Do you find yourself struggling to answer when your children ask you hard questions about Christianity? Do you have the feeling “that’s not right” when they tell you things they learned in Sunday school or from friends, but you have trouble explaining why you disagree? Did you hope to rely on the church to help give your children a strong set of values, but find that church isn’t really helping? Does it seem to you that what people think of as becoming more religious is not the same thing as becoming more truly Christian? Does the version of Christianity you hear in church or from neighbors seem hard to square with your own sense of what Jesus taught? Do you have your own questions about religion and values in the modern world that nobody seems to answer? If so, this book is for you.
This book explains the Christian religion in a "non-churchy" way that takes three simple principles and shows how they make sense of sin, virtue, prayer, and other basic concepts, and enables parents to answer the hard questions like "why does God allow evil to exist?" It then applies those concepts to real-world problems, explaining how Christianity, correctly understood, can help to navigate safely through life.
This book is aimed at three main groups. First and foremost are parents who may or may not be particularly churchgoing, but who want to provide their children with a useful moral compass to guide them through life. This book arose from my own efforts as a parent to explain Christianity in a sensible and useful manner to my children. I found that church, Sunday school, and the religious books on the market provided surprisingly little help in this effort. This book seeks to fill that gap.
The second group is active, churchgoing Christians who find that they have questions that no one has been able to answer to their satisfaction. For you, this book offers a comprehensive framework for understanding Christianity, one that makes it easier to fill in the holes and to sort out conflicting information or things that don’t seem to make sense. If understanding Christianity seems to be unnecessarily difficult, and if your questions have been met with responses that are vague, mysterious, or unhelpful, this simple guide may provide what you have been missing. Christ's mission was to help us to understand, not to be mysterious.
Finally, this book is aimed at those who want the spiritual comfort and purpose of religion, who feel a void in their lives without it, but who have never been able to buy in to the versions of Christianity that were presented to them. For you, I offer a correction of the errors that you may have been exposed to. Because most people never get a very firm grasp of what Christianity is really about, many of us grow up being exposed only to versions that don’t make sense or that propose a vision of God that is unattractive, one that we can feel must be wrong. A proper understanding of Christianity will remove those errors and allow you to find the attractive, sensible, useful faith that can give you what you have been seeking.
Who am I to write this? I am just a parent who has taken that role seriously and has spent a lot of time studying and working through the issues necessary to give sound advice and instruction to my children. But Christianity was never intended to be restricted to specially-trained theologians. God chose a mom and a humble carpenter to raise Jesus, not a high priest. Too much training can sometimes stand in the way of understanding something that is meant to be simple. Sometimes it is easier for a regular parent to see and explain what is important than it is for a professional expert. Experts say things and people simply bow to their training. Parents, on the other hand, have to deal with inquisitive children. That's harder.
Matthew Fortunato is a regular parent of three virtuous and successful children. Having read widely on Christian theology in his college days, he found that his children came home from Sunday school with questions and misconceptions that needed to be addressed within a sensible framework. Years of discussion produced an organized framework that addresses the "why" of Christianity doctrine without need to rely on mere dictates from the deity. In this book he shares the product of this effort.
