Relationships & Family

This can also be seen as a subset of discipleship, and key to this area as well would be intentionality around 1) awareness of the default narrative about relationships that we live/react out of and that we have received , 2) processing that default narrative through the biblical/gospel narrative, and 3) engaging in our relationships with others - friends, spouses, children, etc - in such a way that we are helping them to do the same. This is one way of describing what it means for Christ to be Lord over all.

This first wave or resources are recommended by our InterVarsity Campus Minister, Mickey Sanchez. Some of these resources come from professional counselors/therapists. Pastor Timothy Keller once said that preaching and counseling are very similar except that the former is done for a general audience and the latter goes deeper and is more contextualized to your life. Counselors often specialize in how relationships break down and Christian counselors in particular bring that and their biblical training to bear on how to engage well in these relationships.

If you have resources on this that you’ve found helpful, whether in friendship/romantic/familial relationships, please let us know as we’d like to list it here for others to benefit from as well. Feel free to contact Mickey Sanchez with questions about any of these resources or if you would like some advice or coaching on discipleship and spiritual formation.

General

Websites

  • Sacred: Closer to Christ, Closer to Others

    • Gary Thomas is a best selling author whose work connects the world we experience to the biblical narrative in different ways. There is a special focus on Jesus’ call to transformation through carrying our cross and dying to oursevles in some of his relational work. Life provides many opportunities for sanctification if we see them as such. Some of his books are listed below.

  • Boundaries

    • Christian psychologists, Dr. John Townsend and Dr. Henry Cloud, are well known authors who have helped many understand what it means and looks like to grow up in Christian maturity. One main idea is that as created beings, and not God, we have limits. Learning to honor those limits allows us, and those around us, to flourish. The Sabbath, for example, is a commandment that is meant for us to honor our limits. When we go beyond those limits, we may not be honoring God and potentially doing damage to ourselves and those around us.

  • Scream Free

    • Christian, Hal Runkel (LMFT), translates and applies some of the core theoretical concepts of marriage and family therapy to our everyday relationships. While the book is aimed at a wide, not specifically Christian, audience, many of the concepts echo biblical instruction and help us apply it. For example, the idea of being “non-reactive” to life but instead “intentionally responding” to life is another way of saying, live out of the Spirit and not the Flesh. By focusing on this, Runkel helps us understand ourselves better and how to follow the Spirit’s lead instead of our own. Some of his books are recommended below.

  • The Five Love Languages

    • Christian psychologist, Dr. Gary Chapman, develops a framework for the ways in which we tend to give and receive love and how that influences our experience and expectations of others we’re in relationship with. He then applies this framework to various kinds of relationships. Dr. Chapman also develops a helpful framework for apologizing well vs. saying your sorry in a perfunctory or superficial way. Some of his books are listed below, but this website lists all of them and other resources.

Books

Romantic

Websites

Books

For Children

Websites

  • What’s In the Bible (by Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer) - HIGHLY recommended

    • Amazing, humorous and engaging puppet videos about the Bible and it’s overarching narrative for young and elementary kids that will teach young and old alike. Parents, whether seminary educated or not, will learn a lot through this as well. Our campus minister HIGHLY recommends them as his kids loved them and have wanted to go through them multiple times, and he found himself learning many things as well. With the Bible, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees since the Bible is so big and hard to take in all at once. This will help kids start to understand the basics of the overall biblical story, what each book of the bible is about, and how it came to be in the first place. This is foundational for kids, and for parents to help their kids, begin the process of looking at the world through a biblical/gospel lens vs. defaulting uncritically to the lens of the world.

  • The Bible Project - HIGHLY recommended

    • Older kids (elementary and up) will especially appreciate going through the biblical narrative again in animated/artistic form through the Bible Project (younger kids might enjoy it but may not understand as much). Parents will learn a lot as well as many things will be pointed out here that may not have been focused on in What’s In The Bible.

  • The Bible App for Kids

    • Great way to have educational biblical screen time

  • The Bible App (elementary to older kids)

    • Our campus minister is taking his 3rd-4th grader through the Bible in a year using The Bible App’s canonical reading plan. His child has access to kid friendly versions of the Bible and the NIV Bible can be read to them. Also, there’s a discussion feature where you can create a group to read together and chat about what you read. Our InterVarsity staff has been reading with his son, his wife and his father and mother-in-law. This makes it much more engaging for his son as his son get’s to interact with the whole family around the Bible.

Books & Media

For Parents

Websites

  • Milestones: Raising A Jesus-Loving Generation

    • A church website (Highrock Evangelical Covenant Church in Arlington, MA) that walks with parents as they raise their young disciples. This site/effort was born out of the idea that parents are the main disciplers of their kids, not primarily churches given that Sunday school is only an hour or so a week. However, many parents don’t feel equipped to actively disciple so Milestones is an effort to equip parents with a framework and ideas for developmentally appropriate discipleship. Our campus minister has leaned on this site/effort in the discipleship of his own children.

  • Christian Sex Education - by Stan & Brenna Jones, authors of God’s Design for Sex book series

    • When do you start talking about sex with your kids? Almost as soon as they can talk according to Stan Jones, former provost and emeritus professor of psychology at Wheaton College, and a nationally recognized Christian expert on sexuality. If parents don’t actively teach about sex proactively, children will learn about it passively from the culture around them. By proactively teaching them, and then helping them interpret what they see in the culture around them through the biblical grid that they have been given, you are preparing your children to have a healthy and realistic view of sex/marriage and to engage the sexual cultural narrative of the world around them versus passively and uncritically learn from and adopt it.

Books