So
Start here: the
What is a godparent?
What does baptism mean?
What happens at a baptism?
Setting expectations with
How does a child’s faith develop?
The
Do you have an image that comes to mind when you think of a godparent? A vision for what that role may look like in the life of a child, a teenager, a young adult, a fully grown woman or man?
I certainly didn’t.
With the exception of Cinderella’s famous godmother, I had no idea what godparents did, until recently.
I grew up in a denomination that didn’t have godparents and was only recently asked to be a godparent myself. The impetus for this book wasn’t my huge wealth of knowledge and experience earned personally as a godparent or from growing up with wonderfully invested godparents.
Rather, this book came out of questions that my children’s godparents had of me. My husband and I were excited to embrace infant baptism for our own children, first and foremost because we had been convinced it was consistent
with what the Bible teaches and what the Church has practised historically. We also love the opportunity infant baptism brings to invite others into the precious responsibility of raising a child in the knowledge and love of the Lord, something that is so countercultural in our individualistic society. This felt like a particularly significant role for others to have in our children’s lives, especially as we’re preparing to move overseas and work as church planters in France—we will be moving between places, cultures and friendships more regularly than most.
The ideal was clear: having other mature Christians invested in our children’s faith for the long term. But the wonderful people we’d asked to be our kids’ godparents had questions we couldn’t answer about what we thought their role would look like. Even though I’m a trained primary school teacher, a Bible college graduate and a children’s minister, I hadn’t thought this through. And so, the idea for this handbook was planted as I tried to figure out how we could resource our kids’ godparents so that they felt confident and encouraged in their new roles.
It turns out that I wasn’t alone in being unsure of what it meant practically to be a good godparent! While being a godparent was considered a significant role in times past, both culturally and spiritually, today in the West the role has sometimes been undervalued to the point of mere tokenism, with godparents turning up on the day at the baptism and not seeing much of the child afterwards, or even being Christian themselves.
You might be in a similar boat to me when it comes to knowing what a godparent is and does, or you may bring with you a wealth of experience as both godchild and godparent. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of confidence in your role as godparent, this book will further equip and empower you to embrace the significant role you have accepted in the life of a child.
So many questions! 5
As I conducted interviews and research to write this book, I heard many ‘shoulds’.
Many godparents were weighed down by these shoulds when they talked about the type of relationship they had with their godchild. They felt that they should:
• always have great spiritual conversations
• do more
• be a ‘better ’ Christian
• feel confident when taking out their toddler/kid/teen godchild on their own
• know intuitively what being a godparent involves.
Having lots of shoulds is generally overwhelming and discouraging. They can get in the way of us actually doing something, because it doesn’t feel like enough compared to what we think we should be doing. They also shift our focus to ourselves and away from the source of our strength and confidence: the grace of God, as revealed to us in the Bible.
The overarching message of the Bible is that all humans are made to build our identity, our sense of worth and contentment on God, and that centring our lives on anything else will ultimately destroy us.1 Even atheists or agnostics pursue or worship something they’ve made into a ‘god’, whether it’s gaining people’s admiration and acceptance, amassing enough money to feel safe, only wanting to experience comfort and pleasure in life, or feeling needed and helpful to those around them. As David Foster Wallace famously said, ‘In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship’.2
Worshipping anything other than God will ultimately fill us with guilt and shame. That’s because we were made to worship our good and loving Creator alone. These other gods we chase demand that we serve them in particular ways. If feeling safe because you’re financially secure is your god, then you must always work to gain more money, sacrificing other important things (health, relationships, moral values) along the way to ensure that you get it. If you achieve your end goal, then you feel safe! But if anything threatens your god, if there’s a housing bubble or a global financial crisis or you invest poorly, then not only is your feeling of safety snatched away from you, but you are filled with guilt for not meeting your own standards or expectations, for not keeping up with the demands of your god. These other things that we can chase after, which may be truly good things, leave us empty and exhausted when we make them the source of ultimate meaning in our lives—when we worship them.
1. Deuteronomy 6:13; Romans 12:1; 1 Corinthians 10:31. On the importance of not pursuing other gods or idols, see 1 Timothy 6:9–10; 1 Peter 2:11; 1 John 2:16–17.
2. Wallace, DF 2005, ‘Everybody worships’, Mockingbird, viewed September 19 2022, <mbird.com/literature/ more-david-foster-wallace-quotes/>.
Start here: the gospel of grace 7
The Bible tells us that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23). Every one of us has done things God says we shouldn’t, and have failed to do the things God says we should. And we do (or don’t do) those things because we’re worshipping something other than God, the only one who deserves our worship. Worshipping these things amounts to sinning against our Creator, because he’s the only one who deserves our worship. Our sin separates us from God and the true life he gives.
Only the grace of God can free us from the weight of shame and guilt, from the shoulds that fill up our lives. God sent Jesus to rescue us, to set us free from the guilt and condemnation that pursuing these other gods laid on us.
As Jesus said:
‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’ (John 10:10–11)
The full, abundant life we may be trying to achieve is not attainable through these other means, these gods. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is God’s gracious gift to us, restoring us to relationship with him and giving us the peace, security, identity and joy that we were looking to find through all those other things (Romans 3:23–24). God deals with sin objectively in Jesus’ death on the cross, when Jesus paid the penalty that our worship of other gods deserved (2 Corinthians 5:21). His death was an astonishing reversal of the values of our world: he rescued us by giving up his life; demonstrated his power by serving others; and achieved glory through a shameful death on the cross. Jesus’ death was an undeserved act of grace, a gift while we were still his enemies and rejecting him in our pursuit of other gods (Romans 5:6–11). We accept this gracious gift in a way that reflects this reversal of our world’s values—not by earning it or measuring up, but by acknowledging that we are weak, sinful, and in need.
Tim Keller summarises it well:
You might say, ‘If I were a Christian I’d be going around pursued by guilt all the time!’ But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be some standard to live up to by which we get
that identity … Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you— who breathed his last breath for you. Does that sound oppressive? 3
Nothing else we centre our life around can give us the safety, significance or love that God can.
Receiving God’s free gift of grace sets us free from the guilt and shoulds that we used to carry with us. God doesn’t need you to meet a guilt-inducing list of shoulds in order to build a genuine, godly and faithful relationship with your godchild. You became a godparent through the baptism of your godchild— an act which is itself a sign of God’s grace! Worshipping God is a freeing act where our identity no longer comes from how good we are at meeting our own goals and standards but instead is forever fixed as his beloved children. This is because of what he has done for us in Jesus, not because we have earned it ourselves. Baptism, particularly of a helpless infant, is a symbol to us of this grace. It’s all about what God does for us—setting us free from our shame, washing away our sins, adopting us into his family—not what we can do or have done for him. So let’s resist the temptation to turn this reminder of God’s grace into a list of weighty requirements and expectations of what we should be doing as godparents.
When we’re tempted to make a list of shoulds and despair at all the ways we haven’t met them, we can look at the grace of God, symbolised in baptism. We can remind ourselves of the holiness and strength and perfection and love of God, as revealed in the gospel of grace, so that when we think ‘I haven’t been the godparent I should be’, or ‘I shouldn’t forget to pray for my godchild. I’m the worst’, we don’t drift into despair. We can look at the grace shown in baptism and rejoice!
But we also start at the gospel of grace, so that when we are feeling like we’re doing well as godparents and we start to trust in our own actions and not in God’s, we can remind ourselves that it is not us who will work to redeem our godchild. As Paul writes:
3. Keller, T 2017, The Reason for God, Hodder & Stoughton, London, p. 172. Start here: the gospel of grace 9I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. (1 C orinthians 3 :6–7)
Paul reminded the church in Corinth that the focus shouldn’t be on who did what in encouraging someone’s faith but rather on God, the only one who can soften our hard hearts and reach us by his grace. Both he and Apollos, another teacher of the church in Corinth, had been responsible for using their Godgiven gifts and roles well, for planting and watering respectively. However, only God is able to make those seeds grow, and only God is to be praised for this fruit growing in someone’s life!
Similarly, it’s not your actions as a godparent that lead directly to the development of your godchild’s faith. You are still responsible for those actions, as Paul planted the seed and Apollos watered it, because although our works don’t earn God’s favour, they are still a sign we have truly been made alive by God’s grace. But in all the ‘works’ or actions that we do, our goal is to bring glory to God and praise him for any fruit of faith that develops in our godchild’s life. We shouldn’t feel self-important because of how critical our actions have been to the developing faith of our godchild.
The middle ground between despair and giving up on doing anything, and puffing yourself up with pride and thinking you are the key to your godchild’s salvation, is what we’re aiming to explore in this book.