Biblical parenting and 7 day- a-week daycare

Simone has been involved in an interesting blog discussion about the place of daycare in parenting for people who want to follow Jesus. It's obviously an area where it is difficult to make judgements without making someone feel guilty or threatened. However my interest was sparked by a comment that Simone made to the effect that obviously it would be innappropriate for a Christian to put their child in daycare for 7 days a week.

My first thought (which I expressed to Simone), was that this was such an obvious statement that it was hardly worth saying, it was a kind of straw man, OF COURSE 7 days a week daycare was wrong... But a little later it struck me with some force that I personally, from the age of 9 to the age of 16 was in 7 days and nights a week childcare - I was sent to boarding school.

You'll be glad to know that the reason I was sent to boarding school was not uncaring or unchristian parents, in fact quite the opposite, my parents were missionaries in Bangladesh and, along with many other missionary families there, felt that the best way to give us a good education was to send us to a boarding school in India.

I wouldn't say that I found boarding school easy, but neither do I look back with too many regrets. I certainly was never in any doubts about my parents love and care for me. And they remain the most significant influence on me as a person.

Now let me say that I that the 'I turned out ok, so it must have been a good idea' kind of argument is false. Fortunately for all parents, God is gracious and could use unwise decisions for good.

However the whole boarding school experience raises the question of whether our concerns about things like daycare is at times more cultural than Biblical. It seems to me that sometimes our arguments against daycare follow this logic. Daycare is a product of feminism. Feminism is a bad thing. Therefore daycare is a bad thing.

But community care of children has been around for much longer than feminism, and has been an important part of committed Christian parenting. The boarding school I attended was set up by Christians committed enough to serve God in Asia before the second world war to care for their children while they were engaged in mission work. My history is fairly weak beyond that, but I get the impression that going further back full time nannies for example weren't seen as necessarily unbiblical for those who could afford them. And this gets us to the heart of the matter. What does the Bible actually insist on in our parenting and what is a matter of freedom?

I've got some ideas, but they're going to have to wait for another post. In the mean time I'm happy to take any comments (and I won't be offended if you can tell me where the Bible says that Boarding School is of the devil).

Mark Dever Seminar

Spent the morning yesterday at a Mark Dever Seminar. Two of his three talks were expositions of Habbakuk and Haggai, and were extremely edifying. He does a great job of applying the Old Testament in a Christ centred way that leaves you feeling the force of the Old Testament passages themselves. Key application points where about trusting God when you can't understand what he's doing (Habbukuk) and using your money to serve God's temple - Jesus and the church (Haggai).

His third seminar was about healthy churches in general, and (as you would be familiar with if you have read his 9 Marks book), he focussed on Membership, Discipline and Eldership. I don't agree that much stricter membership and discipline are the key shortcomings of our churches. He was coming from a situation where churches tend to have 250 members and only 70 average attendance. At our church the membership is less than the attendance, and I think that is common in many Presbyterian churches around here. I don't think there are stacks of slack members floating around. And on top of that I don't really want to make a second formal distinction in church beyond being a follower of Jesus or not.

Having said that, we do struggle to know exactly how to deal with those who get caught up in scandalous sin. Often they are informally isolated and drop off the radar instead of being given an opportunity to repent and be restored. The other difficulty is how to actually measure repentence, and know when it is appropriate to welcome people back and then what ongoing consequences their sin might have. So it is a tricky issue. Just not, I think, the key health issue in most churches.

Appreciating Calvin

I thought I'd jump on the 'Calvin's 500th Birthday bandwagon' and I've enrolled in an MA (theology) and signed up to do an subject on Calvin this term (at Moore College). It's going to be great to get back into some formal study after 7 years but, like when you haven't excercised for a while, I think it will involve some significant pain.

It was a bit of a shock to see that the whole of Calvin's Institutes was included as part of the required course reading (might have been wise to check that before signing up) - we got three years to get through it when I was doing a BTh. Anyway, Simone's advice was 'blog your way through it' so stay tuned for possible updates.

Test post

This is a test post just to see if the mail2blog feature works. This would make it easy to do blog posts from my mobile phone.

Chess

Recently discovered the chess game on our new computer. I haven't really played much before, and basically I'm getting thrashed. Even the two times I've had the opposition down to just their king they have somehow managed to get stalemate - Aargh. Still, it is certainly a good mental workout.

ad break

For various reasons we have done a lot of travelling this year, and as part of that have hired cars in Rockhampton, Melbourne, and Auckland.
I've used the www.drivenow.com.au website and found their comparison of all the rental companies very useful in getting a good rate. They asked me to mention them on my blog, so here it is.

ISFJ

I think I have an ISFJ (Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging) personality type (according to the Myers Briggs test), although the first time I did the questionnaire I came out as ISFP. However the description of the ISFP (a 'composer') definitely doesn't match me, but ISFJ seems pretty close to the mark. I'm not really happy about being an ISFJ, but then apparently ISFJ personality types have a tendency to be overly critical of themselves - so I guess that confirms it. Damn.