Last week I told you about the day we decided to homeschool our girls. What I didn’t say out loud is that the decision was never really about academics. It was about who gets to shape my daughters’ hearts.
Today I’m handing the mic to someone who has spent almost twenty years thinking about that exact question. My friend Kat Martin’s book, Raising the Remnant, releases today, and I’ve read it more than once. I want to tell you what’s inside, because I think it’s going to do for your home what it did for mine.
A vision she ran from for a year and a half
Kat’s path here wasn’t a straight line. She spent her twenties and part of her thirties in ministry with her husband Rob, church planting, leading children’s ministry. When they moved to Colorado with a young family, she found herself surrounded by new moms asking her the normal questions. How do you get your kid to sleep? How do you potty train?
But the questions started changing. How do you talk to your kids about identity? What do you say when they’re scared? People noticed something in the way her kids treated each other, something that wasn’t planned or performed. And Kat realized her years in education and her years in ministry had been preparing her for something specific.
She started writing down what she was learning. Little stories about her kids. And eventually she knew she had a book. It still took her a year and a half to have the courage to write it, because, in her words, she never wanted to be the person telling other people what to do in their homes. But eventually the calling was louder than the fear.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same pattern I talked about last week. God plants the vision. We run for a while. He doesn’t let us run too far.
The math that changed how I see Sunday
Here’s the part of our conversation that convicted me most.
Kat walked me through the math. There are 168 hours in a week. If you’re at church two hours on Sunday, that leaves 166. Add a couple hours of youth group and you’re still looking at over 160 hours where the question is simply, what are your kids hearing about God?
Her point isn’t that church, Christian school, or good friends are doing it wrong. She said it herself, all of that is great. Her point is that Deuteronomy 6 gives parents a specific calling, to talk about God when your kids wake up, when they lie down, when they’re eating, when they’re walking through the day. Not two hours a week. All of it.
I’ll be honest. I thought I had this covered. Christian school, church every Sunday, a little kids’ Bible study every other Monday. But when Kat asked how often I actually opened the Bible with my girls at home, I had to sit with the honest answer. Hardly ever.
Her book didn’t make me feel shame about that. It made me feel equipped. We ended up starting a family devotional at breakfast because of this conversation, and it’s become one of my favorite parts of our morning.
What discipleship actually looks like, no calendar required
This is the part that made discipleship feel possible instead of overwhelming.
Kat told me about a regular Tuesday night. She was washing dishes, told her kids to get ready for bed, and her five-year-old came downstairs saying she was scared to wait alone in her room. Instead of just sending her back, Kat stopped what she was doing, went to her daughter’s room, and taught her that she could say the name of Jesus out loud when she’s afraid. They said it together a few times, sang a worship song, and Kat reminded her she can always come find mom, but she also now has a tool for the moments mom isn’t there.
Nothing about that was on a calendar. Kat didn’t buy a curriculum for it. She called it discipleship happening in the normal rhythm of the home, and she was honest that it only comes naturally when you’re already rooted in Scripture yourself. Her advice for the parent who’s newer to faith and doesn’t have a verse ready. Open the Bible. She compared it to listening to a voicemail from someone you’ve lost, it’s how you hear God’s voice and actually get to know Him. Her family memorizes one verse a year together. That’s it. That’s the bar.
The word in the title
A remnant, Kat explained, is a group of people who stay faithful in a time when most people aren’t. It shows up throughout Scripture, starting all the way back in Genesis, and it’s the line God used to move His story forward even through very flawed people.
Kat believes this generation of kids is going to need remnant-level faith, especially with how much of their world is shaped by things that aren’t real. She talked about the coming years as a battle over what’s true, not just what’s right or what’s beautiful, and about wanting her kids to have the kind of rooted faith that can stand firm even when almost nothing around them agrees.
That’s the vision behind the book. Not perfect parenting. Kids who know Whose they are, deeply enough to hold onto it no matter what culture hands them.
If you only do one thing this week
Open the Bible. That was Kat’s answer, and she gave me grace for the guilt that question can bring up too. She reminded me of one of her favorite verses, 2 Corinthians 12:9, His grace is sufficient for you. You are not the one saving your kids. You’re stewarding their childhood while they’re here on Earth, and God loves them even more than you do. That’s not permission to do nothing. It’s permission to stop doing this from guilt instead of love.
Get the book
Raising the Remnant: Stories and Tools to Share Jesus at Home released today. I’ve read it more than once and I’m already recommending it to my own small group. You can find it on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Kat and Rob are also building free tools at raisingtheremnant.org, including conversation guides and prayer guides for families, with a small group curriculum and parent workshops on the way.
Listen to the full conversation on the podcast player above, and if it stirs up the same thing in you that it did in me, grab my free CEO Day Guide too.