The Ministry of Passing on Your Faith to Your Children

A persistent prayer request of Christian parents is asking God to work saving faith into the hearts of their children. Parents know they have a priestly task to experientially connect their children to God. If only it stayed as simple as a 3-year-old learning to sing “Jesus Loves Me,” which can help build a pure trust in Jesus. But our unbelieving or skeptical young-adult son or daughter presents a more difficult challenge.

In my work I often see the obstacles that stand in the way of young people growing in their faith. Ironically, often the resistance to believing is rooted in their relationship with their parents. There are three relational dramas most children in Western cultures encounter, which can either impede or help the development of saving faith. These parent-child encounters come from what is bought, what is taught, and what is caught. In conjunction with these is the wooing work of the Holy Spirit—who ultimately brings about spiritual regeneration—but parents play a large role in the Holy Spirit’s development of saving faith.

First, let us consider what is bought. Parents can easily turn their kids into consumers with lavish provision of needs and desires. The May 2000 newsletter of the New York Child Study Center reported on a study about children growing up in households with above-average incomes. It stated that “homes where parents provide children with complete financial security, excessive freedom to explore and learn, a wide range of opportunities and toys for recreation, entertainment and education led to an increase in apathy, entitlement, laziness, indifference to goals, moodiness, depression and insecurity in their children.”

In other words, what is bought, both the stuff and the activities we lavishly stuff into living, can become a false idol to which they attribute ultimate value and tenaciously cling for happiness, though it does not deliver. That is why Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

But parents who withhold excess, model generosity to the poor, and, if possible, give their kids a third-world exposure to poverty can teach them they are blessed so that they can be a blessing to others. As John Calvin said, “The sum of the Christian life is self-denial,” not self-maximization (Calvin’s Institutes on the Christian Religion).

Second, we know that what is taught to our children is key to having an informed faith in God. The stories of the Bible teach a deeper narrative of God’s plan of salvation. Yet there is disappointing ignorance in Christians, young and old, about two important discipleship teachings.

First, to better appreciate the deeper narrative inside the stories of the Bible, Christians need to know how and why each book of the Bible got into the Bible. Otherwise the Bible is experienced as a disconnected collection of irrelevant, ancient stories that discourages youth from exploring it for answers to life’s struggles.

Also, it is important to teach that in the often-used profession, “I believe that Jesus saved me from sins,” there are three essential building blocks that go into establishing saving faith. The first building block is to believe that Jesus, as our substitute, lived the life we should have lived to please God and died the death we all deserve to appease God. Next is the step of entrusting oneself by faith to that truth so that we can be adopted as children of God. The final building block is to make faith real in daily living through adoring worship of God and the non-intuitive practice of selfless, sacrificial love toward all that God loves. We do this under the Lordship of Jesus Christ who, by the Holy Spirit, empowers us. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, although “grace is freely given, it is received at a great cost” (The Cost of Discipleship).

Third, there is much bias, good and bad, simply caught from family life that psychologically establishes itself in the soul of a child. Just as we “catch” a cold from invisible germs, children can catch “soulish colds” with spiritual symptoms that can be expressed as “I don’t know if I can trust God” or “I don’t deserve God’s love.” These symptoms come from either fear or shame.

A fear-based “cold” is caught in three ways. When parents over-parent with “helicopter love,” hovering over the child to intrude, warn and protect, the child infers that life must be dangerous to need so much protection. Such a fearful spirit might receive the promises of God with the same caution and reluctance.

Another reason for a fear-based predisposition is neglect of consistent care for children. If the child learns from infancy that she can’t rely on parents for basic needs, she infers that she is basically on her own and is reluctant to attach to a secure provider, parent first and God later. Third, fear can be established in a child’s heart from parents who are bullies. “Drill sergeant” parents who demand blind obedience to affirm their authority create a homelife of walking on eggshells in fear of confrontation. Authority is feared—even God’s authority.

Guilt and shame are caught when parents don’t affirm their children or are so rule-oriented that their children are set up for failure. Parents imply and children infer that they don’t measure up to parental expectations. The children might develop a self-image consistent with parental criticism and often behaviorally live out that shameful evaluation of themselves. They “catch” that just belonging is never enough to be good enough—for parents or for God.

My own home leaned toward shame from a lack of praise. But my father did three things that helped his kids catch a more vital spiritual life. First, we always had family devotions at the end of a meal when our father would “preach” his little biblical sermonettes to his family audience. Second, he hauled his four children to the county jail once a month to be part of worship services for prisoners. We were a little afraid of those scary, hairy men, but we caught that God loves “bad” people too.

Finally, our dad took this CRC family to the local Baptist church for evening services so that we could sing “peppy songs” such as “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” and hear personal testimonies about real experiences with God. From our dad we caught his passion for God and his conviction that, as he often said, “Either you are a missionary or you need one.”

Children need homes rich with unconditional love, empowering discipline, plentiful grace, and joyous celebration—the same way God treats his children. None of us parent perfectly, but we take comfort from the promise that the Holy Spirit can and will break through the thickest walls of resistance to generate a saving faith in our children. Often the life struggles that fear, guilt, or shame create can be the very instruments God uses to crash down walls of resistance in answer to parents’ prayers.

I know no better way to give little children the beginnings of faith in God than to have tender bedtime rituals with each child, telling stories, singing songs, and listening to their innocent thoughts and concerns. Then going with them to Jesus in prayer with a goodnight kiss. Passing on your Christian faith to your children is a ministry opportunity that quickly passes. But it is a joy and a privilege to carry it out in collaboration with the Holy Spirit.