One of the greatest and most significant callings of a Christian is that of parenthood, as children would eventually grow to be the next leaders. As such, ensuring that children are raised up in healthy families and nurtured to be healthy followers of Christ is a significant concern for parents and churches, and churches have been vesting more attention to the nurturing of children.
An aspect that undoubtedly and deeply affects the healthy nurturing of children is the very relationship between the children and the parents.
"Everyone wants a strong bond with their children," John Loppnow, the pastoral care pastor at Young Nak Celebration Church (YNCC), said at YNCC's parenting seminar on Sunday. "And joy is what strengthens the bond."
Loppnow, who also has a background as a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), shared several ways parents could help to keep joy in the parent-child relationship, and further strengthen that bond.
First and foremost, Loppnow explained that the most important aspect to maintaining joy in the parent-child bond is the joy that comes from the bond between the parent and God. Loppnow pointed to John 15:9-12, and said that one of the ways joy is maintained in the parent's relationship with God is keeping His commands.
"If there are two things that you could take away from this seminar, it should be that first, God loves you and is glad to be with you, always," Loppnow said. "And second, a true life of joy comes from following Him and putting His words into practice by the power of the Holy Spirit."
"In the last six months, what has the Holy Spirit been leading you to learn and grow in Him? And what about the next six months? Maybe you could even choose an aspect to grow in together as a family," Loppnow suggested, encouraging parents to continue in striving to become more like Christ and follow Him.
Some 35 people gathered for the recent parenting seminar at Young Nak Celebration Church.
Loppnow also shared several practical ideas on maintaining joy and strengthening the bonds in the family. One of the ways to maintain joy in the family bond is to understand how joy is communicated, he said. If relational joy is understood as being glad to be together with someone, Loppnow explained that that joy is expressed differently by different people.
"You could list ten things as a family on how you are going to comunicate joy to each other," Loppnow suggested. "And individually, you could also list how you plan on communicating joy to the neighbors around you in the world."
The frequency and the quality of the interaction between two people is also one of the major ways through which the strength of any relationship is determined, Loppnow said. "The strength of the bond can withhold the people together through the hard times," he added.
Loppnow also mentioned a more scientific aspect that affects relationships: relational circuits (RCs). RCs are akin to switches in the brain, and once turned off, one would stop seeing other people relationally, but rather, see "other people as being in your way from achieving your goal, or see them as tools to use or manipulate to achieve what you want." When RCs are on, "you experience others as relational beings, and you are concerned about what others are thinking and feeling. You feel the desire for connection and joy in being together."
Understanding this concept helps to maintain bonds because major conflicts tend to arise from the RCs being turned off. Loppnow shared his experiences of taking time to turn his RCs back on, or essentially, taking time to calm down in the midst of a conflict, and then coming back to reconcile aftewards. These actions to take time to calm down instead of acting out of anger also model for the children the appropriate behavior during conflict, he added.
This was the third such parenting seminar that took place recently at YNCC over the past year. The deacons in charge of the marriage and family ministries at YNCC shared they hope to have at least one parenting seminar and one marriage seminar each year. These seminars provide opportunities for couples to not only learn from seminar speakers, but also from each other, as the seminars provide time to share experiences and ideas and learn from one another. Newcomers to the church could also find that these seminars offer yet another opportunity to become more involved and connected to the church.
