a lot of kids in Generation Z and Generation Y their morning habit is to pull open their phones and go to YouTube and to watch those videos. What happens, whether you’re reading the news every day or you’re reading Spurgeon every day or opening YouTube every day, is that the habits we have in our life form our affections. So I think there are a number of kids for whom Rhett and Link’s content was clean and family friendly. Parents even who had policed their kids’ viewing content and thought, Okay, if they’re gonna watch a video, this is probably one of the better ones to watch, had still built what they felt was a relationship from a distance with these two guys. And so when they began to deconvert, when they began to step away from the faith, it became a real stumbling block for a lot of students.

Matt Tully
Their story fits so cleanly into this pattern that it seems like we see more and more today of people who at one point claimed the Christian faith and even had a place of prominence and influence as Christians explicitly who then deconvert or deconstruct their faith in some public way. And then that can be pretty unsettling and maybe cause a lot of questions to arise, especially in young people who have followed them online for some time. You refer to this generation as “the YouTube generation.” Can you explain more? What are the characteristics of the YouTube generation?

Jared Kennedy
I think there are a number of things. I think being shaped by outside influences, because they’re the most screen-saturated generation we’ve had in while. I don’t have a statistic in front of me. But I think one of the marks of Generation Z is that historically, drift toward maybe anti-Christian sentiment or drift toward sexual identities that are opposed to the Scripture was something we primarily saw in urban areas. And so what’s happened with this generation is so much of what’s happening in Hollywood and elsewhere is online. And so both in urban areas and in rural areas kids are exposed to these kinds of things at younger ages.

Matt Tully
The Internet has just made all of that stuff that might have been isolated, as you said to certain kinds of areas or pockets in the country, it’s made it accessible to any kid anywhere.

Jared Kennedy
That’s absolutely right. My approach is I don’t think that—and when I say “my approach”, I don’t think the Bible’s approach is to just totally withdraw from that. I think there are certainly places for us to think about the kind of friends our kids are hanging out with, think about the kind of content they’re watching, think about the kind of environments that are shaping their worldview. So those things are essential for parents. But I wanna be able to watch a Marvel movie with my daughters and talk about both the things that are contrary to Christianity and think about the themes there that maybe highlight great character, or are maybe even windows to ways we see the story of the gospel or the longing people have for a story like the gospel in our culture as well. I think with Rhett and Link, you think about the arguments they put forward for leaving Christianity aren’t new. The kinds of things they were talking about are things that have been around for years and years.

Matt Tully
They are objections to Christianity.

Jared Kennedy
Yeah, and you can buy a book by C. S. Lewis or Tim Keller and see arguments against the arguments they’re making. I think what parents really need to be aware of though is the way that the habit of going back to these voices again and again forms affections. One of our responsibilities as parents, but also as the church, is to help form the thinking, the affections, and the life of the next generation. And so that’s where not so much just decrying what’s out there in the world; we wanna be clear about calling sin sin, but we want to have an intentionality about helping kids be formed in a better story than the story that’s being told out in the world.

09:25 - Unique Challenges for Parents in Discipling This Generation

Matt Tully
I want to get into that and explore what that looks like to give them, as you said, this better vision, a better story, to be a part of and be drawn into. Before we get into that, are there any other unique challenges that you think parents are facing today when it comes to discipling their kids that you would say are in some way unique to this generation?

Jared Kennedy
We’ve talked about the culture, and I think the other challenge is one that is more unique to evangelical culture. And so I’d love to talk about the church for just a moment. I I think in the church, especially in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, we really leaned in to—if you talk to a youth pastor or a children’s minister at that time and the church, they would quote, “Become all things to all people.” And they were thinking very intentionally about—and this is a commendable thing. It’s a missional impulse. And if you talked to me during that time, I would’ve said this too.

Matt Tully
Is it contextualization?

Jared Kennedy
Yeah, to think about how to make youth ministry and children’s ministry as contextual. You would hear kid friendly and fun. You would say, When a kid goes home from children’s ministry and a parent asked them how was it, what do you want the kid to say? And the answer that kid’s ministers would to you was not, * Here’s what our Bible story was about today, but, I had fun today and I was loved*.

Matt Tully
And I wanna go back.

Jared Kennedy
And I want to go back. So I think we thought very intentionally about how to contextualize ministry for kids. And I think contextual ministry is a really important thing. You wanna make it so it’s not just entertainment for kids, but also just shaping ministry for where kids are in their stages of development and their learning. But I think what that created for parents was sometimes a feeling that, The youth pastor’s really good at contextualizing the Bible for my students. And then if you’re in a larger church, The children’s minister’s really great at making the Bible come alive for my kids. I don’t know that I can do that. And it creates this situation where it’s almost like the reformation—a clergy-laity divide where the people in the pew feel like they don’t have the capacity to train their kids in the faith.

Matt Tully
Yeah, I can’t come up with every week two hours worth of really fun, exciting games that make a huge mess and have thirty kids involved. It’s hard to compete with the production of even a small church’s youth program.

Jared Kennedy
So I think the tendency then for parents are like, I wanna honor my kids’ dignity. I want to celebrate how they’re unique creations in God’s image. And so I wanna build them up. I also recognize, because I live with them every day, that my kids are sinners. And so I wanna call out their sin and correct their sin. But if you stop the gospel at creation and fall, and the implications of the creation and fall, and you don’t go on to redemption and consummation, it’s a truncated gospel. And I think sometimes moms and dads had the tendency to think— sometimes in the family ministry world we call it a “drop-off mentality.” I take my kids to softball, and the coach teaches them softball skills that I may not know as a parent. I take my kid to violin lessons, and whether I played violin or not, that violin teacher can teach them that. And I also take my kid to Sunday school, because the minister there will teach my kid the faith, even if I’m not equipped and prepared to do that.

Matt Tully
I wanna explore why parents might be doing that and why they might not feel equipped or prepared, but I guess I think many of us have heard that critique before of the way that some parents view children’s ministry at a church or even their own role. I’m just curious, from your over a decade of experience in children’s ministry in a church, how common is that actually? Would you say that really is the mindset? Is it dominant? Is it just 10% of parents? Where would you put it in there?

Jared Kennedy
I think that mentality was very strong in the 90s and early 2000s. I think what happened in the early 2000s is a number Crossway authors and a number of people began to write about the primary role of parents in discipleship of the next generation. And I think a number of parents now have heard that preached from the pulpit at their church. They’ve read about in books. I actually think what happens now is moms and dads are like, I know it’s my responsibility, but I have no idea what to do. And so I think the first answer to that is a theological answer, and that is just as Luther addressed the clergy-laity divide in the Reformation by teaching the priesthood of all believers, I think we need to encourage moms and dads to see just how equipped the Lord has made them already in Christ. We need to encourage them and say, You have the Holy Spirit, and so press in*. For all of us, anything we start that’s new is hard and you figure it out as you go along. You start a new job, you drive a new car and it’s weird—all the gadgets are weird. It takes a little while to learn how to do it.

Matt Tully
But you’ve gotta start.

Jared Kennedy
But to start. Pick up that Bible story book, or pick up that devotional and read through with your kids. Sing a song in the car—I almost said, Put on a CD, which is showing my age.

Matt Tully
My kids don’t really even know what a CD is.

Jared Kennedy
Mine do, but they’re older now. Flip to that Christian channel on your streaming audio, and then sing those songs together with the family in the car. Recognize that because you have the Holy Spirit of God living within you, that as you obey the command to teach your kids, the Lord will empower you to grow in that. And so I think from the parents’ perspective, we want to just really encourage them. And then I think from the church’s perspective, I think sometimes we wanna live either in a high production world where everything looks polished and beautiful, which is not the world of allergy shots and broken arms and soccer practice and running kids here and there in carpool that most parents live in. And so I think when we equip parents, it’s not that we want to water down the gospel, but we wanna think about what are the kinds of tools we’re giving them that actually fit the real life of most people in our church. So bring those tools down in ways that are the kind of—like flashcard things that you can tape up in your car.

17:34 - What If My Kids Aren’t Interested in Being Discipled?

Matt Tully
You’re thinking day to day about the experience of living together in a home. You’ve mentioned already the concern of not knowing where to start—the stumbling block that parents might face there. I had a couple others I wanted to ask you about and see how you would respond. The second one would be,My kids aren’t interested. I’ve tried to do some kind of intentional discipleship with my kids, whether they’re young teens or their middle-aged teens, and they’re just not interested in it. They’re bored, they complain. What would you say to that parent? Have you ever experienced anything like that?

Jared Kennedy
Absolutely. My kids are 17, 15, and 12, and so we’ve definitely had seasons where they’re just not in to gathering for yeah family devotions. I think the first thing I would say is do it anyway. It’s like when your kids are really young and one of them pulls the other’s hair, and—

Matt Tully
That’s never happened in my house either.

Jared Kennedy
Really?

Matt Tully
No.

Jared Kennedy
And they’re just super angry with one another, and you tell the older daughter, You need to apologize to your little sister. And she says, I don’t want to you need to. You say, Well, you need to. You have to. You stay the course and you say you do it anyway. I’ve heard folks say, Don’t make a kid apologize if they don’t feel it. My response to that is a kid will never feel it unless you make them apologize. Sometimes it’s the habit of doing it that leads our affections. Sometimes it’s our affection. Our affections very often lead our actions, but sometimes it’s the habit of doing that action that actually leads our affections and creates the environment where the Holy Spirit can show up and bring that life within us.

Matt Tully
The goal is the affections. We wanna get to that, but you don’t always just wait for the affections before you cultivate the habit.

Jared Kennedy
Yeah. We actually believe, don’t we, that it’s preaching the word, in the word in prayer, in the habit of bringing that to bear, that the Holy Spirit works to make people alive. He does that through those means of grace. It’s why it’s called a spiritual discipline. This is not something you’re always gonna want to do any more than I want to eat salad or go to the gym. It’s not always something you wanna do, but it’s what’s healthy for you. Physical training has some value, but godliness has value above all things. So even more so than physical disciplines, spiritual disciplines are means by which the Holy Spirit shows up and, by his grace, empowers us to grow. And so I would just encourage that parent to press in and do it anyway. It might be, especially if the kids are like three or four and this has become the time to pull sister’s hair, then you might wanna think about shortening it at first. When you lift weights you don’t go in and immediately lift 300 pounds. You work up to it. And so it may be that we’re gonna have a five minute devotional tonight, pray for each other, and that’s fine. But we’re building that muscle so that we can do more over time.

21:10 - But I’m Not Spiritually Mature Enough to Disciple My Kids

Matt Tully
Maybe another related objection than the parents might have is that they don’t feel spiritually mature enough. They feel like, I don’t know the Bible well enough. I don’t know theology. I’m not gonna be able to answer my kids’ questions when they come to me. They’ve already asked me questions that I felt completely unprepared to answer. What would you say to that Christian?

Jared Kennedy
I don’t know is a very good answer. Then, go do your homework. That may be asking a pastor, that may be opening a study Bible and thinking about that passage and what’s there. I’ve been to Bible college and seminary for ten years, and my kids ask questions that I have no idea about.

Matt Tully
Kids ask some really hard theological questions.

Jared Kennedy
They are really hard. My kids are a lot older now, so it’s not a humble brag, but we’re reading through the book of Romans together with our small group and our kids are part of that. The kids asked a question about Romans 2, and I went to the commentaries and the commentaries were like, We have no idea.

Matt Tully
They found that one question.

Jared Kennedy
They found that one question. I just went back and said, Guess what guys? No one knows the answer to this question. And that’s okay. I think it’s a hundred percent okay to say, I don’t know. I will look this up. If kids ask questions about science, we wouldn’t be afraid to answer in that way, and I don’t think we should be afraid to answer in that way about theology or the Bible.

Matt Tully
I was gonna say I think that is sometimes the issue for parents is they feel afraid that they don’t have a good answer. Maybe the question is about the justice of God or the mercy of God and things that kind of hit on these big questions. The fear would be, If I don’t have a good answer that can convince my kids the Bible is true and that God is good, they’re gonna start questioning these things. They’re gonna maybe walk away. How should we think about that as parents?

Jared Kennedy
I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I think first of all just to remember that Jesus loves children, and he welcomed them. And because he loves them, we can love them too. In that moment, like lying to kids or trying to make up something or pretending you know more than you do isn’t really the most loving thing. In Matthew 18 and 19 when Jesus warns about putting stumbling blocks before children, the kind of stumbling blocks he’s talking about have nothing to do with not knowing the right answers. In fact, the kind of stumbling blocks are stumbling blocks that arise from being proud. The context of Jesus’ warning there are his disciples debating over who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus begins his discussion about the little ones by saying, Unless you humble yourself and become like a child, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. And so I think our interactions with children need to be shaped and seasoned with that kind of humility that is willing to say, I don’t know when I don’t know, but then is also motivated by love for them. The kind of love and the kind of honor and value that Jesus bestowed upon children by welcoming them to himself and saying, The kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are like these children. And so I think moving towards kids with love and honesty and humility is actually the thing that will remove a stumbling block and not the kind of thing that’s going to put a stumbling block in their way. The truth is all of us have doubts. We can’t avoid having doubts about our faith when one of our prayers goes unanswered, or when we encounter particularly difficult suffering, or we just get to that passage that is extra hard. We’re going to encounter doubts. What we want for our kids is that when they encounter doubts that are childhood doubts, that we’re not communicating to them, You always have to have the perfect answer. You always have to know exactly what God is doing in the situation. No, what you wanna communicate to kids in that time is that God is good. And even though there are some things about what he’s doing or what he’s taught us that are a mystery, we can trust his goodness. And the best way to model his goodness to your kids is in humility and love.

26:25 - Four Questions to Help Keep the Gospel at the Center of Discipleship

Matt Tully
When we talk about discipling kids, whether that’s in the context of parents and their families or even in the context of a church and trying to teach kids in that place as well, I think it can be really easy for the focus to be on a lot of the things we’ve been talking about: reading the Bible, prayer, spiritual disciplines in general, the importance of theology and evangelism, and all of that. But in all of that good work, I think sometimes we can maybe miss and start to neglect the core thing—the central thing, which is the gospel—the good news about Jesus and the way that completely is the foundation for all of this. I know this is something that you’re passionate about. I wonder if you could speak to that. Have you observed the dynamic where the gospel subtly becomes less central even as the focus with kids is on all these good things?

Jared Kennedy
I think it’s because teaching kids is just so different from teaching adults. You go into an adult Sunday school class and you grab your coffee and you chat about Stanley’s surgery he had this week and you take prayer requests. And then the teacher sits down and you walk through the outline of the passage, maybe for 45 minutes to an hour. And we’re thinking about, Okay, how does this type point to Christ? What does this say about the goodness and greatness of God? A kid’s ministry classroom looks really different from that. So we’re talking coloring sheets and crafts and moving around the room from story circle to place centers to those kinds of things. So how do you point to Jesus in the midst of the schedule where you’re always moving and where you’re managing behavior issues and you’re thinking about those things? I think our tendency is legalism. Legalism is our native tongue, and so we have to fight against always wanting to revert to just telling people what to do in a moralistic way. And so I think when we teach a Bible story—for example, I’m gonna be teaching on Friday about Solomon and the queen of Sheba. When we teach a Bible story like that, I think the first thing we want to do is say, Solomon was so wise, and God used that wisdom to bless his people. We need to be wise like Solomon. But it’s fascinating. I think it’s Luke 11 and Matthew 12 when Jesus brings up that story, and he says nothing about us being wise. He’s just talking about the fact that one greater than Solomon is here before you. It’s a picture of who Jesus is and what he’s done. I think we’ve gotta take intentional efforts as we’re teaching those stories to help kids see this is not about them. In the first instance it’s not about them and what they should do; it’s about who God is and what he has done to save through Christ Jesus.

Matt Tully
It’s easy to say that, but it’s hard sometimes to know how to do that in the moment, whether it’s sitting around the dinner table on a specific story that you’re telling, or maybe just even more day to day. How do you maintain that gospel-centeredness in the midst of having to constantly correct your kids or the pulling of the hair? What does that look like?

Jared Kennedy
I try to answer four questions. First, I want to help my kids identify with the people in the story who need good news. Instead of having them identify with the hero in the story, I want them to identify with the most needy people in the story. And so you think about the story of the bronze serpent in the wilderness from the book of Numbers

Matt Tully
That Moses raises up.

Jared Kennedy
Where he raises up the bronze serpent so that they’ll be healed. The story starts out with the people wandering through the wilderness, and of course, they’re grumbling and complaining. I have the phrase memorized because it means so much to me. They say, “We have no food, we have no water, and we hate this miserable food.” And you’re like, I thought you just said you had no food. “We hate this miserable food.” It just reminds me of the kids standing—

Matt Tully
That sounds like kids saying, There’s nothing to eat!

Jared Kennedy
Standing in front of the refrigerator. You open it up and you’re like, Mom! There’s nothing to eat! There’s meatloaf. You can reheat that. “I hate this miserable food.” So God says, There’s manna there. And they’re like, We hate this. And it’s in that context the law has already been given. They already know what it means. It means to be grateful before their God. And where God has shown compassion to them before, here he sends judgment for their sin, and they begin to die. It’s in that context that the serpent is raised up. What Jesus says later when he is talking to Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man will be lifted up.” When I’m teaching that story, I wanna help kids not identify with the snake on the pole. That’s Jesus. I don’t want them to identify necessarily even with Moses who’s interceding and praying for the people. I want them to see, Oh! We complain. I grumbled today. I grumbled on the way to church this morning. And I think when we identify with those in the story who are most needy, it helps us to see (second step) what God has done in the story for those people, and then to help kids move forward. The next step down the road is answering, How does he do the same thing for us in Jesus? How does believing that truth change the way I live? So those are my four questions. The first is Who in this story needs the good news? I got that from my friend Marty Machowski. The next three questions I got from a Bible teacher named Jack Klumpenhower. The second question is What is God doing for his people in the story? The third is, How does he do the same thing for us, only better, in Jesus? And then the last is, How does believing that change the way I live? That’s when you finally get the application, at the end. It doesn’t start there with, Just be like this person. What I love about that last question is that it reminds us that our obedience always begins with faith. Our obedience always begins with believing who Christ is and what he’s done. In the classroom environment, how do you not forget that? Honestly, sometimes we do. That happens. But I think one thing I would just encourage children’s ministry leaders and Sunday school teachers is in preparing your lesson, be thinking about how Christ is central in that lesson before you get to Sunday school on Sunday morning. Intentionally thinking through a grid like that, maybe those four questions or something similar, that helps you focus your lesson on how the story points to Christ. If that’s deep in you before you arrive to Sunday school, then it’ll bleed out in those moments when Johnny’s difficult.

34:30 - Encouragement for the Parents of Prodigal Children

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. Maybe as a last question, I wonder if you could speak to parents who are listening right now who maybe have kids that have seemingly walked away from the faith, or who have expressed really big concerns or reservations or doubts about things. Speak to parents who are, if they were being honest, feeling very afraid and feeling nervous about where all these conversations are gonna lead for their kid that they love, and a kid that they would love to see follow Christ and love Christ and the church. What advice would you offer to a parent like that listening right now?

Jared Kennedy
That’s such a good question. I wanna encourage you there’s one perfect Father in the Bible: God the Father, and he has prodigal children. And so we shouldn’t expect that godly Christian parents who are not perfect won’t also have prodigal children sometimes. And so sometimes I think in our Christian culture we’ve adopted the mentality that if you parent right, your kids won’t walk away. And so parents have a lot of shame about that. But having a prodigal child is something that your heavenly Father sympathizes with, and he can meet you there in that sympathy. That’s the first encouragement I would give. I think secondly, to remember that some things only come out by prayer, and even before you move to actions and words, to move to your knees and to plead with the Holy Spirit for your child’s heart. And then third, I think as far as it depends on you, to pursue a relationship and conversation with your child. Begin by listening to their doubts and showing them love. Do not be afraid to speak truth, even though that truth may offend, but move toward your child with love and with a listening heart. And then, on your knees open your hands and realize ultimately their soul is in the hands of our loving Father and not in our control.

Matt Tully
That’s a good, wise word that can be so hard for us to truly believe and accept, but that is so helpful, Jared. Thank you so much for talking with us today about kids and how we as parents and together with churches and pastors can be discipling them.

Jared Kennedy
Thanks for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

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