Launching Your Child's Faith : What's the Rush? (928 hits)
Depending on which study you want to quote, anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of children from evangelical Christian families won't embrace the faith as their own when they leave for college. That's tragic. When it comes to faith transference, we're losing the next generation. It's not the churches' fault. The level of ministry excellence in churches today – for the two hours or so that a family is in the building – has never been higher! The music and youth programs are light years ahead of where they've been. Yet more and more young people are never getting off the launch pad when it comes to accepting Christ and growing in their faith.
Here's one reason why.
Recently I asked several hundred parents of younger children at a large church three questions.
1."Do you think it's important to pass down your faith to your children?" As you might expect, more then 90 percent said, "Yes! It's very important!"
2."Do you think your child will have a strong faith when he or she gets out of college?" Again, 90 percent of those responding said, "You bet!"
3."Outside of going to church, what are you doing intentionally to introduce and build a growing faith in your child?" Fewer than 30 percent were doing anything purposefully to meet that goal during the 166 hours a week their children were at home.
Think about that. These wonderful, godly, well-intentioned parents strongly believed they should be involved in their children's faith development. They also were highly confident that their children would embrace the faith by the time they were on their own. But when it came to actually preparing their kids, they were just dressing them up and dropping them off at church — and setting themselves up for a failure to launch.But that doesn't have to be true in your home. Now is the time for you to realize the incredible impact you can have on your child, helping him or her come to Christ and grow in that relationship. You can do it! It's not rocket science to help your child reach God's best for his or her life. It's small things, even fun things. They'll go a long way toward filling up those boosters that lift your son or daughter into a lifelong faith.
The best things we can do is to live before them as Godly as possible and to take them to events, activities that are purposed to let dem know who Jesus is.
Saturday, July 21st 2012 at 5:58PM
Jen Fad
