Multiple surveys consistently find that about three-quarters of the UK church came to faith before they left secondary school.
This is consistent with the Bible story (Prov. 22:6, Ps.78:1-6). Given the disproportionate influence of those first two decades of life, it is vital that we understand the key effective steps in ensuring we hand our faith onto the next generation.
Parents matter
While faith transmission is a spiritual work done by the Lord, we would expect to find that in God’s ordered world there are some wise and godly methods that often bear fruit. A book that adds to the considerable research in this area is Handing Down the Faith by Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk (OUP 2021). It is interesting to read the research collected from 235 interviews (in the USA) and hold it up against the Bible’s instructions and our church’s current practices. The single most significant cause of faith, humanly speaking, in teenagers and young adults is (drum roll please) the religious lives of their parents. Parents matter! More than church, more than Sunday School, more than their peer group, more than the cultural air they breathe, parents are where it is at. The authors start by summarising the research story so far. As a newbie to this, I took notes!
