Parents and Hakuna Matata faith-formation.

For my 15+ years of youth ministry, I’ve noticed a majority of parents with a hands-off approach to faith-formation.  I mean, isn’t it better for kids to just figure spiritual things out on their own? We don’t want to indoctrinate kids with weekly religious experiences, right?  If the kids aren’t interested in church things, let’s just not worry about it.  Just like we dropped piano lessons when it was clearly not their thing.

But Children’s and Youth Ministry are not just another sports practice.

When treated as an extracurricular activity, parents have little motivation to involve themselves.  And who needs ONE MORE THING on the calendar?  So ministry to children and youth becomes more and more flashy and extravagant to try and attract kids, to create FOMO so kids will invite their friends.  VBS has to look like Disney on Ice.  Youth Group needs to emulate a Green Day concert.  Otherwise, kids will be bored and choose to play Nintendo Switch at home instead.

But we know that’s not true.

 You can generate fun and excitement around ministry without a giant budget, spectacle, or even a pied piper staff person.

You can disciple kids in ways that develop critical thinking.  It’s even possible to teach the Christian faith with each life stage in ways that crucially strengthen a student’s confidence, agency, and self-acceptance.  But you can’t do it alone.

Discipleship at every age happens in community.  It doesn’t just take a village to raise a child.

It takes a village to be the Church.

Ministry to kids and youth is the responsibility of the entire church.  It starts with parents of faith.  If you’ve chosen to baptize your kid, you’re taking on a certain responsibility to help them process a Christian worldview.  Engaging your kids in the church community is a HUGE part of that.  With children and youth, quantity of time really does lead to quality of experience.  In other words, prioritizing your family’s presence in worship and spiritual formation is the first step to your kid actually processing this stuff well.

But parents can’t be left empty-handed.  The church has to provide them with ways to talk about faith with their kids.  The church has to surround them with mentors, spiritual advisors, a community that will relentlessly love and welcome them even when they only come at Christmas.

There’s no point lamenting that people don’t come to worship anymore.  It’s unhelpful to worry that a kid only comes to youth group once a month or less.  Even if they came weekly, that’s still less than a week’s worth of hours per year that a church gets to teach a kid about God’s love.

What are we doing to help that kid process life and faith the other 51 weeks that we don’t see them?

Providing simple catechesis techniques for parents is a huge start.

Martin Luther’s Small Catechesism may not be a book I expect parents to read to their kids at night. But he designed it to be a resource for parents to have an accessible way to go over basic Christian beliefs in a way that allows kids to process what they’re hearing.  Luther asks the question required to develop critical thinking skills, “What does this mean?”

I am knee-deep in Vacation Bible School this week, and part of the fun is sitting with my own children over dinner and hearing my wife ask them what they learned each day.  But she ALWAYS follows with the question, “Do you know what that means?”  She lets them work it out, and then helps them fill out their understanding by sharing what she understands it to mean.  It’s the same type of work we do with them after a day at school, or when we go over math homework, or process a movie.

We don’t just let life happen to us.  We experience it together, and we have much to share with each other about those experiences.  When a child becomes a youth, their enchanted view of God becomes disenchanted.  The Santa-like God has to be reimagined, and parents and adult mentors are essential to helping kids figure out what to do with that.

Instead of a “don’t worry about it” attitude, we help our kids grow when we ask, “So what does this mean?”

One caveat: I always get push back when I talk about this.  Loads of parents choose not to raise their kids in the faith because the parents themselves no longer hold to a Christian worldview.  I would argue that the principles I’m talking about here ring true regardless.  Kids need their parents to help them process the deeper truths in this world.  Talking about your experiences and asking “What does this mean?” are fantastic and easy steps to developing confidence, agency, and self-acceptance in the life of a kid.  Thinking through your own beliefs and sharing them with your kid will only benefit both of you.

If you do consider yourself to be a Christian, and you want your children to come to their own conclusions about the faith, I would argue that you have an obligation to inform them, to allow them to be formed within the church community, to walk with them through childhood and adolescence within the Body of Christ, and make that informed decision as an adult.  They could not make an informed decision or application about science or math or art or history or any extracurricular activity through anything less than a full immersion in those disciplines.

So I leave you with one simple question, and it’s one I must ask myself regularly.

“What does this mean?”