Last week I had an opportunity to attend the Next Level Leadership Conference at Savannah Christian Church as part of my role as children's ministry intern at Southwest. It was great. It was a lot of fun; especially playing cards on Thursday night. =) At conferences like this you can get overwhelmed with lots of ideas, but at maybe the first session they said find one thing you can implement now and one in the next year or something like that. Well, something that's been tugging at my heart was one session that I didn't anticipate being that great. It was entitled Family Ministry Q and A. But it turned out to be a presentation on what they do as in family ministries and then had brief Q and A at the end. I'm not a huge fan of throwing out statistics, but two stuck out to me like a sore thumb and they answered some questions. The first was that parents have 2-3 times more impact on their children's faith and religious decisions than church leaders. The second was something like 80% of young adults who have grown up in the church are leaving the church after high school. So something's not reaching and instilling in our children a strong Christian faith.
This made me think of my family. At times I could be critical of things about the way things were done or this or that, but one thing that has always puzzled me in a way is that so far none of the seven children have rebelled, fought against God, etc. This isn't to say that none of us have questioned God or his existence or that we've always been at the church every time the doors opened, but just that we haven't had a period of time where we walked away. There's also this factor that almost all of us have a desire to be or are in full time ministry. So why haven't any of the seven fallen into that 80% range? During this breakout session he spoke of how they were training parents to take their faith home with them; to do activities like devotions, or movie nights, or other such things that would promote displaying the faith of the parents at home. Then it hit me. That might be the answer to why we haven't rebelled. At 6:30 almost every morning we were drug out of bed (we were homeschooled so technically didn't have to be up that early) for family devotions. Most of the time my dad read out of a devotion book like Keys for Kids; nothing spectacular and I have to admit that I may not have even listened, but it was there. Every Advent season we had an advent wreath, devotions and during that season had to sing at 6:30 in the morning after blowing out candles. Every Christmas day we had a birthday party for Jesus. We were homeschooled, so we learned about God, people in history of strong faith, etc. We were at church "every time the doors were open." I'm not saying that this was the magical formula to ensure that your children don't rebel, but I wonder if it didnt' have something to do with why our family is what it is...that it may not always be the most dynamic thing, or the thing we enjoyed, or a huge event...maybe it's the heart of it all...instilling in our children the faith of their fathers....
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