Passing the Torch So Kids Are Kept Christian
My focus has been elsewhere lately, but in the last few months three significant studies on childhood-to-adulthood faith retention have been published, all which validate the arguments laid out in Keeping Kids Christian.
The Experience of God’s Love in Children. World Vision and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University studied how children experience the love of God. Christianity Today has a good write-up of the study. This is slightly different than the question of faith retention, but the “how” covers the same territory: the relationship between children and adults. The study found that children experience the love of God through their families, particularly their parents. Kids understand God’s love, not in abstract categories, but in concrete, relationally grounded human connection. Parents, families, and the adults of the church providing care and guidance is crucial for kids understanding the love of God. All people grab onto models for thinking of God, and kids inherently look to their parents to be that template.
Childhood Experiences with Adulthood Religious Outcomes. Published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the authors looked at preexisting data sets to examine seven childhood factors: parental marital status, conversations about faith with parents, childhood religious service attendance, mother/father religious service attendance, and the quality of the relationship with one’s mother/father…
Mere Orthodoxy Web Forum Bonus Q&A
I had a great time participating in Mere Orthodoxy’s first ever author forum to discuss my book Keeping Kids Christian. We ran out of time to cover all the questions, so I wrote up a series of short answers that Mere Orthodoxy published, along with a link to a recording of the forum.
Mere Orthodoxy Forum on Keeping Kids Christian
This Tuesday, March 31st, I have the privilege of participating in Mere Orthodoxy’s forum series, “Conversations for Humans”. It’s hosted online and open to the public; you can register for the event here. I’ll be talking about my book Keeping Kids Christian and what the church can do to promote faith transmission to the next generation.
How to Save a Pastor’s Kid
The most challenging requirement to being an elder is that your kids need to be faithful and well-behaved. Your kids are simultaneously their own people, with their own wills and personal faith, and part of your resumé, open to evaluation by your church. The requirement is then difficult on two fronts: you are being evaluated based on someone else’s character and behavior and the church has a legitimate interest in observing your kids.
I didn’t grow up as a pastor’s kid; in fact, as far as I can tell, I’m the first pastor in my family going back at least 8 generations. But the reputation of pastor’s kids veers wildly from the most-straight laced, spiritual kids (who may or may not burst out of their inhibitions upon adulthood) or church-based terrors. And pastors often make the mistake of treating their kids not as their own child first, but as extensions of their ministry to the church. This looks like kids being turned into ministerial props, and their lives being put on display (sermon illustrations anyone?) with no sense of privacy and dignity fir the kid. Especially as the kids get older, the realization that they are constantly being watched and evaluated, and that their parents are holding them to a high standard precisely because of that evaluation, often leads to resentment, pressure, and rebellion. Or worse — entitlement, when the kids think they have some kind of trickle-down authority in the church because of who their parents are.
So, the very nature of the requirement that a pastor’s kids be faithful often raises the pressure that encourages unfaithfulness…
Oncers, Noncers, and Evening Worship
A friend of mine grew up in farm-country Indiana, and their family faithfully attended church twice on Sundays. She likes to tell us that the only times as kids they were allowed to skip the Sunday evening service was when Elvis and then the Beatles performed on the ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. The evening service was once a regular feature of American Protestant worship, but for a variety of reasons has slowly disappeared. I believe that an evening service is incredibly valuable for Christian spiritual formation; for that reason we instituted an evening service in my congregation two years ago.
But I couldn’t help but think of my friend’s story when I was recently introduced to a phrase from the Dutch Reformed tradition: “Oncers become noncers…”
