With the increasing number of kids from divorced and disrupted homes, you may be left wonder how the church should respond to these changes in our society.
What We Need To Do In the Church to Help Spiritual Development
Judith Wallerstein, in The Unexpected Legacy, the Twenty Five Year Landmark Study, advocates for strengthening marriages. This can be accomplished through marriage retreats, Bible studies on what the Bible says about marriages and numerous other means. We have to model good marriages for the child of divorce. We have to mentor the children in divorced families and expose them to happy and healthy two-parent families.
Doug Dees in Baker’s Hand Book of Single Parenting calls it grafting. He says to graft a single parent family with a two-parent family. Grafting is where you place or join a single parent family into the healthy two-parent family like you would graft one plant into another one. The two-parent family can help parent the child in the single parent family. The two-parent family can walk alongside the single parent.
We need to teach children what the Bible says about divorce. We don’t need to heap condemnation on them but gently explain that divorce is not God’s design for us. They need to know that God allowed divorce because of hardness of heart but that He hates divorce. He hates it because he knows how much divorce hurts everyone, including the children. However, God’s forgiveness can extend even our parents when they sin.