Crash Course Theology for Moms: A Series Introduction

If you’re a Christian mom like me, you probably have the desire to equip your children with as much knowledge and wisdom about God as possible before sending them out into the world. I’ve written before on the special and eternal influence a mother has on her children and why women should study theology in general.

The truth is, we’re all theologians. Some of us are really bad ones, and some of us are better than others. But what we as mothers believe to be true about God has a direct downstream effect on what we teach our children about God. We want to be able to prepare a defense when they ask really difficult off-the-wall questions and we want to make sure that we are the authority they run to first for questions about God and the world — not their schoolteacher, their Sunday School teacher, or their peers.

As moms, we want to make sure that our theology is sound. And by sound, I mean grounded in Scripture. When discussing a topic about God or Christ, or the Gospel, we want to make sure that everything we know to be true about the subject can be defended by our ultimate authoritative source of truth — His Word. You don’t have to be a seminarian or a Bible scholar or an avid reader of a systematic theology book to be effective in this — you just have to be a faithful steward of the children you’ve been given and lean on the Lord to train them.

After all, your child’s spiritual walk is not the responsibility of your local church. Your local church will instead aid you by reinforcing the groundwork you’ve already laid in the home. It matters very little whether or not your child makes the soccer team or gets accepted to the best college. It doesn’t really matter if your child is successful or happy, although every parent hopes for these things for their children. Your primary job isn’t to make sure all of these things become reality; rather by example and instruction, your primary job and responsibility is to point your child to Christ. And through that may come happiness and success for your child, or it may not. But you have to be okay with the reality that, even though you are the parent, God is the one directing your child and He will do with him or her what He wishes. You are simply the steward to whom He has given your children for the purpose of equipping and training them for His kingdom.

You might say, “Well, my son won’t be able to understand right now. He’s too young.” To that, I say don’t underestimate what your child is able to learn. Right now, you may feel like you are ill-equipped. If you don’t understand big theological concepts, how could your child possibly understand? How could you even begin to teach them? I submit to you that if your child can learn the lyrics to their favorite song, algebra, or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell — he can learn about God, too.

So, this series is a Crash Course in Theology for Moms, and its purpose is exactly that — to give you the resources to understand who God is and what His Word has to say about the fundamentals of our Christian faith so that you can teach your children effectively.

Each article in the series will tackle a theological concept and break it down in a way that you, as a mom, can understand it and then explain it to your little ones — no matter what age they are. Hopefully, it will serve as a devotion of sorts for you to meditate on as you search the Scriptures for wisdom to pass on to your children. In the same way, using a catechism-style format, it will provide little nuggets of truth to live in the brains of your kids so that, over time, they will know the fundamentals to defend the faith and be able to share the Gospel.

The first article in the series will be on Scripture. What better way for us to start than by defining where we get our theology — or our study of God — from? And why is it only on Scripture that we base our theology? How do we know that Scripture is a reliable resource for what we know about God?

These questions will be answered for you and your little ones in Part 1 of this series: “The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture.”

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Ready to dive deeper into the intersection of faith and policy? Head over to our Theology of Politics series page where we’ve published several long-form pieces that will help Christians navigate where their faith should direct them on political issues.