Back when we released our new book Leading Missional Communities, we said that Missional Communities weren’t really an end in and of themselves, but rather a vehicle that helped us get to a vision we needed to get back to: being extended families on mission.

We use the word oikos (Greek for “household”) to describe this reality. MCs are like training wheels that help us ride the bike of oikos.

Now, as much as we talk about Missional Communities being a place for the extended family, we also recognize that the experience of family that most of us have daily interaction with is our own nuclear families. Indeed, MCs that function as extended families are mainly made up of nuclear families. So we wanted to spend a few weeks exploring some practical tips on parenting, raising kids, and leading our nuclear families in a missional way.

Here’s the question I’d like to start with: what does it look like to parent well?

Sally and I wanted to raise our kids so they had three things from us:

1. Love
2. Discipline
3. Freedom

Let’s talk about what each of these entails.

Love:
Love is one of those things that’s easy to grasp conceptually, but difficult to implement practically. Of course we tried our best to unconditionally love our kids. Let them know we’re pleased with them. We’re proud of them. That we would love them no matter what their behavior was. Our love can’t be conditional on anything, or it’s not the same kind of love that God has.

That means that no matter what they’ve done, they need to be able to rest in the confidence that our love for them does not change. This of course gives them a concrete picture of what it means when we tell them that God loves them. We didn’t do it perfectly of course, but it’s important for kids to experience unconditional love as a bedrock foundation for everything else in life. Which means we have to express that love to them in words and action, often.

Discipline:
It’s sometimes difficult to tell this nowadays, with the emergence of helicopter parenting, but the role of parents is to raise adults who are good people rather than trying to make sure our kids always like us and become our friends. If you raise your kids to be good people, there will be a strong possibility they will be friends with you when they grow up, but this cannot be your goal. If your goal in parenting is for your kids to like you, you’ll never be able to give them the kind of investment they need to become mature adults. To invest in your children in a way that brings them to maturity, you need to be able to bring them both invitation and challenge, and you can’t challenge someone if you need them to like you.

Practically, for us, discipline meant that we did things that positively reinforced behavior that was unselfish, considerate, and helpful to others. We met twice a day for meals: breakfast and dinner. It didn’t matter what you were involved in or how tired you were, you needed to show up at breakfast and dinner. We didn’t allow individual preference to define how we lived together. Sometimes that meant we had breakfast really early in the morning if I was leaving for a trip. Sometimes it meant you couldn’t go out with your friends until after dinner.

Breakfast and dinner were times of re-connection and value-strengthening. We prayed together, ate together, discussed together. Pretty much every day.

Also, for awhile we did something called “Appreciation Dinner” every once in awhile. It worked like this: at dinner everyone would share one thing they appreciated about every other person. Everyone shared several things they appreciated and everyone got appreciated several times. It was awesome! What we were doing was engaging in a discipling that reinforces the kind of behavior we want to see more of in our family.

You’ll notice that “discipline” for us wasn’t primarily about punishing bad behavior. Discipline simply means regular and rigorous activity that trains us. That’s what breakfast and dinner were about. Sometimes we needed to confront behavior that didn’t line up with our values, but it was always very important for us to distinguish between childish foolishness (which is to be expected) and rebellion (which is something entirely different).

Foolishness was met with simple correction, perhaps a new boundary, a conversation, etc. Rebellion (things like deception and willful disobedience) were met with the revocation of privilege. The message was that these kinds of things are out-of-bounds in a covenant relationship like family.

Freedom:
Here’s what we believed: a moderately disciplined life lets you soar. And we knew we needed to give our kids permission and empowerment to soar, to explore, to try thing. Freedom isn’t defined by lack of rules; it’s about exploration within a framework. Sometimes the most stifling environments are those with no framework.

We established the framework of discipline, and then encouraged our kids to explore with freedom. Have fun. Express yourself as an individual creatively and artistically. Try new things, whether you fail or not. There needs to be an environment where it’s okay to try things out before we know if we’re good at them or not, tell some jokes, lighten up and laugh a bit. We were constantly pulling each other’s legs and playing practical jokes.

It worked, even though we made many mistakes, because it was freedom within a framework (discipline), soaked in an atmosphere of unconditional love.