Continuing Ed Staycation - "Sticky Faith"

This week I've been home reading "Sticky Faith" a book about how to create long-lasting faith in kids and youth. It was an awesome study on how churches in the past have failed in helping kids and youth gain faith that lasts past high school. 50% of youth who graduate from youth programs in churches leave the church once they graduate from high school.

To be honest, I was incredibly frustrated reading this book. Mostly because I was taught most of what this book had to say, and I knew it. I found it frustrating, because in my seven years of ministry at Gethsemane, I have never found an effective way to communicate what I read, what I know is true about youth.

But I am insanely stubborn, and I will not declare failure...yet. So, here we go...

1 - The church has spent too long teaching the first step of faith as obedience. It isn't. It is trust. If you want proof that this is true, look at a 3 year-old. Mine, for instance. As I recited the list of erred ways my son had committed last Sunday to a friend, that friend laughed and said, "they really should entitle 3 year old's 'Wait is that a boundary? Let me check.'" My son is not interested in perfectly obeying the rules that I set out for him... yet. Instead, he purposefully is testing all of them, to figure out if I mean what I say, if I am who I say I am, and ultimately if I am trustworthy. I am exhausting myself teaching him obedience, but what he is trying to figure out is if I am trustworthy. If I am trustworthy, if I hold my boundaries, do what I say I will do, eventually (hopefully) he will learn to trust my judgment and will start to obey.

In church, we exhaust ourselves teaching kids what God expects of them. We teach them to love, to do their homework, to read their Bibles, to pray, to forgive, to come to church... and with older kids to not have sex before marriage, etc. But what we don't necessarily teach them is how to trust God.

Maybe we don't introduce faith that way because it is scary. God could fail us. ;-)

The example given in the book was teasing/bullying. When a child faces this, we often tell them to forgive, love their enemy, etc. We tell them how to obey what God would want them to do. We don't start with the dangerous questions of "how  can we trust God with this?" "What would it look like if God didn't let us down here?" Instead of "What would Jesus do?" maybe we should ask, "Can we trust Jesus to do something here... and if so, what?"

2 - Here's the really tough news. I think that why we have failed at gpcfortworth to get really sticky faith in our youth is because we don't teach our youth that we are trustworthy.

As parents, too often we say, "because I'm the parent that's why". We don't teach our kids that we are trustworthy and gracious and following the example of God for us. We demand obedience, but we don't necessarily teach them to trust us.

If we can demonstrate, share, be an example for our youth about how we struggle to trust God day to day, then maybe they would trust us. If we can show them how we struggle to do the right thing and how that journey is going for us, maybe they can start to trust our experience... instead of "because I'm mom", we can start to share "because I've made those mistakes, because I know where this could end up, because God has not let me down yet" more often, and maybe then, our kids will want to repeat our behaviors.

3 - Adults need to get caught doing faith. Let's fess up parents. How often do we talk to our kids about where we saw God today? How often do we reflect on how God helped us today? How often do our kids catch us praying and reading our Bibles? How often do our kids catch us journaling our faith? How often do our kids catch us forgiving as we have been forgiven, modeling peace, modeling submission to one another, modeling respect, modeling...?

How are they going to trust our advice if we don't even follow it?

The greatest teacher kids have regarding their faith is their parents. Our kids need to see us trusting God, really trusting God, with the hard parts of our lives. We get to be their laboratory. If mom trusts God with her marriage, with her lost job, with how to handle people talking about her, and God doesn't let her down... then maybe I can trust mom more, and maybe I can trust God more.

4 - We need to be better and more strategic about being church. Gethsemane does an awesome job at being church, but we are super disorganized and hap-hazard about it. This book recommended 5 adults to each kid, to mentor them in the faith.

We have that many people loving our kids, but do we have 5 adults checking in on our kids? Sharing with our kids how they have lived out their faith today?

The best folks to do this are often those who are grand-parent age or older... the kids already have a parent/parents. And mentoring is one of the best ways to get our own faith in a healthier place. Ask a teacher. You really have to know your subject (God in this case) if you are going to teach it.

5 - I've said this again, and again, and again, and again. But maybe since a book said it people will not think that I am making this up. Segregating kids based on age is a horrible idea. Older kids who teach younger kids are more likely to keep their faith. Youth who are part of general worship (not sent off to kids' worship) are more likely to keep their faith. Youth and kids that have many generations interacting and sharing their faith are more likely to keep their faith.

Now this means that worship needs to be multi-generational, it needs to be led by different generations, and different parts of the service need to serve different generations. As Karl Travis at First Pres says, "our goal is to make everyone happy, some of the time." If you are happy and feel connected during a part of worship, awesome. If there is one part of worship that doesn't serve you... then pray that that particular part of worship is reaching someone different in age/culture/language than you, because it probably wasn't meant for you.

Sending kids out of worship is not the key. Segregation wasn't the key in the US for education, and it shouldn't be in the church. Jesus said let the little children come, while the full grown disciples were there. If kids are having trouble during worship, then we need to do worship better to serve them, and we also need to engage their gifts better. They are just as legitimate a part of the body of Christ as you or me. Those who have professed their faith are just as much full members in the body of Christ as you or me. We need to act like it.

I would be upset if you told me that the 30 somethings now needed to leave the room for this part of the service. Wouldn't you?


So there you have it. The rest of the book talked about the breadth of faith. Do we teach kids to do justice? Do we teach them to read things in the newspaper and help them do something about it? (Ahem, community organizing and ACT are great starting points). Do we model volunteering? Do we model service? Faith is more than faith disciplines, it is putting faith into action.

Unlike many churches I know, Gethsemane actually has the tools to respond easily to this call to sticky faith. We have all generations together. We think we are old, but we really aren't. Our median age on a Sunday is probably around 45 or so. We have adults that deeply care and pray for our youth a lot. We have adults who have struggled and continue to struggle in the journey to actually trust God. We have all the resources, but for whatever reason, we are stuck teaching old models that don't work, stuck wishing we were big enough to segregate kids out, stuck hoping that if we can get kids to "act" right they will believe right... but our faith isn't about doing it right. It's about faith and trust and deep, deep love. Let's focus on that.