I would love to hear your ideas about a home-centered approach for teaching the gospel, with Church programs playing a support role.
We are taught that “the home is the basis of a righteous life and no other instrumentality can take its place.” That means that parents have the primary responsibility for teaching their children the gospel in the home. The role of the Church is to help strengthen the family, but not to replace the family. Unfortunately, many parents rely on the Church too much to teach the gospel to their children.
Imagine for a moment. What if you lived in a country where it was dangerous or prohibited to meet for 3 hours on Sunday? Assume you could only meet for a few minutes and administer the sacrament, then you went home. You were responsible for all teaching and training for your children. There was no Sunday School, no Young Men or Young Women meetings, no Primary, and no mutual or any other weekday meeting or activity.
What would you do for your children? How would you teach them? How would you help them learn to apply gospel principles in their lives?
How would you structure Sundays in your home? Without hours of church meetings on Sundays, how would you keep children, teens, and adults in your home engaged in meaningful things that are appropriate for the Sabbath?
Larry,
Thanks for posing such a thoughtful question. This only addresses one small part of your question about what I’d shoot for in teaching my children. It doesn’t actually change, regardless of having or not having the Church supporting structure of classes. I don’t bank on my children getting all they need in that block of time from week to week, though it is a divine blessing and reinforcement that they do benefit from inspired, committed lay teachers, and it speaks to the divine origin of The Church of Jesus Christ. Right out of the chute, I just have two thoughts. As a single Mom, my focus in attempting to raise Christ-centered girls, was twofold: 1) Teach them how to recognize the Spirit and get answers to prayers through the Word, through asking, fasting, going to the temple. They needed to be spiritually independent, in my mind, so when they left the roost, they knew how God spoke to them, and not just how Mom knew that God spoke with her or them. They needed to know Jesus is the Christ and really atoned for them and knew them personally by name. So working with them by sharing my own experiences consistently and helping to carve out and identify theirs, was always on my mind, however imperfectly I may have done so. 2) Have them develop their own witness of the Book of Mormon, and the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness. This was a deliberate effort, and not left to Sunday School or girls’ camp (or their mission) and occurred in ways to distinguish simple emotional responses from spiritual ones (which ‘can’ sometimes also involve deep emotion). I think the rest spins out of that. This plays out in a bazillion informal ways–Deuteronomy style (talk with your children in the way, on the bed.., and more formal ways, sharing the ordinance-based lifestyle with them, living the talk and repenting of faux-pas when you feel you miss, so they see both ends of the process.) … Just a start for your discussion….