Jesus Creed
Syler Thomas, who is the author of this series of posts, examines what “sticky faith” means to him as a father.
I’ve been walking through Powell and Clark’s Sticky Faith over the past week or so (previous posts are here, here, here, and here). There is more that could be said about their very important book, but I’d like to share one final post from a personal standpoint.
The issue of how to pass faith along to children is an incredibly sensitive subject, as there are scores of committed Christian parents who have done everything the “right” way, whose children are nonetheless not in the faith. Some of these parents feel like Paul does in Romans 9, that they would choose to be “cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of” their children.
As I have seen it play out in my context, I do think we have seen the effects of the “gospel of sin management” take its toll on some of the children of evangelicals. Parents (and the churches they attend) teach children that “all you have to do” (I heard that phrase verbatim from a teaching video at a children’s program this summer) is put your faith in Jesus, and your sins are forgiven, your spot in heaven secure. Some young people grow up and understand that faith is more than that, and others do not. This has led to the de facto creation in many churches of the category of “saved, but not walking with the Lord,” a category that I have yet to see in the pages of Scripture. But the thought process of these young people goes like this: “Each week in Sunday School, I was told that the Bible says that all I have to do is accept Jesus and I will go to heaven. That sounds great to me. In the meantime, I’ll join Billy Joel and laugh with the sinners rather than cry with the saints.”
I’d like to now share a bit about my own early faith journey.
I grew up going to an Episcopal church, but faith wasn’t anything I talked to my parents about. In grade school, while at a Christian summer camp, I first heard the message about Jesus and his offer of forgiveness, and I made my first faith profession then. When I was in 8th grade, all of my friends went to confirmation class. I didn’t want to go, and my mom didn’t make me. I’ll never know what would have happened had she forced me, but I think she was very wise to let me pass. (I eventually did get confirmed, at the end of my senior year: I met one-on-one with my priest a handful of times, and the bishop came to town the morning after my senior prom. I bet the Facebook group “Confirmed the morning after Senior Prom” would be a relatively small one).
When I was a senior in high school, I quit my involvement in theater and, with my newly found free time, agreed to be one of three high school volunteers in our church’s junior high program, which included weekly meetings with an adult leader. This was when things started to come together for me. When more was asked of me beyond just showing up and listening to a talk, my faith went deeper. This is, in fact, one of the “sticky faith” factors that Powell and Clark identify: students who get involved in ministry tend to have a faith that sticks.
The second most important factor for me was the discovery of the work of the Holy Spirit during my junior and senior years. This is, of course, another controversial subject, but I am convinced that had I not had an encounter with the power of God before I left for college, my faith never would have made it. As a skeptic, I needed “a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that [my] faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Cor 2:4-5).
I share my story to highlight the fact that my parents really had very little to do with my faith development, beyond loving me unconditionally. As parents, I think we tend to overvalue our own influence and undervalue the role of the Holy Spirit in bringing about His work in our children’s lives. This is not to say that our role is unimportant. There is a line that parents have to walk between being overbearing on one extreme (sure to push kids away from faith) and passive on the other (one post from a youth pastor last week said that most of the adults in his church “are too busy pursuing their own adventures than spending the quality time needed to develop the kids”). We have to be ready to step in and push the point in strategic places (for instance, doing what we can to get our kids around other adults who can reinforce the faith they see modeled at home) and back off other times. This is an art, not a science.
People often say that God loves our children more than we do. If we believe it, we’ll take responsibility for our own faith first. That is, we’ll answer the call to take up our own crosses and follow Jesus, living out our faith in an authentic way. Then as it relates to our children, we plant, cultivate, and water, but ultimately, we leave the growth to God.
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