All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
Theologian, mother, and writer Bonnie Miller-McLemore asks what faith and spirituality have to do with parenting and how caring for children in a more intentional and faithful way can benefit parents’ own spiritual and faith lives. Parenting reframed in this way alleviates the need for parents to be all-knowing authority figures who impart spiritual knowledge to children, and empowers parents to notice what they are already doing as potentially valuable and to practice it more consciously as part of their own faith journey.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Brentwood, TN) is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. A respected feminist theologian, she has written extensively on cultural and familial issues and religion.