A Letter To Parents

I am not a parent. I have no children, and so I can't even begin to say that I know what it is like to walk in your shoes. But I can say this: I know that you are the most important, most influential person in the spiritual life of your adolescent. It does not matter if they acknowledge it, it does not matter if you never talk with your child about about your spiritual life or their, it does not matter if you are not sure your children are even hearing you, no matter how they react, YOU are the most important person in the outcome, formation, and longevity of the spiritual lives of your teenager.

Over and over again the research points to parents being far and away the most consistent predictor of the faith of their children. As Kenda Creasy Dean puts it "we get what we are." Christian Smith and the National Study for Youth and Religion name parents, and in particular, the mother, as the most influential factor in the participation and internalization of the faith of their children. " On page 116 of Soul Searching he says, "Family socialization generally seems to work when it comes to teenagers’ religious faith and practice. Furthermore, the quality of the relationships that parents build with their teenagers, and their own choices about marriage relationships, education, and occupations—insofar as they have choices in these areas—also create family contexts that again form the outcome of their teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives."

Your kids ARE listening, or more accurately, they are absorbing. They are absorbing your beliefs, habits, and level of internalization. I want to take a minute and talk about the internalization piece (which is a word coined by Fuller Youth Institute). In a nut shell: internalization is the level at which one's faith affects one's daily life and character. It is about Christ changing who we are, not just what we do. An integrated faith changes thoughts, values, beliefs, priorities, budgets, relationships, and schedules. A person who is internalizing their faith in Christ is moving towards loving others and God on a daily basis. This is often messy and awkward. It involves mistakes, apologies, harming others, being harmed, sharing our tender spots, it often involves anger, confusion, hope, tears, affection, kindness, and grace - lots and lots of grace. If you are moving towards internalizing your faith, then the odds are high that your child is as well. In short, adolescents are absorbing and mimicking the level at which the faith of their parents is or is not internalized.

I ask myself this often as a youth worker: Am I being transparent about my mess? I am becoming more and more passionate about parents also asking that question. The influence of positive parental relationships during adolescence is both one of the most powerful influences on lasting faith, and one of the places that our culture has stereotypically expected disengagement on both the part of the adolescent and the parent. While teens naturally reproduce the spirituality of their parents, they also benefit greatly from an adult, and most particularly, a parent having an open dialogue about one another'sspiritual lives. In particular, if you are following Christ, then sharing about your daily spiritual life, how you became a Christian, and everything in between can equip your child to navigate the transition into adulthood with their faith in tact. It makes so much sense to me! You have lived more, and you know what it looks like to follow Christ in your stage of life, and quite simply, your kids do not. They have not lived it or walked it and cannot know what it looks like without the adults in their lives being honest about what it means to follow Christ in all of its messy glory.

How you live your spiritual life matters, how you share that with your teenager matters. I am praying for you all as you make this journey. Please pray for me as I learn to relate to you and your children. Let's keep walking this road together.

Youth Ministry: Parent Ministry?

Did I mention yet that I am a nerd? I spent a good portion of my Saturday sitting in Caribou doing research. I am currently reading A Faith of Their Own by Lisa Pearce and Melinda Lundquist Denton. I am reading it partially because I am more than a little interested in this type of research and its results, and partially because I want to try to synthesize some of this information into something useable for those in youth ministry.

A repeated theme in this research is the importance of parents. We get what we are. (This is a little unfair to say because I am not a parent, but the saying itself holds true) Parents are consistently the best predictors of the spiritual life of young people. In Soul Searching (116), Smith states it this way, “Family socialization generally seems to work when it comes to teenagers’ religious faith and practice. Furthermore, the quality of the relationships that parents build with their teenagers, and their own choices about marriage relationships, education, and occupations—insofar as they have choices in these areas—also create family contexts that again form the outcome of their teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives.” In A Faith of Their Own, this theme is reiterated about religious behavior and beliefs for students in all levels of religious engagement. In short, if parents attend church on a regular basis and integrate thier faith into their daily lives, children do. If parents don’t, neither do their children. And if parents are sporadic, nominal or culturally Christian, so are their children.

One thing is becoming more and more obvious to me: as youth workers we must minister to parents. I wonder how many of our ministries do this at all? How many do it well? What does it take to build this kind of ministry?

I think ministering to families is one of the largest challenges facing the youth worker today. Families are incredibly hard to minister to as a whole. One has to consider all ages, all maturity levels, and all education levels. Each family has a unique pattern of communication. Each family has a set of rules, assumptions, values, dysfunctions and functions. And each family is composed of individuals working as a whole. It is daunting to think of ministering to a family, and, specifically to parents. I love listening to parents about their children and vice versa, and while listening is incredibly valuable, it is not, in and of itself, the kind of ministry that is going to help build and equip families to grow in their faith in Christ.

The real question is, of course: what is?

Internalization Part 3

Internalization as Evidenced in Morality

My friend, co-laborer, and youth pastor at our church, Nathan Wagner, made several really great points about internalization on the last post. Nate makes the point that choosing God's way in any given situation out of trust and love for God is evidence of faith taking root. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton put it this way in Soul Searching "Even though many teens said religion is important in their lives, it still seemed to us to be mostly part of the furniture in the background of their lives. ... Quite often, teens said they did not think their relgion affected their family relationships, they did not believe religion was relavant to the conduct of a dating relationship, they did not see that religion affected their life at school and so on." They go on to state that this was true of adoelscents who told the researchers that religion was very important in their lives. Clearly there is a gap in the undertanding and practice of Christianity, and this is evidenced in moral decisions.

Nate has a great point- that choosing an option that lines up with the teaching of Christ is fruit of internalization. I agree with him when he takes it further to say that this decision needs to founded and rooted in trust in God's character. It has to go beyond just actions, even though consistent patterns of action are fruit of what we actually believe. Some moral choices are moments when our true motives are laid bare, and being founded in the knowledge that God loves you and expects rightesouness is a poweful motive. Knowledge about God needs to lead to actions and thought patterns that demonstrate that His way is worth risking.

Is internalization the subtle ingesting of truth in a place where decisions are made?

Yes, teenagers are graduating from the church

For those who have been in suspense for several years: Yes, teenagers are graduating from high school, and at the same time, ceasing to be regularly involved in churches. Of course there are different definitions of what that looks like, and the research tracking this shift is recent enough that no one is sure if the drop in church attendance will last in the lives of this group of people. What is confirmed by the research is that there is an overall decline in church attendance beyond graduation from high school.

Here are some of the various tidbits of research shamelessly pulled from my capstone paper.

• In Souls in Transition, Christian Smith tracks the religious shifts from ages 13-17 to 18-23 and this research shows an “overall decline in professed importance of religious faith.”[1] Of the students who were Mainline Protestant or Conservative Protestant in high school, Smith reports that these categories lost 13 percent of their baseline totals over the five year period.[2] This includes religious switching or changing of religious affiliation, defined as “stated membership, association, or identification with different major religious traditions and organizations.”[3] Fifty percent of the Mainline Protestant and 36 percent of the Conservative Protestants switched to another religious affiliation, including switching between these two affiliations
• Smith also notes a 24.7 percent loss in those who attended religious service two to three times a month or more, yet there was only an 8.5 percent loss in those who said that faith is “extremely important” or “very important” in daily life.[4] In these categories, Mainline Protestants had the biggest decrease with a loss of 16 percent, while Conservative Protestants lost 13 percent.
• As part of the College Transition Project, Fuller Youth Institute tracked 400 college students who attended youth groups in high through their first three years of college in order to “to better understand the characteristics of youth groups that are associated with a healthy transition to college life and help youth workers develop those qualities in their youth groups.”[5] Some of their findings to date state that “29 percent of the students we’ve surveyed moderately or strongly agree that ‘it’s been difficult to find a church where I feel welcome.’  Although we are not yet finished with our study, this data (along with findings in parallel studies) seem to suggest that about 30-50 percent of students in youth groups struggle in their faith after graduation.”[6]

The numbers by themselves can be daunting. Yes, there is a decline in church attendance after graduation from high school, but these numbers are fleshed out and balanced out by increasing in religious interest, stories of young people who are deeply commited to their faith, and by exploration of the reasons and causes behind the behavior. I found a lot of encouraging material in the midst of this information. But, the purpose of this blog entry is to answer a question from 3 years ago: Around 30 percent of high school students who regularly attended either youth group or a church cease doing so after graduation.

This is a very real phenomena.

I think that we have an equally real challenge to do something about it.

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• [5] http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/college-transition/#research
• [6] Ibid,

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[4] Ibid, 133.

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[1] Smith, Souls in Transition, 113.

[2] Ibid, 105.

[3] Ibid, 103