To celebrate Easter to good folk at Songs for Saplings are making their whole collection of Christian songs completely free. That includes downloadable albums, sheet music, lyrics – the lot.
We have really loved how their Questions with Answers CDs have helped us to worship God together as a family and we’ll be downloading the material we don’t yet have this week.
I’d highly recommend you do the same by clicking here.
The Good Book Company have made their Easter Unscrambled family devotional material available for free online, with the aim of providing 5-10min Bible times to help families celebrate the crucified, risen King, during the week running up to Easter Sunday.
To make use of the material all you need to do is register here
Rev. Ian Fry. On the occasion of the induction of Alan Witchalls as Assistant Pastor with Responsibility for Youth and Families at Romford Evangelical Church
Excited children and happy parents.
Songs for Saplings have been extremely busy and have now released Volumes 5 & 6 of their Questions With Answers series of albums. Volume 5 covers Prayer and the Sacraments while Volume 6 has songs on Christ and His Return.
It’s a great way for children (and adults) to learn the catechism and lots and lots of Scripture.
Click on the video below to hear Dana singing a version of The Lord’s Prayer, and click here to download volumes 1 -6 of this excellent resource.
For anyone interested in an extremely helpful and in depth review of two of the most popular “children’s story Bibles,” David Shaw has done a great job here. It’s a long read but well worth it as it provides a helpful way to think through the important issues in reading God’s Word with your children.
Following on from the previous post, Kevin DeYoung lists 10 items originally by John Witherspoon on raising children and parental authority here.
Of particular note are the following three comments on a parent’s authority or lack of it:
A helpful post for parents from Justin Taylor summarising Anthony Esolen’s book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It’s available from Amazon as a hardback, but you’d be far better off buying it in the Kindle version.
1. Begin by rearing children almost exclusively indoors
2. Never allow children to organize their own worlds of exploration of that which is interesting or challenging
3. Don’t risk allowing children to explore machines or encounter those who know and use them
4. Replace fairy tales with cliches and fads
5. Denigrate or discard the heroic and patriotic
6. Cut down all heroes to size
7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex
8. Level all distinctions between man and woman
9. Distract the child with the shallow or unreal
10. Deny the transcendent
Here’s Peter Hitchens column from Last Sunday’s Mail newspaper on what the government really thinks of motherhood.
The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.
You can read the whole article here, and it’s hard to deny that our secular liberal ruling classes want to encourage parents to have as little to do with the upbringing of their children as possible, in the light of the most recent announcement of a £1,200 bribe to parents to ‘warehouse‘ their children in state regulated child care.
It’s clearly not as innocent a move as giving parent’s a choice on how they wish to raise their children, if the state incentivises one means of child-care, while to all intents and purposes it penalises (cutting child benefits) the other option. There’s something more sinister going on.
To illustrate this, below is an exert from a piece in today’s Telegraph quoting an education minister’s response to the accusation that stay-at-home mums are being discriminated against
“We have helped stay-at-home mothers with increasing the free early education from 12.5 hours to 15,” she said. “We all know that childcare is so expensive that parents simply don’t have the choice to go out to work because they can’t afford the childcare. What we’re doing is helping parents make that choice.”
Did you spot that? We’re helping mother’s engage in the high calling of motherhood, enabling them to be the most influential voices in their child’s upbringing, by paying someone else to look after their children for a large proportion of the week. Some choice!
This article by Joe Carter, on whether Christian parents have a fundamental right to homeschool their children, should be read with concern by Christians in the UK. Whether we chose to homeschool our children or not, it is fairly evident that Western secular government believes it has the right to determine what our children are told.
WHATEVER IS COMMENDABLE 