The Church's Parenting Challenge
by Timm Boyle

Volume 14 Issue 2, 2007

Should churches be investing their time in training children or building families?

The Parenting Roundtable

We’ve all read the data: If a person accepts Christ while they are still young … (fill in the blank). If a teenager makes a decision for Christ before a certain age … (fill in the blank). Increasingly, churches are becoming more and more aware of the pivotal role that children’s and student ministries play in the overall lifecycle of a church and its members. These ministries are receiving more attention and more resources every day and the pressure on them to “deliver” is overwhelming.

But should churches be more concerned about shoring up their youth programs or building into families, where, arguably, the greatest potential for spiritual growth resides?

We spoke with three specialists in this area, and their answers may surprise you. They are:

George Barna: Founder and directing leader of The Barna Group, Ltd., a California-based company that offers primary research and strategic assistance related to cultural assessment and transformation, faith dynamics, and leadership development. Among many other books, he is the author of Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions.

Betsy Hart: Syndicated columnist on cultural and family issues. Her column “From the Hart,” is distributed nationally each week to newspapers across the country. She is the author of It Takes a Parent.

Mark Holmen: Senior pastor of Ventura Missionary Church in Ventura, California. He has worked with families for more than 15 years serving as a youth and family pastor in three congregations and is the author of Faith Begins at Home.

WILLOW: George, in your book Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions, you say that 85 percent of parents believe they have the primary responsibility for the moral and spiritual development of their children, yet more than two thirds of them abdicate that responsibility to their church. You also state that most families do not have a genuine, spiritual life together. Why are these things true?

Barna: The research shows that while most parents say ultimately they are responsible, they also say they feel that they can handle that responsibility best by bringing their children to the “experts.” They look at the local church as the experts in the spiritual development of children. If they felt like they knew how to do it better, they would do it. But also remember that they’re very busy and very distracted. Most Americans like to do things that they feel they can do well and they tend to shy away from those things they believe they do not do well. So there’s all kinds of motivations for them to say, “Yes, I recognize that this is important, therefore it’s important that I have the people who do it best take care of that responsibility.”

Hart: I think that is a problem throughout the culture — the parents of young children saying,“I’m not an expert. I’m just a parent raising four young kids.” I do find that there is a tendency to want to turn to the “experts” for everything, whether it’s training our kids about soccer, schooling, and all kinds of interventions when it comes to their personal well-being. These days you can literally hire someone to train your children how to ride a bike and learn how to use the potty. So, it’s not an accident that we’re also seeing this in the Church. The tragedy of that is that God did not design experts to raise your children. He designed you to raise your children,and created parents to have a uniquely influential role in the lives of their children. No one is going to love a child, have the intimacy with a child, and have a knowledge of a child that a parent does. Nobody’s going to be willing to sacrifice for them, or even lay down their lives for them. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that’s how the Father sees His children, and we’re to model that to our own kids.

Holmen: What I see in a lot of our parents is they would love to parent better than how they were parented. They would like to do it better,they just don’t know how, and they are now living two to three generations removed from the last generation that even remembers what it was like to do everything in the home. What I’m finding in working with families today is if we as a Church get back to the basics of saying, “You know what, we’re going to show you how to do this,” then parents are very willing. Especially if we can say to them, “We’re going to help you be better parents, and we believe by getting Christ-like living into the center of your home, that’s the way to do it.” They’re pretty wide-eyed and open to saying, “OK, show me.”

Barna: We measure “success” in children’s ministries by thinking the kids are having a good time, the kids are happy, and we’ve got more kids coming back than we had last week. So we tend to measure those things when, in fact, that is not at all why the children’s ministry is there. We’re not there to make them feel good. We’re not there to make them happy. We’re not there to take them off their parent’s hands. We’re not there to make the parents feel like this is now being handled for them. The bottom line in this is supposed to be the transformation of a child’s life; allowing the Holy Spirit to really have free reign in that child’s life through some kind of a partnership with the parents who are giving the lead and the Church is supporting those parents. But that means that we’ve got to go back and redefine what success looks like. You get what you measure, and what we measure in our churches are things like attendance, and satisfaction, and so forth. We don’t do a very good job of measuring whether or not a child’s life is changing.

Hart: I like to use the terminology that my goal for my children is “Heaven, not Harvard” — which is a good thing because none of my children show signs of going to Harvard! I wonder if we presented that question to a typical Christian parent — “Is your goal for your child Heaven or Harvard?” —if sometimes there wouldn’t be some hesitation, particularly if there were a soccer game competing with Sunday morning church. Is Heaven and church in the same league with piano lessons and soccer and karate and doing well at school?

Barna: We wouldn’t have soccer games Sunday afternoon if Christian parents were saying, “You know what? That’s inappropriate.” I see a lot of parents who desperately want a great spiritual life for their children but who are intimidated by what’s going on sometimes in church programs. They don’t feel they can keep up. They would like to. They really do believe it’s their job. They’re not sure, but they would like to be doing the right things. On the other hand, I’m also seeing a lot of parents who are professing Christians, but who are guiding their children in such a way that it’s difficult to discern how they’re going to be spiritual successes because of some of the things we’re talking about here, and, honestly, I fall into both of those camps myself at different times. I get lackluster. I get more worried about the piano lessons. I don’t have devotions with my kids for days at a time. I’m convicted as we’re talking here that I need to be more aware of these things.

WILLOW: Mark, you once said that churches that are determined to address this crucial area don’t need to recreate the wheel on this subject. They don’t need to throw everything they’re doing out the window and start all over. They can tweak existing ministries and build bridges starting very early in a child’s life.

Holmen: Everybody wants to come along with the next “program in a box.” The Church for the last 40 years has had the most creative programs that the Church has ever seen! Our programming has been outstanding, and yet our families are in worse shape today as they ever were. Something’s not working through programs. It’s all supposed to be about a relationship with Jesus Christ. I try to encourage pastors that this isn’t a children’s ministry issue and it isn’t a family ministry issue. This is a Church issue. Christ-like living is not happening in our homes today, and whatever we’re doing at church is not enabling or equipping people to be Christ-like. Instead of throwing out everything we’re doing and saying, “All the programs need to go,” why don’t we just say, “How are we doing our women’s ministry in a way that we’re equipping women to live it out in the home? How are we doing our men’s ministry in a way that we’re equipping men to live this out in the home? What about our singles ministry? What about our worship? What about our small group ministry?

Program-driven initiatives are based on numbers or money or budgets. We need to be figuring out new tools to say, “Are we instilling something that is changing how people are living in their homes?” If Christ is in the center of the home, it’s going to impact what they watch on TV and what they do on the Internet. It’s going to impact choices they make. We, as the Church, have to put those lenses on, and until we do, we’re just going to keep looking for the next program to fix our problem.

WILLOW: You also once said, “You can be a church with family ministries, or you can be a church of family ministries.” Can you explain the difference?

Holmen: You can be a church with a family ministry where it’s just another program. You’ll have some family ministry events. You’ll have some family ministry game nights. You’ll do some family retreats. At best, you may get about a 40 percent turnout rate. Or, you can become a church of family ministries, where you say, “You know what? It’s a part of how we do church.” If through those lenses home is the primary place where faith is to be nurtured, let’s focus on that and everything we do will be evaluated through that lens.

WILLOW: George, do you think it’s easier or more difficult for church leaders to be the primary source of spiritual nurturing for their kids at home than for the average parent?

Barna: I think there’s two sides to that coin. On the one hand, in some ways it’s easier because you’ve been immersed in this all day, day after day. This is your language. This is your culture. This is what your mind and your heart and schedule are wrapped around. But on the other hand, it’s like a guy who’s just come back from a basketball tournament. He gets in the door and the kids say, “Come on, Dad, let’s go out and play basketball.” This is where that whole issue of balance comes into play for those of us who are in ministry leadership roles; recognizing that we have to have our priorities straight. We have to schedule our time and our energy.

WILLOW: Mark, in your book Faith Begins at Home, you give some practical examples of how families can transform seemingly mundane routines of life into faith-affirming activities. Can you give some examples of that?

Holmen: One of the things was “car time.” Can we just turn off the radio and as we’re driving just ask, “What happened today? What’s going on in your life? How can I pray for you?” Another was taking full advantage of mealtimes and simply taking advantage of whatever time we have. Most people think they’re going to get a two hour sit-down with their kids at the table with a candle burning and the Bibles open doing a devotion for two hours. That’s not going to happen. I mean, that’s gone today. But there are other increments of time, and you just have to take advantage of them.

One of the things that we discovered from studying parents who have produced the goods is that they tended not to see themselves as a dictator, not to see themselves as the perfect role model, but to see themselves as a coach, and in that process, I think a lot of times we overlook the value of coaching where it is really interactive, and based on a relationship. As a coach, you’re always looking for the teachable moment. That little window of opportunity when you can, based on the bond that you’ve created with the child, interact with them, and show them how to get to the next level of whatever it is they’re trying to get to. But all along having that mentality that you’re not perfect, but there are some things that you’ve learned. “Here’s some things that based on my own failures in life, I can help you to do better.”

Hart: That’s a great point, and I think because we live in such a perfectionist society, we want everybody to think we’re a perfect parent. Well, I don’t even know what that is … and I know I’m not it! But if we have a failure, we need to get back up and just keep going and persevering, all the while giving ourselves a chance to be human, to be failed, and to be real.

Barna: Part of the difficult thing is recognizing that love sometimes means you have to allow your child to fail in a situation; that sometimes they are going to suffer and it’s not our job to rush in and alleviate the suffering. We did some research on this and we found that by and large, Christians perceive any form of suffering or adversity to be a sign of failure or in some spiritual circles to be a symbol of God’s disapproval of who we are or what we’re doing,which I think is a tremendous misreading of Scripture.

Hart: We’re so afraid of adversity in our kids’ lives, but it can be the very thing that God uses to bring them to be the people He wants them to be, and Scripture is so clear on that. I agree with you, George, it’s a sad misreading of Scripture that we don’t have more of a sense of that today.

WILLOW: Are there churches focused on family ministry that are doing measurably better in equipping their kids spiritually compared with churches that are not necessarily equipping families in this area?

Barna: I can’t give you a nationwide answer on that. I can tell you that we have studied individual churches where we have found that, yes, because they had a focus on enabling the family to be the primary place where faith development occurs, that there has been a measurably, demonstrably superior product than in the typical church setting. How widespread are those kinds of churches? I can tell you that a few years back when we were doing a national seminar tour where I was talking about this very issue, we wanted to have model churches that we could study and try to figure out their process in developing such a ministry. And we had a very difficult time finding such churches. There are not that many of them. But we find that when a church really does pour its energy and resources into making this work and they do it intelligently, logically, and biblically, yeah, it does make a difference.

Holmen: The last church I served at made a decision many years ago to get very intentional about that. A few years back, we were in need of 60 adults in our congregation who would be willing to spend every Wednesday night for an hour and a half to two hours with our 350 junior high kids. Normally, that would be a pretty daunting or overwhelming task. I’ve been in other churches where we’ve tried to do that, and you had to manipulate people with every guilt button possible to get them to be willing to work with junior highers in that way. Well, when the kids signed up for small groups, we said, “Give us the name of an adult that you would like to be your leader for your small group.” And what blew me away was that the number one request for the adult to be in their small group was their mom or their dad. As a result, we had more adults that were willing to be small group leaders than we had need of, and it was all parents.

The reason for that is that they had been trained back when their child was 2, on how to start blessing their child at night, and then when they were 3, how to start praying with their child, and then how to start doing family service, and how to do Bible reading in the home. This church had an intentional strategy over time of equipping the home with a new faith skill every year so that they were instilling these values into the home so that by the time the kids got into junior high, it wasn’t any big deal for them to continue to have faith talks with their parents.

I’m in a new church now and I had to start all over building that value here, and I know that the results are going to be 15 years from now. That’s another thing we have to say to senior pastors. It took generations to get to this place. It’s going to take generations for us to change it. We have to make a long-term commitment to this; to getting Christ back in the center of the home. Our world is driven by quick fixes, and everybody wants a 40-day program that’s going to make you look good and get a bunch of numbers in. You know what? You’re not going to quick-fix families. We have to make a long-term commitment to this and ask, “Do we want our church and our families to look different 15 years from now?”

WILLOW: You’ve spent years in youth ministries before realizing that you were not reaching out to the kids’ parents who, as it turned out, were big influencers in their lives. Was that one event, or was it something that happened more over time?

Holmen: You would have to bring that up! I was totally an “all-about-me” type of youth pastor, because that’s what I saw. One day, I looked at a survey that had been conducted with about 250,000 kids and was blown away to find that the number one reason why kids said they have faith was because of mom; number two was dad; number three was pastor (not youth pastor!); number four was grandparents. Youth pastor did show up, and so did Sunday school and youth ministry, but those things were, like, numbers 12 through 17. That’s when I realized, that mom and dad were two to three times more influential than any church program. I realized it’s about what happens in the home. Then I had to realize I’m spending 99.9 percent of my time and energy on the programs, and I’m not spending any equipping what is the most important.

That was the life-changing thing for me.

FURTHER READING

Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions
by George Barna

Want to reach America’s largest hidden mission field? Look down! Studies show that our children’s moral development is largely set before the age of 10. Discover ways for your congregation to target this worldview-shaping window of opportunity, equip new Christian parents to nurture spiritual maturity in their kids, and help strengthen the church’s future generation.

Faith Begins at Home
by Mark Holmen

In this engaging book, you will learn about the importance of you and your spouse’s walk with God; of using gifts and experiences of grandparents, elders and mentors in the family; and of the role church should play with families.

It Takes a Parent
by Betsy Hart

A passionate, provocative argument against today’s “parenting culture”— parents who put their kids on a pedestal, shy away from discipline, and cede the power to take decisions, large and small, to their children. This commonsense book shifts the focus back to the role and responsibilities of parents for guiding the character and hearts of their children so they’ll grow up to be responsible adults themselves.

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