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Well, Pastor John and I recorded a handful of episodes live and in person in Nashville this summer, and we ended our

live recording session with an audience question about parenting non-Christian teenagers. Here's the question and Pastor John's response.

We got some really important valuable emails from people in this room who are parenting non-Christian teenagers.

Teenagers who have not made the profession of faith. A number of questions have to do with like enforcing church attendance.

We heard from a woman named Angela who grew up going to Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday or dad made her go. You have to go. You have to go.

So she started to resent Christianity. She later came to the faith. Mary to godly man is now involved in a wonderful church, but she looks back on that and wonders

as your parenting teens, especially in the mid to late teen years, and they have made no professional faith. They don't have any interest in the gospel or church.

How much do you enforce church attendance? Where do you draw that line between expecting them to attend a church meeting on Sundays and being patient with them and not making Christianity across as though it's something being enforced upon them?

I can't just jump in to a 16-year-old, 17-year-old behavior without backing up a little bit. I know that's not the question being asked, but let me just say.

We're not God and we do not create our teenagers completely, but partly.

We start rearing teenagers when they're in the womb. How we pray for them in the womb?

We affect the behavior of a teenager when they're two years old.

I watch a lot of young parents today. They seem to believe you cannot control the behavior of a child, or they're just wrong to.

Childs make an absolute mess or chaos of every relationship and every dinner meeting, every grocery store, and the parent seems powerless.

That's not helpful for teenagers. It's come in 12, 13 years later. A little child needs to feel profoundly secure, profoundly loved, cherished, enjoyed, and profoundly under authority.

And those are not contradictory, and every child knows it. Children want boundaries and massive love inside the boundaries.

And so there's the setup that I would love to see happen, so that even when at 14 or 15 or 16 a child starts to question and says, finally, on one scary, off-on-night, daddy, I don't believe this anymore.

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