Keeping the Faith: Suggestions for Parents and Church Leaders
NIV
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon you hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
(Deut 6:4–9)
Perhaps your role in your church doesn’t put you in direct contact with the children and/or the youth. There may be other staff to handle working with them. However, don’t these verses from Deuteronomy hold us all responsible for guiding our young people in the faith? Sticky Faith by Kara E Powell and Chap Clark is about how to help them gain a lasting faith.. While written primarily for parents, Sticky Faith is an important read for anyone (clergy and lay) staffing a church in which young people are involved.
Churches across all denominations in the US have a common problem in that about half of young people from Christian families do not stick with their faith when they go to college.1 One fifth of the young adults that gave up their faith in college had actually planned to do so; The quasi-good news is that, some half of those who leave will eventually come back, in their late twenties. But considering the life changing decisions that are made in those years when Christ is not the center of their lives, it might motivate us to impress upon them that sticking to their faith is not to be taken lightly. So our job is to find ways to help them deal with these important decisions before they make choices they may later regret.2
The research presented in Sticky Faith concluded that parents have the power to motivate their children if they make the conscious decision to do so. And, of course, turning to the religious professionals in their churches would be one critical way of designing strategies aimed at helping their adult children through the choppy waters of late adolescence. Many parents approach their children’s faith with what we might call “Dog Groomer Discipline.’
We have a yellow Labrador retriever named, Honey. Now, lovely as Honey is, she rolls in things she shouldn’t and gets filthy and smelly. So, we drop Honey off at the groomers for a couple of hours, and when we pick her up she’s 75 pounds of clean, soft, sweet smelling dog. We don’t have to mess up our bathroom at home, or have a wet dog shaking water off everywhere, or dirty towels to launder.
This is how many people expect their children to become followers of Jesus. They drop them at Sunday school each week and hope that their children will stay active Christians throughout their lives. I suspect it isn’t that these parents don’t feel it’s their job to do more, rather, it seems possible they often don’t know how to do more. They aren’t comfortable talking about their faith or are afraid they will get it wrong or that they won’t be able to answer a question that their children might ask.
Helping Parents Talk with Their Children About Jesus
Curiously. very few teenagers from church-going families have regular dialogues with their mom about faith issues and a fewer have those conversations with their dad.3 Our job as church leaders is to help parents live out the gospel in their home, and help them understand how to frame discussions and activities in order to pass along these learnings to their children. Shouldn’t we be teaching parents how to discuss what happened in Sunday School beyond the craft items they made?
We need to equip parents to reflect theologically with their children about everyday things—money, movies, even the Internet. Why not help parents learn how to have conversations about faith and encourage them with the confidence that the gospel—that has stood for thousands of year—is robust and neither their child’s questions nor their own lack of knowledge is going to break it. Getting together with parents to talk about these matters openly is a most empowering, effective way of giving them confidence to broach “churchy” topics with their children. These parent meetings give them an opportunity to voice their fears, concerns, and questions with one another. This helps provide a way forward; parents value what they learn from ministers as well the ideas they get from one another. Personally, I have found very enthusiastic responses from parents wanting to take part in such conversations.
Another lead that the church can take in helping children retain their faith is what Powell and Clark call building a “sticky web of relationships.”4 This is an intentional act of getting Christian adults involved in their children’s lives. My eleven year old came home from a youth retreat and indignantly demanded, “How come you never told me about the Holy Spirit?” My husband and I have indeed taught her quite a bit about the Holy Spirit over the years, including celebrating Pentecost with cake and candles, (which she did concede upon review). However, going away and hearing about it from someone other than her father and me brought the Holy Spirit newly into focus for her. Yes, children need to hear their parents talk about their faith and how to live a Christ-cantered life; when they hear it from others as well, that helps strengthens their own emerging faith.
As a church we can facilitate and encourage this web of other adult Christians in the lives of our children. For example, many churches offer Christian formation/confirmation courses for their young people. This sort of course can be filled with opportunities for building a web of relationships. My elder daughter went through a confirmation course recently, and she has built many relationships with other Christian adults in the process. First, she chose an adult mentor to meet with her weekly and discuss what it means to be a Christian and answer her questions. Second, the class met each Sunday afternoon with their confirmation leader to learn more about the basic tenets of Christianity, and she was encouraged to share her doubts and ask more questions. The class went on a confirmation retreat, that included the youth minister as well as an older teenager who talked about what it’s like to follow Jesus in high school. Last, she and her mentor chose a “mature saint” whom they talked with about her faith journey through her 85 years—the highs, the lows, the doubts, the certainties. That dear, lovely lady gave my teenage daughter a bible that had been given to her when she was baptized as an adult 70 years ago. My daughter is thrilled with that bible and is unexpectedly now “into” the King James Version. Someday, she may hold that bible in her hands and recall that an elderly woman who followed Jesus passed that special book onto her as she was just beginning her journey. Who knows where that bible will go next? Personally, as church leaders, we may not be able to build that sticky web of relationships for every child, but we can build up the opportunity for it to happen. Confirmation is one example, but what else can be done to create a cross-generational relationship-web? What can the older teach the younger? What can the younger teach the older?
We need more than sharing a church building to make for a lasting faith for our children and young people. As church leaders we need to frame the culture in our church to facilitate and encourage the support that will guide them toward a lifetime of robust faith.
Notes
1. Kara E Powell,. and Chap Clark, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 15.
2. Ibid, 16.
3. Ibid, 23.
4. Ibid, 71.
