1375. Personal Faithing

1375. Personal Faithing

5. Personal Faithing

A Quest for a Faith That Grows With

My (Steve’s) firstborn was less than 48 hours old. As Jen held our precious newborn daughter, the hospital nurses wheeled her from her room to our car. All of a sudden it hit me: we were about to be all alone.

No more pit crew of nurses checking on us, attending to Jen’s needs, offering ongoing encouragement to us as new parents while constantly telling us that our baby was the best. Surrounded by a support team of caring medical professionals, parenting seemed easy—albeit sleepless—those first 48 hours.

But now those same nurses were rolling Jen out the door, helping her into our sedan, watching while I buckled our baby into her car seat for the first time, and saying with a smile, “Have a great life!” At that moment, parenting got real. Our confidence evaporated. “Have a great life”? Seriously? That’s all the help we get as we’re launched into uncharted parenting territory?

These “I’m in over my head” moments surface for us as parents more often than we would like. We think we are getting the hang of one parenting stage. Then our kid or circumstances change and we’re faced with another new frontier. The predictability we have grown to appreciate that stems from routines, resources, and relationships is often upended that first time we drop our kid off at school, let them stay at a friend’s house, empower them to join the sports team, witness them get their driver’s license, help them figure out prom, watch them pick a career, and greet a special friend they bring home to meet us. These crucial moments challenge us to pause and recognize that the ways our parenting worked in the past may not work today or tomorrow.

Kara and I have found this especially true for growing with our teenagers and young adults in their faith journeys. The family routines of prayer, reading the Bible, and going to church that worked through elementary school often unravel when we need to incorporate our growing kids’ new schedules, new pressures, new questions, and even new resistance.

As our kids navigate new faith questions and experiences during their learner, explorer, and focuser stages, we have new opportunities as teachers, guides, and resourcers to encourage their growth. In this chapter, we explore practical research and tools to help us support our teenagers and young adults as they trek through new territories of faith—and doubt. In the spirit of Growing With, we’ll also probe the new twists and turns emerging in our own faith paths as parents. Then in chapter 6 we’ll explore the relationship learners, explorers, and focusers have with faith communities.

Faithing: The Fuel for Our Spiritual Journeys

Prior to the teenage and young adult years, one of our primary faith-oriented goals was to pass on the faith tradition to our kids. This meant talking to them about Jesus, modeling faith in our actions, taking them to church, enrolling them in Sunday school, or ensuring that they made it to summer camp. Kara and I have each tried to keep up these practices in our respective families with our own kids, motivated in large part by research confirming that family instruction, traditions, and rhythms are correlated with deeper faith in young people—both now and in the future.

While this faith foundation is important, it cannot—and will not—be the fuel that carries our kids forward for the rest of their spiritual journeys. We cannot “fill up” our kids in their early years and then hope there is “enough in the tank” to make it the rest of their lives. A relationship with Jesus does not work that way.

Which means we parents need new perspectives and goals regarding faith—both our own and that of our kids. These renewed views and aims are rooted in a concept called faithing. By faithing, we mean a child’s growth in owning and embodying their own journey with God as they encounter new experiences and information.

Inherent in this definition is a view that faith isn’t just a noun, it’s a verb. When we treat faith only as a noun, it often gets reduced to a possession.

You may have heard someone say that they “have faith” or “found faith.” As parents, we worry that our growing kids will “lose their faith.”

Stop and think about how faith is being used in these phrases. Relationship with God is treated as a thing to find, an object to own, or an item that can be lost. It’s treated like a commodity.

If relationship with Jesus is perceived only as a noun, we feel that our job is to load up more faith-like items into our kids’ lives to offset any current or potential doubts or struggles. Like a cosmic faith balance sheet, we strive to bank enough pro-faith experiences for our kids to offset the anti-faith elements they will encounter. So we add more church, more youth group, more Bible verses, and more religious education. We believe the myth that if the balance sheet stays positive, the faith of our learner, explorer, or focuser will stick until they grow old enough to worry about their own kids.

Thus, while Christian traditions, practices, and faith-oriented language provide frameworks for younger children to interpret, live, and talk about their spiritual lives, we must build on these crucial foundations with strategies that support their walk with God as they age. Their faith becomes qualitatively different; therefore, so must our approach to navigating faith with them. So a Growing With commitment to faithing relies on three new premises:

Faithing is about making sense of our spiritual journey, not merely learning more information. Faithing is about the quality not the quantity of our believing. It is about developing an agility that allows us to negotiate our personal, relational, and vocational trajectories. Faithing encourages us to keep developing our connection with God.

Faithing seeks to integrate, not separate, spirituality and life experiences. Sooner or later our learners, explorers, and focusers will need to integrate their spiritual and religious beliefs with political platforms, social issues, economic challenges, global relationships, and scientific discoveries. If our young people keep their convictions about Jesus separate from their lived experiences, they run the risk of embracing a faith that is unable to keep pace with their lives. Faithing inspires us to live holistically.

Faithing is more than intellectual; it also has relational and emotional qualities. When young people are working through belief crises, many adults assume that the problems and solutions are informational. They believe that if the young person just reads the right book or memorizes more of the Bible, then the process of following Jesus will work itself out. Far more than mere intellectual assent, faithing also encompasses what we feel and how we relate to others. Faithing legitimizes our quest to make sense of our beliefs, permits us to be emotionally honest, and encourages us to reach out to others for support.

The bottom line is this: We do more than “have faith.” We “faith.” This is faithing.

Some researchers suggest that the religious beliefs and commitments of young people can vary by ethnicity. While broad generalizations, some of these patterns can be helpful to understand as we consider the young people in our families and communities. African American teenagers often exhibit “personalistic absolutism,” meaning a greater tendency to see God (who is often viewed as pretty demanding) as someone who has to be obeyed and who also wants to have a personal relationship with them that influences every aspect of their lives.

Latino teenagers often demonstrate “religious familism” by speaking of their religious beliefs as tied to family relationships more than institutional commitments. From the perspective of religious familism, the church exists to support family connections, and a personal encounter with God is often viewed as a catalyst toward positive outcomes for the entire family.

Family connections are often the catalysts for Asian American teenagers’ entrance into both church and faith. As a result, while many young Asian Americans make autonomous faith discoveries through church relationships and serving, others continue to describe their religious involvement through the lens of their parents’ expectations.

White teens often hold to a view of moralistic therapeutic deism that is expressed as “therapeutic individualism,” meaning God helps them through personal struggles, and religious groups provide help in times of need.1

For more resources exploring the realities of multicultural families and communities, see fulleryouthinstitute.org/multicultural.

1. Richard W. Flory, Korie L. Edwards, and Brad Christerson, Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 141; Jerry Z. Park and Elaine Howard Ecklund, “Negotiating Continuity: Family and Religious Socialization for Second-Generation Asian Americans,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2007): 93–118.

Kara and I both value conversations with young people because we find their perspectives enlightening. I once asked an 18-year-old about his experience transitioning out of high school and how that affected his own spiritual journey. A phrase he offered stuck with me and has shaped the way I have parented my own kids. He explained, “The adults in my life didn’t tell me what to believe but how to believe.”

As he explained what he meant, I realized that what was most helpful for his journey with Christ was the way his parents, youth group leaders, and mentors gave him room to grow in his faith beyond saying the right answer or agreeing with everyone else. His faithing grew as adults in his life taught him how to believe. I got the sense that his parents grew with him in their own faithing too.

Faithing Insights

When Faithing Moves Us from an Abstract God to a Reliable Jesus

When we train ministry leaders to help their churches grow young, we often ask the adults in the room to share their responses to the following questions:

What words come to mind when you hear the term Christianity?

What are some words that describe God?

What are some words that describe Jesus?

Often those in our seminars notice that their descriptive answers to the first two questions favor abstraction. They label Christianity as “a religion” or “the church.” They offer abstract Christian words that characterize God as “almighty,” “holy,” and “triune.”

But when they describe Jesus, they use more intimate words such as “friend,” “healer,” “loving,” “present,” or “forgiving.” During our Growing Young research, we discovered that young people wanted to talk less about abstract Christian beliefs and more about Jesus.

The gospel means “good news,” and good news for young people is rarely an abstract theological concept. It’s concrete, and it’s lived out in concrete terms.

It’s offering forgiveness to a family member who has wronged you.

It’s finding one’s place in a competitive world.

It’s listening to the marginalized and feeding the poor.

It’s confessing our sin of racism.

It’s welcoming the stranger and loving the people right in front of us.

Jesus had dirty feet, was a partygoer, stood up to oppressive power, cared for the mistreated underdog, and ultimately gave up his life for those he loved.

Just as Jesus embodied flesh-and-blood good news, young people long for a tangible gospel that matters to their everyday lives. Faith must match their ground-level, gritty, real-time minutes and hours. Young people want to know if the religious concepts they’ve been handed up until now are relevant enough to handle their current relationships, decisions, and actions. Their religious beliefs shift from theoretical ideas to everyday realities when the bills arrive; when diversity becomes their roommate; when violence is no longer a news story but their friend who has experienced sexual assault; when choice means pursuing one option at the expense of another; or when their politics are activated by stepping into the voting booth. The faith traditions they have inherited from their families and churches must now be pursued on their own volition, in their own lives. They need a faith that grows with them.

Faithing as Searching

Let’s be honest: the statistics regarding young people and their faith do not appear promising. As referenced earlier, the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a comprehensive study of the faith of over two thousand 13- to 17-year-olds, tracked teenagers into their early emerging adult years (ages 18–23) and found that the influence of religion in their lives diminished.

Furthermore, the number of Americans described by the Pew Research Center as “Nones”—meaning those who claim to have no religious affiliation—has risen nationally from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014. More alarming is that 35 percent of those in the Millennial generation (of whom the majority are in their twenties) claim to be Nones, outpacing religiously unaffiliated members of Generation X (23 percent), the Baby Boomer generation (17 percent), and the Silent generation (11 percent).

Parents who read these statistics and watch their own kids’ behaviors often assume that young people are walking away from faith. While that may be happening, there is often more bubbling under the surface than we realize. Having conducted a vast review of the major studies on 18- to 23-year-olds, researcher and professor Tom Bergler describes a clear pattern in their religiosity: “Public religious practice declines a lot, private religious practices and felt importance of faith decline somewhat, and basic theistic beliefs decline only a little.” In other words, while faith-related behaviors may plunge dramatically, our kids’ beliefs might actually only dip slightly.

Perhaps our concept of faithing allows us to reinterpret our kids’ behaviors and questions and forge new ways to support them. To start with, let’s assume that their faith journeys are more about searching for God than walking away from God.

While our young people’s religious behaviors may be dropping, the encouraging news is that their hostility toward faith is not rising. Even in the midst of describing college-aged young adults’ move away from public, corporate faith practices (such as attending church or a campus Bible study), the NSYR reports that 80 percent have positive feelings about the religious traditions in which they were raised. Relatedly, most Nones say they consider themselves spiritual and believe in God.

Doubt: Faithing’s Friend

Faithing acknowledges that the quest to integrate their faith with new life experiences brings new struggles and doubts for our learners, explorers, and focusers. So we might hear them say:

“I don’t believe in God anymore.”

“If that’s what Christians are like, I don’t want to be one.”

“I’ve outgrown my faith.”

“I’m not sure I believe what our (or sometimes even more painfully, your) church teaches.”

Disappointed by a faith that feels too small, our kids often seek new ways to hold their beliefs while simultaneously feeling disoriented and vulnerable. In one study, 78 percent of college students expressed a fluctuating sense of feeling connected with God and felt “considerable” or “moderate” distress over their religious dilemmas.

Tom, a college student we met during our research, realized how a shift in his spiritual outlook could impact other parts of his life: “You start thinking, if I was wrong about this, or I have a different perspective on this, what else am I wrong about? You change your opinion on one thing and it affects everything else.”

At this point, it’s normal for parents who have tried to raise their kids in a faith tradition to become anxious. But let’s suspend our anxieties for just a moment and view these doubts through the lens of faithing. Let’s acknowledge the qualitative shifts our kids are trying to make and recognize that faith is more of a verb than a noun. It is much more a process than a possession.

The good news when our growing kids ask new questions is this: Faithing invites doubt rather than avoids it. In many family and church contexts, doubts about God are often viewed as embarrassing or maybe even unfaithful. Few want to express their spiritual struggles for fear of being seen as less of a Christian or maybe not a Christian at all.

Growing With parents fight to reverse this trend. They realize that doubt is part of the faithing process and a necessary portal toward mature faithing. Often, young people’s questions about God and current topics are their attempts to keep their spirituality relevant, not rebel against it. In one of our interviews, a mother with three post–high school kids reflected on the changes she’s witnessed: “I think if I were to go back and re-parent, I actually would allow my kids more freedom in their high school years to explore and express their questions about faith.”

Her instincts align with what teenagers need. Over 70 percent of churchgoing high schoolers report having serious doubts about faith. That statistic emerged from a three-year longitudinal study of 500 youth group graduates launched by the Fuller Youth Institute to help parents and churches build faith that lasts, or what we call Sticky Faith. Sadly, less than half of those young people shared their doubts and struggles with an adult or friend. Yet these students’ opportunities to express and explore their doubts were actually correlated with greater faith maturity. In other words, it’s not doubt that’s toxic to faith; it’s silence.

To find out more about our Sticky Faith research and resources, please visit fulleryouthinstitute.org/stickyfaith.

In our nationwide interviews for this Growing With project, mothers and fathers noticed both how their kids experienced doubt and how their kids tried to harmonize their beliefs with their new life experiences. Such efforts raised new faithing questions for their kids and called on new parenting skills that encouraged their kids to work through doubt rather than ignore or avoid it.

An East Coast couple shared the changes they were seeing in their high school daughter. The dad described their observations this way: “Her faith seems to be becoming more personal, which has driven more questions for her. There is lots of, ‘Why would God not like this?’ or ‘Why would God support something like that?’” Mom chimed in: “She’s no longer willing to just regurgitate something she has been told. She’s trying to understand and figure it out herself.”

One Indiana mother reflected on the parenting shifts she needed to make as her son went to college: “Finally God was saying to me, ‘It is still your faith you are trying to give to your son, but you need to allow him to make his faith his own.’ I realized I could pray for him and encourage him, but for his faith to stick, he had to own his faith journey.”

Another mom we interviewed realized that she had to monitor and contain her own emotional and physiological responses to her explorer daughter’s new questions: “During her sophomore year in college, my daughter came home and told me that one of her senior friends who she really looks up to said she wasn’t sure if there was a God or not because there’s so much destruction in the world right now. My daughter said she agreed with her. As I listened to her, my stomach was in knots as I resisted overreacting.”

Faithing Grows Best with a Solid Starting Point

In the midst of seasons when a child’s faith stalls or diverges from our own, the spiritual influence of parents is still paramount. When our kids strive to make their faith their own, they need a solid launching point and, at times, even something to come back to. In their 35-year longitudinal study spanning four generations, sociologist Vern Bengtson and a team of researchers found that religious transmission, meaning faith habits and perspectives held by parents and passed on to children, remained almost unchanged with their adult children. For example, parents who reported being “more religious” also had adult children who similarly identified themselves as “more religious.” Beyond self-reported religiousness, parents and children consistently reported similar responses regarding church participation, view of Scripture, and attitudes toward teaching religious values. Their conclusion: “In religion, parents really matter.”

Growing With in Real Time:

Faithing’s three dimensions

Faithing has intellectual, emotional, and relational dimensions that affect the way young people make spiritual sense of their world.1 All of these elements impact and are impacted by the way we embody our faithing in our everyday tasks, relationships, service, and worship. The following table depicts these three dimensions associated with faithing.

What faithing asks

What doubt looks like

What young people need as they navigate faithing and doubting

Intellectual

What do I believe?

Beliefs and experiences do not add up, leading to confusion and questioning.

Space and opportunity to question, challenge, disagree, and wonder.

Emotional

How do I feel?

The onset of doubt brings anxiety, frustration, or feelings of being overwhelmed. Working through doubt leads to feeling hopeful and energized.

Time and empathy to grieve and be authentic.

Relational

With whom do I believe?

Diverging from one’s family or faith community’s beliefs can lead to experiences of abandonment, loneliness, rejection, loss, and distance.

People who are relationally committed to them, even if they believe differently.

The intellectual dimension of faithing. Young people are often the most articulate about their spiritual struggle in this intellectual dimension of faithing. After all, they want to understand why something about God is true or how to synthesize previously held beliefs with conflicting data or experiences.2 Parents must resist the temptation to short-circuit adolescents’ and emerging adults’ intellectual quests by only reinforcing prior beliefs or by downplaying their questions. Instead, we can nurture the intellectual dimension of relationship with God by encouraging honest conversations, creating room where everyone is free to ask any question, and being willing to learn together.

The emotional dimension of faithing. When children experience doubts, they may feel anxious, confused, angry, sad, or hurt because life does not add up. Or they may feel let down by their faith, their church, or even God. As they work through these challenges, they may eventually begin to see a way forward and then experience relief, joy, renewed energy, or inspiration.3 Parents can help their kids by recognizing that faithing includes an emotional element that usually seeks an empathetic ear before a logical argument.

The relational dimension of faithing. We have discovered that some students who experience spiritual struggle worry most about the effect doubts and questions will have on their relationships with parents, clergy, and peers. They anticipate that their intellectual doubts may result in relational consequences. Parents can help their kids’ faithing by reminding them that, even in disagreement, we are committed to the relationship—no matter what.4

1. Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 53–103.

2. Steven C. Argue, “Undergraduate Spiritual Struggle and the Quest to Remain Faithful,” Journal of Youth Ministry 16, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 19–20.

3. Argue, 18–19.

4. Argue, 17–18.

Faithing’s Contagiousness

Supporting our children’s faithing requires paying attention to our own faithing. Some researchers have noted that spirituality has a “contagiousness” to it; the faithing and doubting of those close to us impacts our own faithing and doubting. Relationally, we might sense that our kids are pulling away from us. Emotionally, we might wrestle with our own spiritual uncertainties and wonder if that’s okay. Intellectually, we could have questions just like our kids do. If we are honest, we may have uttered phrases like:

“I get worried that I can relate to my stepson’s feeling that church sometimes doesn’t make sense.”

“I feel anxious when my daughter asks a question about Jesus and I don’t know the answer.”

“I feel scared when my teenager raises a legitimate point that contradicts our church’s stance, because I think I agree with her.”

In the midst of this inner whirlwind, we’re tempted to focus on our kids while missing how God may be transforming our own lives.

I (Steve) remember having a “conversation-turned-lecture” experience with my high school daughter, Lauren, as she was packing for a month-long service trip. Both of us were a bit more sensitive as we were tired from tackling her long to-do list, excited about her adventure, and anxious about all the unknowns. Our conversation took a negative turn when I realized that I was barking at her more than talking with her. I could see that she was shutting down, and we finished packing in silence.

Later that night, I returned to her and confessed, “Hey, I’m sorry that I started lecturing you. You weren’t doing anything wrong. I just realized that I was scared about you heading out on this trip by yourself. Will you forgive me?”

Growing With in Real Time:

What if my spouse and I do not see eye to eye on faith-related issues?

While there is evidence that same-faith marriages can perpetuate religious continuity over generations, parents often disagree on religious topics, or parents are growing in their faith at different rates.1 The same dynamics can emerge in a single-parent family supported by grandparents or a multigenerational family sharing the same living space. When our kids start raising questions and sharing their own opinions about God, spouses and other family members often are invited—or forced—to consider trying the following:

1. Vern L. Bengtson, Norella M. Putney, and Susan C. Harris, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 127.

Honestly, I get discouraged when she sees the anxious parts of me. When she forgave me that night, I realized that perhaps these are the moments our own kids help us as much as we support them. My daughter’s journey impacted my own faithing. I realized that I was trying to control the situation so that I wouldn’t feel anxious. My impatience and stress were about my faithing, not hers.

Sometimes the words we say, the emotions we feel, or the relational tensions we experience are not about our kids’ spiritual journeys. Instead, they are symptoms of our own faithing and doubting. When we get scared, anxious, and overwhelmed, Growing With parents stop and admit it—to themselves and to their children.

Faithing’s Linguistic Connection

The glue of faithing in our family is communication. In other words, Growing With parents actually talk about our faithing.

The vast NSYR highlighted that young people have become inarticulate about their faith, often lacking the language to express their beliefs and convictions.

Further exploration revealed another telling part of this story: so have their parents.

Somehow, young people and their parents have lost the ability to speak of faith in real life. Like learning Mandarin as a young person then forgetting it as an adult, Christian adolescents and emerging adults often become less fluent in faith over time. Faithing needs to be talked about and processed, and if these conversations diminish as our kids get older, we miss opportunities to help them remain fluent in faithing. Faithing depends on practice and use for it to become deeply part of us. It is through faithing that language, behaviors, beliefs, and values are internalized.

The good news for parents is we don’t need to be theologians or super-Christians to talk with our kids about our faith or theirs. We only need to be willing to go there.

Take a risk by offering to pray for them. Share what you’re trusting God for. Discuss the sermon together. Or read the Scriptures together during the holidays when everyone’s home. Our good friend and fellow practical theologian from Princeton Theological Seminary, Kenda Creasy Dean, says it best: “Do something radical and give Jesus the credit.” When our faithing process becomes part of our conversations, faith itself becomes easier and more natural to talk about.

Faithing Ideas

Help Your Kids Figure Out Their Unique Faithing

I (Kara) tend to feel closest to God when I’m reading my Bible or writing in my prayer journal. Or both. But the older I get, the more I am coming to terms with the reality that not everyone is the same as me.

So every once in a while, I ask my kids this question: “When do you feel closest to God?”

Nathan’s answer: “During worship.” He has felt close to God through worship music since fourth grade. He now plays guitar and regularly leads worship at our high school ministry. Thursday night worship practices are a priority in his schedule.

Krista tells me she feels closest to God when she’s at church. With her friends. She’s always been social, and she comes alive when she’s with people who get her.

For Jessica, our most introverted child, it’s in our backyard. By herself. She loves nature and experiencing God’s creation. As much as she loves her friends, she cherishes time on her own outside to read, swing on a swing, ride her scooter, or just lie in the grass and look at the sky.

God has wired each of my kids differently. As much as my default is to assume my kids are like me (or at least should be like me), I’m coming to appreciate their unique ways of faithing. I want to model faithing to them, but I cannot expect them to copy my faithing. If you want to try to do the same with your learners, explorers, and focusers:

Bring Faithing into Their Challenging Dilemmas

Now that we understand faithing, let’s return to the challenging statements we raised earlier in this chapter. What if we tried to approach our kids’ challenging dilemmas in light of what we now know of faithing?

I don’t believe in God anymore. What if you responded, “Please tell me about the God you don’t believe in anymore”? Encourage your teenager or young adult to articulate their doubts so that they, and you, can better understand what they might be working through. Acknowledge that their confession is courageous. Honor the moment by asking them how they’re feeling rather than debating them. Remind them that you are present with them, love them, and are for them. You might even find you can say, “I don’t believe in that kind of God either.” And eventually share what you believe about God instead.

If that’s what Christians are like, I don’t want to be one. What if you were to acknowledge that you also have observed mixed messages sent by both churches and individual Christians? Compliment them for noticing the contradictions. Ask them how they would live differently. Talk about how your family can live more consistently, extend grace to each other, and forgive each other.

I’ve outgrown my faith. What if you respond with a calmness that comes from remembering that faithing grows and that this moment is not the end of their faith journey but the beginning of a new chapter? Might it be possible to acknowledge your teenager or young adult’s growth, empathize with their emotions, or encourage them to find new inspiration for their faith journey? Suggest reading a biography of someone who may have charted a similar journey, such as a scientist who believes in God or an artist who expresses faith through unique mediums. Or read of a woman who overcame her experience with discrimination. Or maybe study a person of color who found God through experiences within his cultural background. Remind your child that when they outgrow something, they are likely growing into something else.

I’m not sure I believe what our church teaches. Comments like these can move a family from conversation to debate in no time! Be slow to assume that a statement like this is only an intellectual one. Recognize that intellectual dissent or questions often are evoked because of new and broadening relationships and experiences. Simplistic faith responses to issues of equality, science, and politics that previously may have been acceptable to your kids now feel unsatisfying. Acknowledge new complexities and make room to dialogue about topics that are important to them. Invite other adults to join your family conversation who will listen, honor, and respond well to your kids’ questions. Avoid offering either-or solutions that constrain them to only two options when there may be more. Work toward considering new, creative ways that honor their experiences and faith journeys.

Speak Fluently of Faithing

As we interact with parents nationwide, they confess that when it comes to discussing spirituality, they’re worried about saying the wrong thing and either messing up or revealing their ignorance. Let’s acknowledge right now that we all will say the wrong thing sometimes! The good news is that faithing needs fluency not correctness.

Faith in families has become a lost language, a segmented category, the fancy room in the house that we visit but don’t live in. Parents can bring faithing language back into everyday life by finding small ways to speak it again. Like any language, it will seem awkward at first, but consistency will bring fluency.

Before my (Steve’s) kids could drive, I would take them to school in the morning. I realized that this task was also a ritual when I had my kids all to myself at the beginning of the day. So somewhere along the way, I made it a point to turn down the music and pray a simple prayer over them. I would typically end by praying, “May we follow you to live in ways that make the world a better place today.”

One morning on our drive, I was moody and quiet, making our typical fun morning drive not very fun. My daughter sensed it. She grabbed my hand, started to pray for me, and ended the prayer, “And may we follow you to live in ways that make the world a better place today.” I squeezed her hand, wiped my tears, and said, “Amen.”

If car-time prayer doesn’t work or is too awkward, pray for them as you occasionally make their lunch or dinner. Tell them you’re praying for them. Ask them what you can pray for.

When my kids have been at college or lived on their own, I have tried to text them regularly. I try not to be overbearing. In fact, we have an agreement that if I text, they don’t need to text back! These texts aren’t “Don’t forget to turn in that paper” texts or “We miss you—please come home this weekend!” texts. Instead, I tell them what I love about them, that I’m praying for them, or I send them a quote that resonates with their interests.

My family has tried regularly to take time over dinner (usually on Sunday before the week begins) for each one of us to share what we’re anticipating for the week. Usually we ask two questions: (1) What are you excited about? and (2) What would you like us to pray about? Then we each pick someone to pray for. This small ritual seems to keep us connected with each other throughout the week. For those who have kids away from home, you can still find ways to connect and ask these very same questions by text, email, or video.

Having said all that, I can also list the numerous times when I forgot to ask the questions over Sunday dinners, failed to pray for my daughters, or just plain blew it. So we know that even our best intentions will at times fall flat or simply lose steam. Our goal is not to be perfect but rather to ask ourselves, What are the simple ways we’re making our faithing conversations fluid and natural? Like any language, the more we practice, the easier it comes.

Create Spaces for Faithing to Happen

When my (Steve’s) daughters were in their late teens and early twenties, I made a point to use coffee outings to talk about meaningful topics. I’ll be honest, it was hard at first. As a parent, you want your kids to come to you and ask you about the meaning of life, but that rarely happens! What I found is that they often expected me to bring up important topics. So I learned to take some risks with them by asking them about friends, politics, current events, and God.

One question that I regularly brought up with them is this: “What is something you don’t believe that you think I still believe?” I’ve also turned the question around: “What is something you believe that you don’t think I believe?” Sometimes the answer would be, “I can’t think of anything.” Sometimes they had a list. Each time I held my breath, wondering what they might say! But what gave me courage was knowing that faithing is a process—a process that is best fueled by honest, regular conversation.

Tell Your Own Faithing Story (It’s Part of Their Story Too)

Somewhere along my parenting journey, I realized that even though I was in ministry and our family shared many faith rituals, I had not really told my girls the story of my spiritual journey. So with each of them, I have tried to find moments to ask, “You know, we do all these religious things and talk a lot about Jesus, but have you ever wondered why or how I found a connection with Jesus and his story?” Each said that they didn’t know; when I asked them if I could share my story, each one graciously responded, “Yes.”

Tell your story. It doesn’t have to be told perfectly. But share about times when God’s grace has sustained you. Offer pieces of it as you can. And if you told them once long ago, don’t assume they remember. Tell it again or share how you are experiencing God in your daily living. Let’s give our kids context and a starting point for their spiritual journeys by telling them our own stories.

Support Learner, Explorer, and Focuser Faithing

Once we accept that doubt is part of faithing, that it’s not if doubts will come but when, and that faithing topics will arise the more our faithing communication becomes common, we become aware that faithing changes over the years. To best grow with our families, we need to develop unique postures that match the key struggles and questions of the learner, explorer, and focuser stages.

WHAT LEARNERS NEED FOR THEIR FAITHING

As high school students, learners make sense of their faith through the groups they belong to and the modeling of others. They can envision a perfect world, a perfect church, a perfect parent, and a perfect self while realizing that none of these truly exist. They need help grieving the reality that they do not live in a perfect world, making sense of the new questions they’re discovering, and learning to live congruently with their beliefs. Parents as teachers can help their kids’ faithing by:

WHAT EXPLORERS NEED FOR THEIR FAITHING

Since explorers are journeying through the first half of emerging adulthood, they make sense of their relationship with God by asking more critical questions, often comparing and contrasting what they have been taught by their families and faith communities with their new encounters with diverse people, experiences, and worldviews. This is often a time of doubting more, challenging more, and stating what they don’t believe more than what they do believe. They wonder if it is safe to question and critique, and worry that they will be rejected. Without encouragement from parents and other adults, they’ll default to talking about their doubts with their peers or trying to work through them on their own. Parents as guides can help their explorer kids’ faithing by:

WHAT FOCUSERS NEED FOR THEIR FAITHING

As focusers move from emerging adulthood toward adulthood, they are likely gaining clarity in their careers, relationships, and beliefs. They do not need to associate only with those like them (like learners) nor reject those who disagree with them (like explorers). Rather, they are becoming more comfortable with their own relationship with God and are searching to find common ground—even with those who hold differing perspectives. Parents as resourcers can help their focuser kids’ faithing by:

Their Faithing Needs Our Faithing (and Vice Versa)

Our kids’ faithing affects our parenting as well as our own faithing and doubting. What our kids need most is not for us to protect them or solve their problems, but rather to faith with them. This is a great moment for you to pause and reflect on your own journey with God. Consider asking yourself the following questions:

Remember That God Seeks Out All of Us

We offer this important truth at the end of this chapter to prevent parents from defaulting to two unhelpful responses toward the faith of their growing kids. The first makes spirituality too magical, as though God will somehow work in our kids’ lives and there’s nothing we need to do. The second assumes that our kids’ faith journeys and decisions are so influenced by our attitudes and actions that we have to do it all. The reality is somewhere in the middle. Our actions and attitudes matter, but there is no formula—or magical tip or trick that we can say or do—that can perfectly predict our kids’ relationship with Jesus. In this middle space lie the peace and strength that come from knowing that God loves each of us, is pursuing us, and desires to give us a full life. We can rest in knowing that, while we want our kids to believe in God, God always believes in them. And in us.

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