Children....lots of them.

I came across 2 posts on children at In Light of the Gospel:

Should Christians Have Large Families?
June 13th, 2009 by JHG

Craig Carter thinks we should. He found Akin’s comments from Joe Carter’s post, and provided these six reasons for large families:

1. God has never rescinded his command to “be fruitful and multiply.”
2. There are numerous passages in the OT that view children as a blessing from the Lord (eg. Ps. 127:3).
3. Contrary to much conventional wisdom, the world’s birth rate is declining rapidly…
4. Christians have hope for the future because of our faith in God.
5. All abortion and some forms of contraception should be rejected by Christians.
6. Christians need to submit their wills to God and accept children as gifts from Him, rather than as “projects” or “products” of our own wills.

Read the whole post for his explanations.

Less Children = Less Christians
June 13th, 2009 by JHG

You probably think that statement comes from a Presbyterian, or at least someone of a covenantal persuasion in terms of the covenantal nurture of children. Well, then, you might be surprised at this one.

This week Trevin Wax posted a 4 part interview Dr. Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Seminary. Here are the individual posts:

• On Akin’s Vision for Missionary Theologians
• On Turning Around the SBC
• On the Great Commission Resurgence
• On SBC Calvinism and Evangelical Cooperation

The second one caught my eye when Trevin posted it. He asked Dr. Akin, “What do you think are the major reasons for the declining number of baptisms and our shrinking membership?”

Akin gives two answers. First, Southern Baptists have become “practical inclusivists” because they have no sense of the “urgency about the plight of the lost.” Akin’s second answer is worth quoting in full:

Secondly, Dr. Mohler has pointed out a fact that is kind of funny and sad at the same time. You can almost document the stagnation and decline of baptisms within the Southern Baptist Convention as the decline in the number of children that Baptist have.

The truth is, (and I said this in my Axioms sermon that’s either famous or infamous depending on your perspective) we have bought into the mindset of the modern world in that we think that less children is best or at least better. Because we have less children, we have less family members coming to faith in Christ.

This is amazing! He does qualify his answer by saying that Baptists have been baptizing children at a very young age, and they need to stop because that is not really Baptist. Nevetheless, this issue is so important. What you have here is a Baptist acknowledging that the future of the church is bound up in our children. Sounds very biblical to me, but I am not too sure that Baptist theology reflects the importance of what it means to “disciple” those children and nurture them in the faith, as opposed to pressing those children into some kind of crisis conversion. At the very least it means that Baptists need to engage and develop a more robust theology of children than they currently have.