How Not to Totally Put Your Children Off God: A Conversation on Christian Parenting Between a Father and His Sons

Parenting can be the best or worst of times. It can be a role we love best or one that causes great insecurity. There is no formal training for parenthood. There are no clear benchmarks of success and yet it demands all our resources, skills and attention. Parenting has no blueprint.

This book is the merging of the author’s deep convictions of parenting with examples of both ＂When it worked＂ and ＂When it did not work＂. He has also elicited the help of his sons to write their perspectives on how their experiences and memories connect (or differ from) his own.

Each chapter has two sections. Section A contains reflections on habits that seemed to work in passing on faith. Section B then reflects on the same habit but from a more critical perspective.
These five chapters come from the author’s experiences as a dad, as a Christian leader and as a theologian. The first section in each chapter marks those habits that he believes in passionately. They are the ’Do’s’, those habits formed in parenting for faith. They emerged in the business of parenting and have become clearer over life. The second section notes when parenting seemed to go wrong. These are the nightmares that skulk around the edges of a parent’s consciousness, the failures, when high hopes are not realised. However it could be that in these ’cock ups’ in being a parent are when the actual parenting for faith is really carried out. That at least is the comment made by the three sons commenting on the script.

Howard Worsley is the Tutor in Mission at Trinity College in Bristol where he is also the Vice Principal. He is a researcher into children’s spirituality and their early perceptions, a contextual theologian, and an educationalist who publishes regularly for academic journals. He is an author of two books. In 2009, he published a book on children’s insights into the Bible called, A Child Sees God. In 2013, his book, Two Hundred Years of Anglican Church School Education, was published by Bloomsbury. In the summer of 2018, he circumnavigated the UK with a charitable organisation called Navigators of Faith, a sea voyage whose objective was to rediscover the story of the Celts who first brought Christian faith to the British Isles. He is currently writing a book about these adventures in book titled, A Wild Goose Chase.