Read an Excerpt
The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family
Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids
By Kara Powell ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2014 Kara Powell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-33897-0
CHAPTER 1
Why Does Your Family Need a Sticky Faith Guide?
Tennis balls.
I had to get tennis balls.
They were on the packing guide from the childbirth preparation class, so that meant one thing: they were essential.
You might be wondering, Why would a woman in labor need tennis balls? Our teacher suggested that while we were waiting for our baby to be born, we could put a tennis ball in a clean tube sock and use it as a massage tool.
I guess I needed a clean tube sock also.
The list from the childbirth class was fairly lengthy. Its specificity and breadth might have scared off other soon-to-be moms, but not me. My strategy was to follow the guide's every recommendation down to the last syllable.
In case you're wondering, yes, this was my first child.
So I needed chapstick.
And massage oil. Just in case my shoulders were aching and Dave's hands were too dry.
A deck of cards, a few magazines, and some music—in case we got bored.
VHS tapes (yes, I'm dating myself) of a few movies to pass the time during labor.
A roll of quarters for the pay phone. Mind you, both Dave and I had cell phones (we might have been using VCRs, but at least we had phones—albeit bulky ones), but the guidebook also recommended a handful of quarters, so I chased down some.
All of the above plus a few changes of clothes and my regular toiletries were in my carry-on suitcase three weeks ahead of time, carefully positioned by our front door for us to grab when it was time.
At 10:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, I went into labor. As I staggered to the car, Dave grabbed the suitcase, tossed it in the trunk, and made sure it made it to my hospital room for the big night.
Where it sat. Unopened. For my entire ten hours of labor.
We did open the suitcase the next day for my toothbrush. And a second time two days later so I could change from my shapeless hospital gown into shorts and a T-shirt for the ride home.
At least no one could accuse us of not following the hospital's guidebook for our son's birth.
Planning Ahead
I'd be surprised if any of you reading this book didn't plan ahead for your first few days with your child.
If you adopted your child, you planned the setup of their bedroom and made a few changes to your home. But more important, you thought about how to attach and bond with your new child. You likely had to work through intensive guidebooks and required training courses to become adoptive parents. Ahead of time, you tried to simplify your life and secure time off from work to make sure you would have the days and hours you wanted—and needed—to cocoon with your child.
If you or your spouse gave birth, you might not have been as extreme as I was. (In fact, I hope you weren't.) But you almost certainly chose the location. You likely strategized your route there. You probably even figured out how you were going to contact your friends and family, and maybe even who you were going to notify first.
I'm guessing that when it comes to planning for your first few hours with your child, you'd receive an A. (I myself was apparently trying for an A plus.)
But then something happens. Or rather, lots of somethings happen.
Our kids get older. We do too.
Our kids get busier. As do we.
Our kids seem to gain more energy. We seem to lose it.
If you're like me, you may have been proactive the first few days and even years of your kids' lives, but as your family's days become consumed by soccer practices and science tests, you become reactive. Instead of looking a few months or even years ahead, we consider ourselves lucky if we make it through the next few hours or days of our frenetic schedule.
At most, we devise plans for our children's education—both now and in the future. We think about schools they might want to attend and calculate the steps our kids (and we) need to take to boost their grades and extracurriculars. But that's often the only area of our family life where we have any long-term vision or goals.
For most families, faith tends to be more of an afterthought.
How Will a Sticky Faith Guide Help Your Family?
Let's get real: no part of parenting is easy. Whether we're responding to our fifteen-month-old's cries from the crib or our fifteen-year-old's texts from the mall, we're constantly improvising. Guessing. Hoping that what we're doing comes close to what's best for our kids.
Part of that is inevitable. Parenting will always be a messy (and often awkward) dance of art and science.
But what if there was research that removed at least some of the guesswork about what is best for our kids—both now and long-term? What if we could learn from proven tools and ideas that would help us create a plan for our families?
For some of us, following a plan is a joy. We are the type of folks who love making lists and identifying next steps.
For others of us, the term "plan" is a four-letter word. (Well, actually, it is a four-letter word for all of us, but you know what I mean.) We cringe at the thought of tying ourselves down to specific goals and tasks.
Regardless of whether you love or hate plans in other areas of your life, we at the Fuller Youth Institute hope you're willing to use this guide to map a spiritual course for your family.
Without a guide, without intentionality, your family is likely to drift.
So is your kids' faith.
Multiple studies indicate that 40 – 50 percent of young people—like your kids—who graduate from a church or a youth group—probably a lot like your congregation or your kids' youth group—will leave their faith and the church after they head to college.
To help that sink in, please take a moment to visualize a photograph of your kids and their Christian friends. Now imagine holding a red pen and drawing an X through almost 50 percent of their faces, because that many will fall away from the faith as young adults.
As a mom, a leader, and a follower of Jesus, I'm not satisfied with that. I bet you aren't either.
As we at the Fuller Youth Institute have spent time with families who beat those odds—who are more successful than average at encouraging long-term faith—it's clear that those parents usually have a strategy that guides how they nourish their family's faith. It isn't that they are trying to control their children's future. Nor do they view following a guide as a foolproof guarantee for success. They hold the guide loosely, knowing that even their best-laid plans sometimes need to be tossed aside.
But these parents know that the things they care about—including their children's spiritual growth—stand a much better chance of becoming reality if they think in advance about what is important to them and how to make time for those priorities.
These parents know that their kids' spiritual roots won't grow deep by accident. God is the ultimate gardener, but he often works through parents to prepare the soil, remove creeping weeds, and make sure kids have the spiritual nutrients they need to flourish.
Families who manage to beat the 50 percent statistic also helped our team confirm that it's never too early to start nurturing Sticky Faith. My husband and I began implementing some of the ideas in this guide when our youngest was three years old. By starting when your kids are young, you can weave these research-based principles into the fiber of your family.
An important corollary is that it's also never too late to start nurturing Sticky Faith. During the course of our research and discussions with parents, we've heard countless stories of our loving God nudging a prodigal son or daughter back to their faith home. Sometimes the parent plays a visible role in this process.
More often, the parent plays a less visible role by praying—and praying hard —for their young-adult child to be overwhelmed with a sense of God's grace and mercy. Sometimes God uses challenges and crises to pull young people back to the faith; other times God works through a powerful experience of community or serving alongside others. Whatever the magnet, it's comforting to realize that faith development is a lifelong process for all of us, regardless of our age or faith leanings.
Findings and Ideas: A Dynamic Duo
I'm a researcher who's married to an engineer. To say that our family values data is an enormous understatement. Dave and I never met a spreadsheet we didn't like.
As much as I applaud data, I cheer even more enthusiastically when data is translated into practical resources. It's the application of data that guides you and me toward a strategy that fits our unique parenting styles. It's the pairing of research with proven ideas that empowers families to walk forward in their pursuit of relationship with Jesus and each other.
In every chapter of this book, you'll get a front row seat to research-derived findings that can help you develop lasting faith as a family. While we could have deluged you with statistics and trends, we ruthlessly mined the data to unearth the handful of insights essential to your family's strategy.
We call them "findings" because they have emerged from valid and reliable research. Yet we need to be clear in the early pages of this guide that there is no formula for building Sticky Faith. Much of the research we share is correlational in nature—meaning that the more families adopt certain practices, the more their kids tend to have lasting faith. Other findings have grown out of qualitative research, where we've interviewed fifty parents like you and looked for common practices. So while it makes sense to adopt those practices, there is no golden blueprint that will yield unwavering faith.
After all, we try hard as parents, but ultimately it's the Holy Spirit's job to build deep faith in our kids. (I hope you sighed in relief after you read that sentence. I did after I wrote it.) Because God is the one who ultimately sticks with us and our kids, we can trust him to walk with our families no matter what we face.
After we run through some foundational findings in each chapter, ideas from families we've studied will take the field. Like you and me, these parents are regular folks who love their kids and want the best for them. They are not perfect, but they have raced, walked, and sometimes stumbled toward being a faith-pursuing family. Along the way, they've picked up some bumps and bruises, as well as a lot of wisdom that can help us.
Some of these ideas are blatantly connected to prayer and Scripture and feel very "spiritual." Others are more tied to meals or miniature golf and feel more "fun" or "relational." The reality is that the family bonding during car trips and card games is indeed very spiritual. Similarly, exchanging prayer requests in your family and adopting a family Bible verse are activities that tighten your family's relationships with each other. So we present both relational and spiritual ideas, praying that the Holy Spirit will help you sort out which hold the most promise for your family's road map.
No longer do the finest faith-building ideas need to remain hidden from view, practiced privately by scattered families. They are now gathered in your hand, on your coffee table, and across your screen.
The Sources for the Sticky Findings and Ideas
Most of the findings and ideas to help your family develop lasting faith come from three sources. The first data stream flowing through this guide is six years of research we at the Fuller Youth Institute conducted with more than five hundred youth group graduates from churches nationwide. Our team's goal was to follow these students during their first three years of college to discover the steps that churches and families could take to help set young people on a trajectory of lasting faith.
As we have shared the results of that study with parents nationwide through presentations and our first book, Sticky Faith, they have begged us for more practical ideas, ideas we knew we could best glean from families themselves. So the second data stream running through this guide is fifty interviews the Fuller Youth Institute team conducted during 2012–13 with parents across the United States. Nominated by church leaders, these parents are of different geographical regions and denominations, various marital situations (while the majority are married, some are single parents, and others are remarried), and diverse ages and ethnicities. What they share is a commitment to deepen their kids' faith, and a recognized effectiveness in doing so. These parents are far from flawless, but they are willing to share what seems to have helped their kids keep the faith. To our delight, their experiences both confirmed what we had learned from our first data stream of five hundred young people and opened our eyes to new tributaries of insights and ideas that help families build enduring faith.
While these two studies yielded a treasure trove of insights, we also appreciate the studies conducted every day by fellow researchers around the country, and these studies are the third and final stream contributing to this guide. Our team extensively reviewed the top research on faith development and family dynamics to showcase the best for you.
This guide thus brings to your kitchen table the top voices in the country on Sticky Faith families. You get to pull up a seat also.
These three streams of research (our two studies and our review of other research) form a river that flows through my own parenting. Every day, my husband and I parent differently—and better—because of the findings and ideas we've garnered from other families.
In some ways, the findings comprise the "head" of Sticky Faith families, while the ideas are the beating "heart." Findings without ideas lead to irrelevant rationalism. Ideas without findings degenerate into empty emotionalism. But together, they allow you to understand not only why your family needs to make some strategic changes but also how to get there.
How Is This Book Different from Sticky Faith?
What began as a study of five hundred young people became the first Sticky Faith book, Sticky Faith.
That first book, as well as additional resources for families and churches, has become a Sticky Faith movement, a divinely fueled coalition of leaders and parents from all fifty of the United States and from sixty other nations committed to loving and serving young people differently.
Because parents who have joined the movement have asked us for even more research-based ideas, we developed this book. While most of the findings are brand-new, since not everyone who reads this book will have read the first Sticky Faith book, a handful of pages in this book review material presented in that first book. Because every single idea is new, and since we have emphasized ideas even more in this book than in previous resources, fans of Sticky Faith will have plenty of new tips and tricks to try at home.
How Your Family Can Get the Most out of This Guide
When we sifted through the most eye-opening findings and ideas, eleven themes emerged, each of which is described in its own chapter. As you work your way through the findings and ideas in each theme, we're hoping you're going to want to be a better parent.
But if you're like me, these insights may cause your "I've already failed as a parent" dial to click a few extra notches higher.
Or maybe these ideas will add a few more pounds to your "I'm not as good as other parents" scale.
I remember the Monday I conducted five consecutive one-hour interviews with Sticky Faith parents. By the end, I could barely stand myself as a parent. I felt more insecure than inspired. The stories and ideas I heard felt more like a punch in the gut than a shot in the arm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family by Kara Powell. Copyright © 2014 Kara Powell. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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