Every Christian parent fears their children will wander away from the church — and from God.
It is a fear understood by Rob Parsons, the Chairman and Founder of Care for the Family, and the subject of his latest book, Getting your Kids through Church without them ending up hating God. As he says, ‘I think I understand why many parents have that fear, because the spectre of it has terrorised my own heart. It is that the experience of being brought up in a Christian home and being intimately involved in the life of a local church, with all the pressures that can bring, could damage the seeds of faith in our children’s hearts. Our fear is that the exposure they have to Christianity will cause them to have little love for God or his people’.
Why now?
What made Rob decide to write the book at this point? Rob told me that the book came out of many conversations he’d had during the ‘Bringing Home the Prodigals’ tour. ‘Time and time again, I spoke to parents whose hearts were breaking, and I spoke to many so-called “prodigals”. And I discovered that many of them had never actually turned their backs on God — they’d turned their backs on something else. This book is an examination of what that “something” could be.’
One of those ‘somethings’ is disappointment, the first being disappointment with others. Rob says: ‘So many young people have told me that they had simply become disillusioned with Christians — with the “infighting” and the way Christians treated each other — and they had decided that, if that was how church life was, they couldn’t go on following Christ’.
Collateral damage
‘We have become used to the phrase “collateral damage”’, Rob continues. ‘It’s a euphemism for “non-combatant casualties” — itself a euphemism for civilians being shredded by exploding bombs. When churches fight and split, there is always “collateral damage”. It should not be a surprise to us; Jesus could not have been clearer: when we live lives that do not demonstrate love towards each other, it is very difficult for people to see us as genuine followers of Jesus. That lack of love affects not only our faith, but theirs. Jesus said, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another”. And when one half of the church tries to start again in the half-empty building and the others begin a new church a few miles away, the split may soon be forgotten. But not by all. So often it is the young people who are the collateral damage. Like children who stand open-mouthed as their parents divorce, so these children watch aghast as their spiritual home is torn apart.’
Disappointment
Not only do parents have to prepare children for disappointment with other Christians, they also have to prepare them for disappointment with themselves. ‘We have to get our young people ready for the day when they feel they have let God down and make sure they know there is always a way back’, Rob says.
‘Hardest of all, we have to get them ready for disappointment with God. When they are little, they pray, “Give me a fine day for my birthday”. But the time is coming when they will ask God to make their best friend well from cancer. Maybe their friend will seem to recover, but the next year they will be at that friend’s graveside, crying in the rain. So many people never recover from an experience like that.
‘It is not our job to defend God, but if we are not honest about these things it will be much harder for our young people to survive them. We have to prepare them for the time when, along with the old prophet, they will need to say: “Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food… yet I will rejoice in the Lord”.’
Faith killers
The book goes on to talk about the five great killers of faith in children — one of them is cynicism. ‘It is 1.30 pm and you and your family have just sat down to Sunday lunch. As you are carving the meat you say to your wife: “When that woman leads the worship she drives me crazy. By the time we’d sung that song five times I’d lost the will to live”. Your wife replies: “You were lucky you went out with the children to their class before the sermon. It was like stand-up comedy. He told jokes and stories, and played us some Beatles music. The only thing we didn’t get was any decent teaching. I just sat there and read my Bible — it wasn’t worth listening to’.’
‘One of the problems with children is not that they don’t listen to us, but that they do’, Rob explains. ‘And not one word is lost on your seven-year-old daughter and your ten-year-old son as they sit around that Sunday lunch table and listen to their parents. The message they get is that the leaders in their church are either ungodly or fools — or perhaps both. The seeds you sow that Sunday will grow and one day, aged 15, one of them will say: ‘I don’t want to go there anymore. The worship is rubbish and the sermons are lame’. Don’t expect that when they are 15 you will be able to talk your way out of that and convince them otherwise.’
Not fitting in
Rob also found that many young people had left church not because of lack of belief, but because they simply felt they couldn’t ‘fit in’. He talks about this in a chapter called ‘The Jelly Mould Syndrome’. He says: ‘You don’t read much about Jesus getting angry, but, when you do, you know that someone has really offended the very heart of his Father. One such incident is Jesus’s withering condemnation of some of the religious leaders of his time who, with their endless rules and regulations, made ordinary people feel that they were failures before God. He said, “You put burdens on their shoulders that they just can’t bear”.
‘Allow me to paraphrase that: “You are trying to put them into a mould of your own making that they just can’t fit”. Unless we understand this, we will continually be judging our children using the wrong criteria and, in doing so, making some children who really care about the things that matter to God feel second-class because they don’t fit in to our particular Christian culture. It’s a great sadness when a young person walks away from God because they don’t want to be like Jesus. But it is a tragedy when they feel they have to leave because, although they love him, they just can’t be like us.’ The book goes on to talk about encouraging those children who feel they don’t fit in — helping them, instead, to have a sense of ‘belonging’.
Rob ends with a rallying call: ‘You and I can, with God’s help, and realising our frailty, try to live lives at home and in church that will make our children’s hearts more likely to be soft towards him. And we can pray for them. We must — for we all know that, even if we achieve it, the title of this book is not enough — not nearly enough. We are their parents and we have a much greater goal for our children. We want them to love him.’
