Importance: 10%
Dr Dave Rueter
Quote
Parents are the single greatest influence on the future faith lives of children and youth.
Pastor, teacher and DCE teaching is good but will not be nearly as impactful as parents teaching at home
Common experience of confirmation being super boring. But we should be opening the door to learning
Good curriculum won’t do it. It takes empowering parents to be making faith a priority in family life
Church workers main job should be tie walk alongside parents not replace them.
Book: Families and Faith - Bengston
Characteristics of parents who pass on their faith
- Warm and Affirming Relationships
- Parental Religious involvement
- Parental Consistency and Warmth
Best approach
- Focus on family as a unit more than age groups. How do you help cohorts of families through as a whole rather than just a single kid or group of kids. How can the church come along side of these families as they grow and mature.
- Take a long view in faith formation. Not just a short time horizon. How do you help kids and families learn how to learn and be curious about their faith and find answers together. The conversation needs to keep happening so that growth happens over time and not just being forced to agree with something.
Book: Soul Searching Christian Smith source of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
Children are primarily shaped by the faith they see their parents live out.
Some of the way we structure worship and education pit families in worship or faith education against each other rather than working together.
Important to ask families what their hopes and dreams for their family is.
Privately reading a Bible is not helpful for teaching kids how you practice your faith. The things we do to be faithful should be evident for our whole family to see and participate in.
Fragmenting programs by age group often makes the kids transition to older or becoming and adult difficult and a place they leave because they never were a part of the church proper
Idea to start a family service that is focused on worshiping as a family unit
Book: a faith of their own - Pearce points to family practice as a key factor
Modeling stopping and praying with a kid is a practical way to make prayer a part of life and turning to God when things feel out of control
Book: religious parenting - smith. religion is a home base for kids when life gets tough or crazy.
Church workers can come and go in the life of a child but parents will be walking with them the rest of their life
Making connection points from stuff that happens or learned in worship to the present life experience with your kids. Encouraging families to see that there is not a separation between what we do every day and what happens during life
Church is who we are and how we live. We gather as church but then are sent out to live as church as well
Shared religion also glues families together
We should not be adversarial with parents and church workers. But are all on the same team for raising kids in faith. Parents naturally what what is best for there kids so we need to teach how faith is the Center of that
The primary responsibility for passing on the faith is with parents. Churches then need to be equipping and encouraging families to do this stuff at home. Not talking down to families that don’t know what to do but have easy access to the materials
We should be able to catechize parents and kids together because that means we have families that have not been the church before learning who Jesus is.
Book: Jesus story book Bible - good Bible except for lords supper
Important to be able to teach through the meta narrative of the Bible as a big story
Final thoughts:
- Equip and support the home beginning at baptism
- Introduce the content of the small catechism as young as possible
- Provide greater depth over time to integration across various ministry programs.
- Mentor children and youth in faith longer. Start kids a young as possible.
- Ask youth to confirm their faith later in their personal development. Keep them learning for longer than just cut things off. Middle school is a crappy time for asking kids if they are actually committed to their faith. This confirmation should be meaningful and not age based