Member Spotlight: The Boyer family/The Learning Parent

Stop by a certain home on Sunnymeade Road in Rustburg, Virginia, on any given Friday night, and you’ll find nearly two dozen children and adults gathering to have dinner and a good time.

That’s when Rick and Marilyn Boyer’s 13 children and eight grandchildren regularly get together. Nine of the Boyers’ offspring still live at home. Four have started families of their own. One child, Josh, went to be with the Lord in 1997 at age 17.

Friday night dinner is not only a good time, but it also enhances the family’s efforts to pass on worthy values.

“I can’t see any of our grandchildren messing up too bad because so many grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters are there to encourage them to do right,” patriarch Boyer says.

The emphasis on keeping generations connected is at the heart of the Boyers’ ministry, The Learning Parent.

“Ultimately what we’re after are self-perpetuating, Godly generations,” says Rick Boyer. “We want to help people to raise kids who have a vision to serve God, to engage the culture, and homeschooling is a means to that end. It’s not an end in itself. It’s a means of raising up Christian warriors who will fight God’s battles in the culture and train up their own children to do the same thing in the next generation.”

Rick and Marilyn, who have been Samaritan members for 11 years, share their experiences about Christian parenting at homeschooling and church conferences as well as through several books and CDs available at thelearningparent.com. They started the Web site in 1999 after years of selling materials at conferences.

Homeschoolers for 30 years now, they were routinely asked questions at those conferences about how they have raised and taught their children.

“We couldn’t remember what we told to whom, so we started writing books,” Marilyn says.

Those books include Parenting from the Heart, The Hands-on Dad, Home Educating with Confidence, The Socialization Trap, Fun Projects for Hands-on Character Building, and Yes, They’re All Ours. Now the next generation of Boyers is getting into the act, writing or co-writing such books as Crossroads of Character: Learning to Make Decisions, Prepared for Action and, soon, Learning to Delight in Your Children: The Key to Their Hearts.

One of the questions they’re most frequently asked is why their children all obviously love the Lord and each other.

Marilyn says they heard the answer from their son Nate, who told Marilyn that the Boyer children “never got the impression that we were burdens to you, that there was nothing you’d rather do than be with us.”

“We delighted in our children as they were growing up,” Marilyn says, alluding to Learning to Delight in Your Children, a book she will be co-writing with Nate.

Neither Rick nor Marilyn grew up in a Christian home. They say that’s one reason they have worked hard to develop a positive, Bible-based method of parenting. “Every negative character quality your child displays is really a positive quality being misused,” Marilyn says.

The Boyers identified three things that are key to quality parenting.

First, Rick says, is using God’s Word as the textbook for life.

“What we want to teach our kids is to internalize Scripture,” he says.

They help their children do that through flash cards and audio recordings of Rick telling Bible stories or reading from Scripture and commenting along the way. Eventually, those recordings found their way to CD as Uncle Rick’s Audio Series and can now be used by other families.

“Knowing the Scripture, having it programmed into your mind, changes your mind, changes your character,” Rick says. “God wrote a book. He intended us to read it. It’s the most important thing in the world we’ll ever learn.”

Next is understanding that developing character in a child is more important than academics, sports, or entertainment. To that end, they developed in-depth studies of the Book of Proverbs for their children. Those studies have progressed from carbon copies of notebook paper for their children to two workbooks, Proverbs People Book 1 and Proverbs People Book 2.

The third aspect is that of service to others.

“We serve God and we serve others for the sake of God,” Rick says. “That’s what life’s about. We have tried to teach our kids that you won’t find satisfaction in life by serving self and seeking pleasure. You will find satisfaction in life by dedicating yourself to doing the most good that you can, to extend the kingdom of God and be a blessing in the lives of those around you. That’s where you’re going to find joy.”

The Boyer family has found that joy in missions trips, through projects in the church, and by simply taking care of an elderly former neighbor with Alzheimer’s disease who has moved into a nearby nursing home. Several of the Boyer children visit him regularly. Marilyn and the children have “adopted” other older folks as well, visiting them to brighten their lives.

Another area of service has been in politics and encouraging Christians to get involved in that arena. The oldest Boyer son, Rick, started out as a 16-year-old volunteer for the Campbell County Republican Party and was elected chairman at age 19, later being elected to the county’s Board of Supervisors. He ran unsuccessfully in November for the county’s clerk of court job, coming in second with 39 percent of the vote. Tim Boyer also has been involved with politics, now serving as vice chairman of the county’s Republican Party to move the local GOP in a more Biblical direction.

Rick, who is devoting more time now to the ministry than to his drywall business, and four of his sons are starting a youth and family conference called “Take Back the Land,” which Rick called a “kind of Biblical Tea Party movement.”

“We’re going to take the lessons (his sons) have learned from their different areas of service, and we are going to do this conference everywhere we can for Christian young people and their parents,” Rick says. “It’s kind of a youth conference for families. We’re going to try to inspire them and inform them about what they can do and teach them how to go about making a difference as they engage culture. We will be teaching them how to prepare for leadership in family, the church, government, the media, the arts, business and so on.”

The Boyers believe that “all major cultural institutions need to be reformed along Biblical guidelines.”

“The way to do that is by Biblical leadership,” Rick says.

Their political helps are offered in such books as For You They Signed about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, most of whom, the Boyers say, were Bible-believing Christians. Or Prepared for Action: Equipping Home Educators for Political Action, Tim Boyer’s new book, described as “a blueprint for how home educators can take a stand for Christ in the political arena.”

For the Boyers, everything in life always points back—or should point back—to Scripture.

“We wanted our kids to know that the Bible has the answer for every problem they’ll ever face in life,” Rick says. “Our goal was not to teach them Scripture just for the sake of knowledge, but to teach them Scripture to change their lives and conform them to the image of Jesus. The goal for our kids and other people’s kids is equipping them with resources to be able to do that in their own families so they’ll have successful families as well.”