Sticky Faith 2 (Syler Thomas)

This series on Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s book, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids, is by Syler Thomas.

We are going through some of the concepts developed in Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s new book Sticky Faith. Yesterday, we looked at their main premise that who you are as a person is what shapes your child’s faith more than anything else.

In chapter two, Clark and Powell examine the impact of a “gospel of sin management” (as Dallas Willard puts it) on the life of a young person. They tell the story of a boy named Darrin who seemed on the surface of things to be the kind of young person whose faith would thrive in college. But he never connected to a church during his first year away and began blowing off his youth pastor. His comments upon returning home the next summer were telling: he said he figured he’d “get back into it” once he got out of college. The takeaway for Clark was that Darrin’s faith was a shallow, performance-based faith that was focused more on Darrin’s being “into it” or his “working” to have it make sense.

Darrin’s faith while in high school was more about accepting Jesus to avoid hell and about changing his behavior in order to fit in with the cultural norms in his religious family and youth group setting, rather than an “inside-out” transformation that results in a lifelong relationship with God.

Powell and Clark have this response:

“As parents, then, instead of concentrating on…whether and how our kids are living ‘righteous’ lives, we have the opportunity to help them discover, access, and strengthen their trust and faith in Jesus Christ. In so doing, the righteousness they eventually display will be the product of the Holy Spirit” (37).

Do you think churches today are set up to produce students like Darrin? How do we do things better?