Five Ways to Help Your Adult Children Stay Faithful to Jesus

One of the most common spiritual conditions I encounter is older parents whose adult children have abandoned their childhood faith. All of us as Christian parents want more than anything else to see our children grow up and live out the faith they were taught in our homes. Tragically, that’s often not the case.

Many children go off to college or otherwise move out on their own and abandon their Christian convictions. Maybe it’s their first taste of freedom. Maybe it’s the secularized environment of higher education, where anything having to do with religious faith is scoffed at. Maybe it’s a new group of friends who don’t share our child’s values.

Whatever you point to as the culprit, the fact is that the college years—as well as the years immediately after—are dangerous to our children’s faith. In fact, the statistics of adult children abandoning the faith of their parents are startling. A recent study by the Barna Group found that 75% of Christian young adults leave the church after high school.

You can find more background on all this at this link: http://www.barna.org/teens-next-gen-articles/534-five-myths-about-young-adult-church-dropouts

So what are we as believing parents to do? Now that our children have left our immediate care and are out on their own. Now that our children are adults and we can no longer make them do what they should do.  How can we help them stay faithful to Jesus? Here are five things to keep in mind as we deal with the spiritual well-being of our adult children.

1. Never stop praying for them. I’ve known some adult children who wandered so far from the faith that they were living like the original Prodigal Son. Few things are so heart-breaking for a parent. But their moms and dads never gave up—on them or on God—and prayed them back into the Kingdom. For some it took years but they never gave up.

2. Be consistent in your own faith. One of the strange things I’ve noticed down through the years (and recent research bears this out) is how many Christian parents lose their passion for God and the church once their children grow up and leave home. The impression some adult children must have is that Mom and Dad were in church only for the sake of their young children. If you want your adult children to take God seriously, guess what? They’re still looking to you as a model. I’m not saying you should put on some kind of religious act for their sake. I am saying it’s unrealistic for you to expect them to follow Jesus as adults if you’re not following Jesus as an older adult.

3. Give your adult children plenty of spiritual space. My children are grown, and each has a vital relationship with Jesus. But many of the nuances of their faith are different from mine. They may well not end up in a church like mine—and that’s fine by me. Just as long as they follow God’s will for them. Parents who insist their adult children have a copycat faith like theirs are almost sure to be disappointed.

4. Don’t hesitate to give spiritual support to your adult children—they’ll appreciate it more than you may realize. My daughter, married and living in Japan, loves it when I send her a daily Bible verse. Almost every evening I select a single verse (dealing with strength, peace, comfort or some similar topic) and email it to her. Since she’s thirteen hours ahead of me, she wakes up to it the next morning. She calls these verses “Pop’s Peace Passages.” I do the same with my son, although I have to do that via hard mail. I’ve asked both of them if I should stop, since they’re adults and (theoretically) reading the Bible on their own. They both insist that I continue. The adult child of a friend regularly asks her mom to pray for her, even though she’s not exactly following Jesus herself. In fact, she grows irate when her mom doesn’t volunteer to pray without being asked. Your adult child will respond to subtle, unobtrusive reminders of faith and spiritual encouragement.

5. Don’t nag your adult children. If they’re not attending church like you think they should; behaving like you think they ought; or hanging out with people you they shouldn’t, one sure fire way to ensure that they won’t come back to their senses is to nag them. Even the biblical father of the Prodigal Son was wise enough to follow this principle. A teacher I once had noted that when we nag our children of any age, all we succeed in doing is to “awaken their demons of resistance.”

Helping your adult children stay in the faith they were raised in is a special challenge today. But faithful parents aren’t without resources. These five steps—and you’ll think of many others—can help keep your adult child in a vibrant spiritual position.

Six Key Investments to Make for a Christian Marriage

Pam and I are at Myrtle Beach for a few days. I know this place has a bad rap. I’ve heard it called lots of things, from the Redneck Riviera to the Tackiest Resort on the East Coast. But we like it. There’s lots of stuff to do, and when you don’t want to do anything (or run out of money), you can just sit on the beach and look at the ocean. Today’s agenda is to ride go-carts then—you guessed it—sit on the beach and look at the ocean.

We’re in our thirty-third year of being together and times like this are growing more and more precious. Just time to get away and carefully listen to each other. Or to sit still with no one else around and just be together. Call it a vacation. Or time away. Or even rest and relaxation. It’s really an investment in our marriage.

We’re at that point many of you know so well. Our kids have left home and are building great lives on their own. Are we happy about that? Sure we are. But it takes a lot of getting used to. Our parents are getting older and require more of our attention. That’s a blessing, to be sure, but it subtly changes the dynamics of our home life since their needs must be accounted for as we go through our own lives. Retirement planning. Health situations. Anyone at this stage of life knows with the issues that come with it.

Investing in your marriage isn’t just for empty-nesters. Newly married couples struggling with small children and senior adults settled in their retirement years face the same thing. A lifetime together as wife and husband is important enough to give it the best you have.

We’re here at Myrtle Beach to catch our breath and take a time out with one another. I love what I do, and the congregation we serve is incredibly good to us. But couples need to be intentional about keeping their focus on one another. So here are a few things I’ve learned about investing in marriage. I think they apply not to ministers but to all of us:

 ·         You can’t leave your marriage on autopilot and expect it to prosper. No matter how long you’ve been married you have to pay attention.

 ·         Time when you can be just with one another is crucial to the long-term success of your marriage.

·         Don’t fool yourself: long-term Christian marriages can and do break up. I know church leaders who were married for decades and seemed to be models of spiritual maturity who finally decided they didn’t want to be married anymore. That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention.

·         Don’t be surprised by changes in personal faith as you grow older.  Sometimes they result from the inevitable alterations aging brings. Sometimes they result from life's crises. Sometimes they come about from the relentless passage of time. Successful marriages find a way to embrace the changes and work through them together.

·         Learn to celebrate all the seasons of marriage. Marriage carries with it an incredible richness of experience as you move from being newly married to having young children through the challenges of career-building into the (greater!) challenges of teen-aged children into the empty-nest phase then to retirement and finally into the inevitable season of physical decline and, finally, death. Each season can bring a blessing as well as offer you the chance to be a blessing to one another.  

·         Accept that your marriage is where God makes you holy. The core commitments of a truly Christian marriage are sacrificial love and mutual submission to Jesus. It’s no accident that those qualities are also crucial to your own sanctification.

Fathering Never Ends

My son Will is a young Second Lieutenant currently sweating through a hot summer in Ft. Benning, Georgia as he goes through Infantry officer’s training. He’ll move to his permanent post at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in a few months where he’ll serve as a platoon leader with the 82^nd Airborne Division. Soon after that he’ll probably be deployed.

In the meantime he’s at that awkward stage of life between student and working adult. He comes home every weekend he can so he can be fed, sleep late, have his clothes washed and receive financial assistance (I don’t quite get this). I honestly don’t mind one bit. Full adulthood will be on him soon enough.

What I’ve Learned about Being a Father

A friend describes fathering this way: those occasions when your wife and kids are all around you and everyone is getting along; and you’ve gathered together because you’re celebrating something significant that happened in your family; and there’s a warmth in the room that you don’t have all the time but cherish more than anything when you do; and you’re probably paying the bill for it all because that’s what dads do but you don’t mind because everyone is content. My friend has christened these experiences as “Dad-moments.” We laugh about them because we both value those moments and are willing to do almost anything to have them at every opportunity.

How Families Can Get the Most out of Church

 

This picture hangs on the wall of my office at church. I love it because it shows so clearly the tensions that church often creates within our families. Mom and her daughters are on one wave-length while her son and husband are obviously on another.

Five Steps for Leading Your Children to Faith

My son Will is home for spring break. As usual, we spend a lot of time talking about his college studies, his future plans and whatever new ideas he has for how to spend his free time (I’m not always on board with him on some of those). We also talk a lot about faith. Just like his sister and her husband, Will has a deep and authentic relationship with Jesus. My wife and I take no credit for this. We did the best we knew how in raising our kids, but faith in Jesus is a mysterious and deeply personal experience and parents can only do so much. In the end, our kids choose for themselves.

Courageous

It’s tough to be a dad today. Fathering has never been easy, but it just seems today that men face so many pressures and temptations that their children often get pushed to second place or worse. No guy gets up in the morning and says, “I’m gonna be a rotten father today.” I mean, neglecting our kids isn’t a conscious decision we men make. We simply don’t pay attention—to  our kids, our lives, our future, or what our selfish decisions end up costing the people around us, especially the ones most dependent on our attention and guidance. And the result of our lifestyle is a generation of kids who don’t know their dads or are wandering around through life trying to make it on their own without the fatherly guidance that’s essential for success or are so deeply wounded by their dad’s neglect that they’ll live the rest of their lives in pain.

The Challenge of Raising Teens

Pam and I have been leading a class for the last few weeks for the parents of teen-agers.  Called “The Age of Opportunity,” we’re reading through Paul Tripp’s book by the same title and learning together a little more about being better parents.

Our latest topic was how we help our teens respond to the surrounding culture. “Culture” is simply the sum total of the stuff around us: school, friends, career choices, social media, movies, internet, styles, thought patterns, behaviors and all the rest of the ways we rub up against the world outside ourselves and our homes. While evangelical Christians (at least) focus on the unbiblical values and lifestyle choices that the culture is continuously bombarding us with, the reality is that culture really affects us in more subtle ways:

1. Culture determines the pace of our lives.  We don’t usually choose how fast our slow our home lives are. Instead, the demands of the surrounding culture determine that. And we are almost always caught up in it. For modern families, the pace is almost always too fast. Every day is filled to overflowing with stuff that has to be done today; with school projects, special activities, get-togethers with friends, jobs, conferences, sports practice, music practice, and so many other things that just to list them all makes me tired. And we’re living at such a fast pace, it’s no wonder that families today feel overwhelmed.

2. Culture determines the agenda of our lives. School success. Professional success. Financial stability. Maintaining our place in the pecking order of our surrounding society. These are all parts of the agenda dictated to us by our culture. The Bible speaks otherwise, of course, and says the agenda we as created beings were designed for is to bring glory to our Maker, through His Son Jesus. But the culture around is so strong and seductive, so insistent and demanding, that it often has much more clout in our lives than the biblical one.

3. Culture determines the relational patterns of our lives. How we relate and respond to one another is more often the result of cultural values than biblical ones. For instance, our culture’s pervasive sexuality invariably affects the way our teens relate to one another. Teen-age boys end up viewing girls as sex objects instead of friends. In another direction, the cultural acceptance in students’ lives today of bullying is best understood as an issue of power. The strong are able to dominate the weak because relational patterns have been skewed by a secularized culture. Biblical values teach exactly the opposite.

4. Culture determines the importance of spiritual truths. Our secular culture focuses almost entirely on materialism: what you have, what you do, what others think of you. The notion that spiritual truths—things that are unseen and immaterial—are superior to material ones is so far off the radar of the surrounding culture that its laughable. Apart from whatever constitutional issues may be involved, for instance, the prayers that at one time were expected at the beginning of high school football games are now generally forbidden. Why would anyone want to invoke an invisible God’s blessing on a sports event? It’s much more important to pay attention to blocking, tackling and a passing scheme able to penetrate the opponent’s defense. The unmistakable message to our students, of course, is that the material world they can see and touch and hear is much more substantial and real than the invisible world of the Spirit. Spiritual truths are second class to material ones.

The task of Christian parents  is to create a culture in their own home that, while not ignoring the realities of the culture their teens live in, is substantial and authentic enough to provide a real alternative. Not all Christian homes are alike in how they respond to that challenge. Some choose a course that is more separatist and overtly religious. Others are more laid back and easy-going. Most are somewhere in between. Some are methodical in their approach and carefully chart out a course for their children’s spiritual growth. Others depend on a more serendipitous style and use the inevitable crises of teen life as teaching tools, to help their children integrate biblical truths into their lives. 

However it’s done, though, parents have to pay attention to the culture around them, and how it impacts the lives of their teens. If parents don’t provide a framework for their teens’ spiritual growth, the surrounding culture will most certainly supply its own.

Raising Christian Kids

Pam and I have two children, Katie and Will, and like all Christian parents, our prayer always has been that they would grow up and embrace Jesus as we have done.  Praise God, they have, but it’s more a tribute to divine grace than parental skills.

The two of them are grown now, in their twenties, and out on their own. I once had a guy on staff with me, an older guy, who would proudly introduce himself by saying, “I have two self-supporting daughters.” That’s not a bad claim to fame—particularly in today’s economic climate—and my wife and I are fortunate in being able to say the same thing.

Unfortunately, the fact that the two of them are out on their own means they don’t live anywhere near us. Katie is in Japan for three years with her new husband. And Will usually lives in upstate New York, when he’s not in Georgia, or Morocco or Ireland or any of the other places he runs off to when given the opportunity. Our home life has essentially become a series of fly-bys, when we see one or both of the kids for a period of time before they’re off again. Last night, we had them both on video-chat at the same time, which was a schizophrenic experience. They couldn’t see each other (we haven’t figured out yet if we can do a three-way video chat yet) but could faintly hear one another. The strangest thing was that Katie’s dog—which we’ve inexplicably inherited during her absence—heard her voice but of course couldn’t see her image on the computer. So she just wandered aimlessly around the house, looking for Katie.

Somehow, through all the colleges, internships, military training, new friends, new experiences, exposure to people, thoughts and beliefs I would never endorse—in short, through the stuff all children encounter when they leave the safe confines of their homes—both kids have not only retained their essential Christian faith, they’ve also integrated it into their adult lives in thoroughly authentic ways. They both love Jesus; more today than they did growing up.

Pam and I talk about it sometimes. Especially since I’m a preacher, and the kids were reared in the fish-bowl that often accompanies the lives of ministers. The general perception that PKs (preacher’s kids) become wild and unbelieving adults is, unfortunately, often true. For people who make snide remarks about that, though, I usually respond by saying PKs learn their behavior from  DKs (deacon’s kids).

Of course, that Katie and Will are today believing adults is due to two factors above all else: one, God’s grace; and two, their choices. I’ve talked to far too many grieving parents, who reared their children in much better ways than I did, whose children abandoned the faith as quickly as they left home. It wasn’t the parents’ fault. Nor was it somehow that God abandoned the kids. It’s just that the world is a broken and unpredictable place and sometimes, despite our best efforts and most fervent prayers, things don’t work out the way they should. Children choose to do things that are wrong.

Looking back, I don’t know any simple formulas or magic bullets that Pam and I used to place our kids in the best position to choose right. But as we’ve talked about the blessings our kids are to us, there are a few things that come to mind:

·        Faith at our home was a long way from being perfect, but we did try really hard to make it real. The things we did at church and that we talked about at church were the same things we did and talked about at home.

·        Church was important to us; obviously so. But the center of our family life wasn’t the church. A relationship with Jesus was much more important than church.

·        We didn’t care much what anybody at church said about our family life. It wasn’t any of their business.

·        I missed a good many meetings and functions at church and in the community in order to be home most evenings. From the time they were very young until both kids were older, I read to them almost every night before they went to bed. In fact, one of my happiest experiences as a dad was reading the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings to Will when he was pretty young. When I got through—after months and months—he wanted me to do it again. So we read it through twice.

·        We didn’t force the kids to do too much at church. We of course constantly contended with the normal “Do I have to go to church this morning?” complaint. “Yes, you do. Quit whining and get dressed or I’m going to wear you out” is the appropriate Christian parent response to that question. Still, we didn’t feel obligated to make them attend a  long list of events, meetings, excursions and other things church life is so filled with. We let them pick and choose.

God is good. And for all of us, our children are our greatest blessing. In the empty-nester season Pam and I are now in, the kids continue to enrich us and bring us joy. More importantly, we both hope and pray that we’ll be a source of wisdom and support to the kids as they build into their own families and pass their faith down to their own children.