Surveys consistently find that about three-quarters of UK Christians came to faith before they left secondary school. This is consistent with the Bible story (Proverbs 22:6, Psalm 78:1-6).
Parents matter
While faith transmission is a spiritual work done by the Lord, we would expect to find that in God’s ordered world there are some wise and godly methods that often bear fruit. A new book, “Handing Down the Faith” by Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk (OUP, 2021), adds to the considerable research in this area. The single most significant cause of faith, humanly speaking, in teenagers and young adults is (drum roll please) the religious lives of their parents. Parents matter! More than church, more than Sunday School, more than their peer group, more than the cultural air they breathe, parents are where it is at.
The authors start by summarising the research so far. As a newbie to this, I took notes!
A) The tone and manner of conversations between parents and their children matter more than the content: Warm and engaging chat in the park gets us further than a carefully, explained, cold, dry, theologically accurate lecture at the dinner table.
B) Both parents matter in handing on faith but the role of fathers is especially crucial. This feels worrying as in my experience it is disproportionately mothers who take responsibility for their children’s spiritual lives.
C) When parents hand on faith to their children, you can trace the effects throughout the child’s life in their sense of security, their relationships and their future family life. It’s the best investment we can make in our children’s lives.
Conversations matter
There is a clear link between parents talking to their children during the week about faith and it becoming a plausible framework for their lives. And yet, speaking about spiritual things is not intuitive. It is a skill. The authors compare it to learning a foreign language.
“When families that attend religious services even weekly do not converse together about religious things in the time between, their children only hear religion talked about by mostly others 1 or 2 hours a week. That is like sending one’s child to a weekly meeting about some foreign land where parents once lived, in which the child merely listens to others speak its foreign language.” (p71-72)
Alongside teaching our children the language of faith, our churches need to equip the parents to be having these everyday faith-filled chats in the park. The authors conclude, “If there were only one practical take-away from our research, it would be this: parents need not only to “walk the walk” but also regularly to talk with their children about their walk, what it means, why it matters, why they care.” (p225)
It seems that Moses had it exactly right, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your 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.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)
Churches matter
To effectively hand on faith to our children we need churches to support parents in talking confidently about Jesus in the everyday situations of their children’s lives. To have a thriving church a generation from now we need to be actively equipping parents so that they can disciple their children.
Ed Drew
A longer version of this article first appeared In Evangelicals Now.
