Parenting
My husband Jeff and I love being parents and we enjoy sharing what we have learned over the years–well, to be honest, decades now–with other parents. We believe that the family is God’s chosen method for transforming lives, societies, and ultimately nations. Unfortunately, the goodness of God’s vision for families has often gotten lost in the hustle and bustle of every day life, and sometimes it is, frankly, under attack. We hope that we can help you discover or re-discover God’s vision for the family, the joy of parenting, and the principles and practical tools to do it well.
Why we can help
We have taught classes on how to parent for over 30 years, and have done our best to apply those lessons to our own children when we were raising them. (They are both grown now and both happily married.) We started teaching parenting using the STEP–Systematic Training for Effective Parenting–methodology in 1990, and have found the principles and tools taught in STEP to be helpful to several hundred families. (The STEP method itself has been used to help hundreds of thousands of parents.)
As I have continued my formal education in counseling and divinity, and my informal education in other parenting methods and ideas, our approach to parenting has evolved and grown. Our ultimate goal is to help you become a better parent, guide your children to become better people and bring peace and joy to your family and your parenting.
A new view of parenting
The STEP methodology is a secular approach that is compatible with Biblical principles, but we always felt like it was missing a strong foundation. We have learned that teaching from a Christian worldview provides that strong foundation as well as a consistent framework for thinking about the challenges and ultimate goals of parenting. The tools for parenting remain much the same, but the purposes to which those tools are applied and the way they are used are now aligned with our worldview as followers of Jesus.
What’s happening now
Our goal is to help Christian parents understand how their assignment as Christ’s ambassador to their children impacts their parenting. We have consolidated a lot of this information in a one-day workshop that covered the foundations of Christian parenting. The workshop was live-streamed and videotaped and can be found online on the YouTube channel of Abundant Life Community Church (the morning session is Here and the afternoon session is Here). The videos are free to watch and we hope that you are blessed by them.
However, we have learned that parents need more than just knowledge. They greatly benefit from the support & camaraderie of other parents as well as an ongoing dialogue where they can ask questions when they feel stuck and get ideas for how to become un-stuck. To that end, we are extremely happy to offer weekly online Parent Mentoring Groups. These groups will run for an hour and 15 minutes on Thursday or Sunday evenings.
