All of us as parents will do whatever we need to do to help our children grow up walking in the truth, walking in faith.
Author and researcher David Kinnaman says there is no recipe for success. What we learn over and over and over is that faith isn't a formula. It is being led as parents by the Holy Spirit. We did learn some practices, but you can't boil faith down to a simple set of do this twice a week and these conversations. And, you know, everything's going to turn out right. In fact, every story is unique, every heart, every soul is unique.
And I think we have to honor that first and foremost is that each young person, God's speaking into their hearts and sometimes their hearts become hardened for reasons that we can't control and we shouldn't try to control those. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. While there's no recipe for raising kids who walk faithfully with Christ, there are some best practices that we can consider and learn from and maybe adapt in our own families.
We'll explore that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us.
I've shared this before, but I just, I feel like it needs to be said over and over again. 3 John 4 says, I have no greater joy than to know that my children are walking in the truth. Now, John is talking about his spiritual children when he writes that. But if that's the case for spiritual children, how much more for our biological children? No greater joy for a parent than to know that your kids are walking in the truth. Why do you think that brings us so much joy?
Because we know that that's where life is and where hope is. I've asked parents, if you could imagine that your child is 30 years old and they write a letter home and they say, the job's doing great, I'm making good money, all of this going on. We're not going to church anymore, but, you know, we were able to take the vacation and have this and the kids have got all of this stuff and we're happy and life's good. You get that letter from one child. The other child writes home and says, it's been a rough month, we were barely able to make the bills, but you know what?
God's got us and we're hanging in. Which child are you going to feel happier about? And it's because we know that second kid is where God's got them. The first kid is dealing with his own success and self-reliance and that's not going to take him anywhere. Living for temporal versus eternal.
And if there's no greater joy than to know your children are walking in the truth, then there's probably no greater fear or pain for a parent than to imagine that your child would not be at some point walking in the faith. And we've got a couple of guys joining us this week to help us understand the culture in which we live, the pressures on our kids, our young adult kids, as they enter into what you guys refer to as the digital Babylon. David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock are joining us again. Guys, welcome back. It's a pleasure, thanks.
Yeah, thanks for having us. David and Mark have written a book called Faith for Exiles, Five Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon. David, who is joining us remotely from Southern California from the offices of the Barna Group, gives leadership to the Barna Group, which has been doing research in the Christian world, the Christian space for decades. Mark is a pastor, a church leader, worked with youth for years in his local church.
He's a researcher as well. We've talked about the realities of the culture in which our kids are living, about the screens and the influence of being discipled by your screen instead of discipled by your father or your youth pastor or the Christian community. We've talked about the fact that some kids end up as prodigals, some kids end up as vaguely spiritual nomads, not going to church but still hanging on to some spiritual vestige. A lot of kids wind up as what you call habituals who are going to church and going through the motions, but we really wonder how tethered to the faith they are.
And then there's this 10%, there's one in 10 who are resilient, and their faith is alive and they're on fire and they're excited and they want to tell other people about Jesus and they really believe it. And every parent is saying, what's the recipe for that, okay? What are the ingredients I pour in?
What's the temperature I bake it at? Because I want to make sure all of my kids are that. Well, one of the things to keep in mind is that we wish it were that easy to find the right temperature, the right ingredients, the right combination, but what we learn over and over and over is that faith isn't a formula. It is being led as parents by the Holy Spirit. We did learn some practices and we'll tell you about those, but the first principle that we've really seen in this is that you can't boil faith down to a simple set of, do this twice a week and these conversations and everything's going to turn out right.
In fact, that's part of the premise of our research over the last decade or more. We wrote a book called UnChristian, another book called You Lost Me that were really about the problems and obstacles. So I've spent a bunch of years, hundreds of thousands of interviews with young people who have walked away from faith or who are growing in faith.
And so faith is not a formula. Every story is unique, every heart, every soul is unique. And I think we have to honor that first and foremost is that each young person, God's speaking into their hearts and sometimes their hearts become hardened for reasons that we can't control and we shouldn't try to control those. If you are a church leader or a youth worker, I want to encourage you that the 38% that are the habituals that we talk about, we really want to focus these practices on them. They're really the opportunity that we have. We spend a lot of energy worrying about those that are already walking away.
We have a real opportunity that are coming into our programs that are welcoming us in right now. Those are the groups that we need to really be looking at with these five practices. So let me explain the background behind the research first and then I'll have Mark describe these five practices. But as I've said, we've been studying all the disconnections among young people, the reason that young people walk away from faith for a long time, but we really want to understand what helps connect these 10% who are most resilient. So again, we put people in different buckets, we analyze the data, we interviewed nearly 1500 individuals across those four groups that we've been talking about this week. What we did was we really want to isolate what are the practices that make a difference with those resilient disciples. And so these aren't formulas, but they are guidelines and guardrails for us as parents to pursue.
All right, so what are they Mark? Okay, and we're going to give these to you in a very high level way, so it's important to understand the context for that, right? That these are big ideas, but it's the detail underneath them that is really where you start seeing the work.
Okay, parents, get ready. Okay, so the first thing is experiencing Jesus, this idea that I'm clearing away the clutter, the religious clutter that exists in the world today and in the church to really meet with Christ. Meaningful relationships, I'm around people that I enjoy being with and I aspire to become. Cultural discernment, this idea that I can apply the Word of God to the world around me and navigate it, make sense of it. Vocational discipleship, this idea that my work is a part of the way I express my faith and live it out.
There's not a disconnect between what I do nine to five and who I am as a Christian. Correct, it's not compartmentalized, it's an extension of who God's called me to be. And then countercultural mission, this idea that I know that as a Christian I'm going to be living counter to the ways of this world and that sometimes calls me to take epic moments of trust where I trust in God rather than the conventions of this world for the good around me.
Boy, that list of five is powerful and your book, Faith for Exiles, that's the heart of the book is to talk about these five things. Go back to the first one, the experiencing Jesus. Are we talking about a phenomenological experience? Are we talking about there needs to be a spirit in the room that we're aware of?
Or what does the experience of Jesus mean? Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit. And you know, one of the interesting things, I'm glad you felt the power of those five. Because when I present this to a lot of pastors, they'll say, oh, we do all that. Maybe I don't know what that vocational discipleship thing is, but the rest of it we're doing. And I'm like, you are doing some of that, but we probably aren't doing it as well as we think we are, right? Just like we can say, you know, love is important.
Well, we probably are doing some loving things, but we probably could go a lot deeper and fuller in our love. Are these in an order too? Is number one number one?
There's not really any order to them, but it makes sense to me, theologically, you'll have experiencing Jesus and meaningful relationships as one and two because they map onto the two great commandments, to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. And I'll just add here, because I think this is a part of what you were saying, we need to be all in on these, not just a little bit. If you give a person a little bit of a disease, you inoculate them against the disease, right? And so, we need to be completely infected by all five of these. There's great power in not just the inoculation against, but the full-on, I got the disease here.
And I also think it's easy to listen to these with someone else in mind, like, oh, my kids should be doing this, or my husband, if my husband would do this, but to listen to this for ourselves. Okay, so experiencing Jesus, explain to me what that means. Yeah, so, you know, one of the interesting things that we did, and it's one of the first things I did when I got the raw data back is, as I was looking through, I wanted to find out what is the age that these different groups are saying that they consciously became a Christian. So, you know, that moment that they knew they were a Christian. And what's really interesting is that resilience marked that age a little bit later in their childhood than the prodigals and the nomads, by about six years.
What's going on? Because when I read that in your book, that jumped off the page. Yes.
It did. It's not what you hear. The younger the better. The younger the better. And, you know, obviously, I gave my life to Christ just before the age of five, and it stuck. So, there's no reason to doubt younger conversions. But I think we need to allow God to work in the lives of our children and not try to force something to happen. Because what we can see here is that we can actually socialize our kids to Christianity rather than actually helping them experience Jesus. And that's where I think if you notice these five factors working together, just as you said, Bob, that if a person has an experience of Jesus but they don't have the mind of cultural discernment, or they don't work out their faith through vocational discipleship, or it's not alive in their relationships, or it's not sacrificial in terms of countercultural mission, these five things really work well together.
They have to work together. Our life with Christ and our relationship upwards, our relationship with others, our relationship of our heart and our mind, and our work of our hands, and then our work in the world. So, all five of these areas, what we find is that people that are deficient in more than all five of them are deficient in their faith.
And it's not a test that we give them. But that if our faith in Christ doesn't work itself out in how we relate to others, how we think about the world, how we think about our work, how we think about our mission, then it's not the kind of Christianity that anyone wants to follow. And I think that's what many young people are rejecting, is these sort of half-hearted, one-dimensional forms of faith.
Yeah, I followed Jesus, I gave my life to him, but nothing else really changed, nothing else was really asked of me by the church. Well, our kids prayed prayers when they were little, and we were talking about baptizing them because they said we'd like to get baptized. But Dave was like, you know, let's just disciple them and wait until as they get baptized, like this is meaningful, like we want to do this, this is our own faith, this isn't our parents, this is us. And at first I was like, what? You know, this isn't good.
No, she was all over me. Let's go, let's get them baptized, they showed some interest. And again, I was like, let's let it be their decision. And then it didn't happen for years and years, and then they go to Israel or somewhere and come back and say, we got baptized, which was great. I think what you've just modeled there and described is a very, the healthy but the right kind of tension for parents to have or, you know, if you're in a single-parent home, the sense that you're trying to like push your kids into the category of being Christian. And that's the thing we're learning so much with this generation. A lot of research that we're now seeing is that they don't want to be emotionally manipulated. In fact, one of the things that's really heartbreaking for me as a researcher is to hear the stories of young people who say, yeah, I made this like weird commitment at a camp or in a, in an environment. And I just, I feel like as I look back now, five years ago or 10 years ago is that they set these conditions in which my heart was going to be, you know, manipulated towards a certain decision. And so we have to be really careful, like this is a lifetime decision. So, I really applaud you guys for working that out in your, in your relationship with your kids. And even though it's hard for us as parents because we want to like tip the kids into the Christian camp. Out of fear sometimes.
That's right. Absolutely out of fear. And how many of us have heard somebody share their testimony as an adult and they would say, well, I prayed a prayer when I was six, but. Exactly. And then they go on to talk about a time later in life when their faith really became alive for them and what was going on spiritually and, you know, if they had died from one point to the other, what's the truth? I won't get into that because I don't know the mind of God, only God knows the heart of a child.
But I do know that what we want is we want there to be an alive faith in a child. I remember a guest on Family Life Today who said the same five-year-old who says, I want to ask Jesus in my heart, says, and when I grow up, I want to be a dinosaur. Right?
And as a five-year-old, that's how you're thinking. Now, it could be, as it was for you, Mark, a genuine profession. One of our kids prayed at the age of four and walked with Jesus the rest of her life. Right? So, we've seen that happen.
For sure. But there are a lot of kids who pray the prayer at four, and when they're in junior high, they're not sure that that's what means anything to them anymore. But, you know, what's interesting is you were sharing your baptism story. I had that same experience with my parents. The church wanted me to be baptized, and my parents said, no, let's not do that.
And as time went on, I am the one who approached them about being baptized. Right. And I will say this, you know, when you're young like that, you give, like, you're a tadpole, right?
And a tadpole has a head and a tail and lives in the water. And you give that— I have no idea. I have no idea where you're going with this. Yeah, where are you going? I'm curious. I'm liking it. Just go with the threat. But you give yourself, your tadpole self, to the Lord. It's not getting better.
No, it is. He's going to go to the people. But then you get the legs, and you get the ability to go in and out of the water and all these other environments. And it's almost like you then have to say, okay, I give all of this to you as well, Lord, right?
Like, I dedicate this to you as well. And I think that, for me, was kind of the progression of giving my four-year-old self to the Lord, and then at a later time, giving the rest of that to the Lord as a completion, but not a— That's good. That's what I'm talking about. I don't think it made the book, though. I think David probably took that out.
The Deadpool illustration. That's going to be the sequel, Faith for Tadpoles. Let me give you an example of how differently these resilience and habituals are experiencing Jesus, just by the numbers, okay? And remember, each one of these numbers represents a life that God loves, so it's really important that we understand that. But when we talk about those resilience—okay, so we asked them, I believe living in relationship with Jesus is the only way to find fulfillment in life. Ninety percent of resilience said, that's true for me. Only 49 percent of habituals said that was true for them, and 21 percent of nomads. So you see kind of the difference in terms of their experience of Jesus.
My relationship with Jesus brings me deep joy and satisfaction. Ninety percent of resilience, 48 percent of habituals. So half. This isn't like resilience or seven percent more. In almost every situation, it's double-digit percentage points, differences between resilience experience and the habituals experience. You talked about meaningful relationships being key, and we're probably not going to be able to dive into all five of these, and this is where people can get your book, Faith for Exiles, and look deeply at this. But I remember when my kids were growing up, I used to say to them, I want you to identify somebody who is five to ten years older than you, who you would look at and say, I would like my life to look like their life when I'm their age, and then figure out how they got to where they are. I was conscious of the fact that they needed some modeling, and they needed some people who cared about them beyond mom and me, people who they could point to and say, yeah, this is what I'm growing for. When we're talking about meaningful relationships, role modeling is a part of that, isn't it? It's a huge part of it, and I think one of the most practical things that moms and dads can do out of this, because you can't make your kids connect to Jesus.
You can provide an environment for that, but the one thing you can do is invite other men and women into your home and surround your kids with these great examples and relationships. One of the things that we found by, once again, wide margins is that resilience had much stronger relationships. They had people that were adults in their life that they felt were investing in them. They had people that they felt they could be honest with about their spiritual journey. They had people that they admired in their church that they wanted to be like, just like what you suggested, and by almost 40 to 50 percentage points difference between the habituals in most situations.
So, huge difference relationally. So, when I hear pastors say, hey, our church is all about relationships, I'm like, show me how you're really connecting those younger people to those older people. That's something that moms and dads do, and you know, we don't invite people over to our homes anymore. We don't have those things, and that's where I really got to know the men and women in our church, and they invested in me and helped me think about my life spiritually, even when some of them went off the rails. I saw the grace of God in their lives, and I think that's a really important thing that we can't discount.
Invite somebody over to your house this week, a mature believer into your house this week. That'll be a first step in helping your children. And you'll notice in this generation a lot of skepticism about people that are paid to do something or even about the motivations of their parents. We actually see some really interesting social data now where young people are more likely to show trust and affinity with their peers or with people online. In fact, they trust a YouTube channel more than they would trust their youth pastor.
And so, part of what I think we're talking about in terms of meaningful relationships, and Bob, I think that was such a great decision. We've tried to do that now in the lives of our kids based on this data, is how important it is for us to put others in the lives of our kids who don't have the same mixed motives about how Christian my kids turn out. So young people now are like, yeah, of course you're my parent. Of course you expect me to be a Christian because you're Christian.
But that's because it makes you look good or because they sometimes push us in the right ways about our own idols, don't they? That we as parents may want our kids to be Christian, not just because it's the best thing for them, but because it reflects on us and we don't want to be ashamed by that. And so having other people around us and around our kids who can help them understand what it means to follow Christ, who love them, who love Jesus as much as we do, who don't have the same sort of weird motivations perhaps about getting them to be a Christian, actually helps to cut through that clutter.
You know, as I think about my three sons now married and grandkids, their faith that I think I'd put them in the resilient, it's as much because of Dave and Ann as it is Rob, Frank, Ryan, John, Craig, and Dave. Those men poured into them in high school and now, even now as they're in their 30s, they're still pouring into them. And they found that. That is, you guys said it, is so critical that somebody else, and some of these guys were my age. So it isn't just that they're cool and hip in their age. It's that no, they're living it in front of them. They're pouring into them and mentoring them.
You can't devalue that. That is critical. It's interesting when we look at like younger stories like on Nickelodeon or the Disney or whatever, almost always the parent or one parent is absent. And the writer of Hannah Montana in an interview was talking about the fact that the reason they do this is because it creates more tension for character to develop in the story, not having those parents present or in the storyline. And I thought about that because almost all of our hero stories, they're orphans, right? Superman, parents died on Krypton, he was adopted, Harry Potter adopted, everybody, right? So, I mean, you start looking at it and, you know, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, Batman, parents killed when he was a kid. You start going, whoa, this is weird.
Why is this? It's a part of the storytelling narrative. And when our kids are going through that formational years, we are symbolically dead as parents, right?
That's depressing. You know, we may be speaking truth into their life. I mean, I was kind of called the teen whisperer at church and people be like, oh, you're going to have an easy time with your kids. And I'm like, but I'm the parent of my kids. I'm the whisperer to your kids. And so, there's kind of a different role that's played there. And so, I realized as we went through that phase, I needed the men and women of the church to be there to be those people speaking into their life when the truth that I was speaking into, they weren't hearing it.
I was symbolically dead to them. I think there's something about that. How lucky are we that our kids have us as parents because we have all the answers.
Yes. We have the PowerPoint slides and the research to prove how they should be raised. And this goes back, David, to where we started, which is there is no formula.
There is no formula. The salvation of a child is a work of God in that child's life. Get on your knees and pray. There is nothing you can do to make your child a Christian.
And there is no timeline for it. I think that's the important thing is we need to be patient and allow God to work in their lives and just cultivate that soil for them, but not expect. And we don't want our kids to go through pain. We really don't because we've gone through it, and yet sometimes pain is the thing that has drawn us to Jesus. But we're telling a lot of parents of prodigals and nomads, their story's not over yet.
Not over. That's why we call them prodigals. And you keep praying, and you keep seeking the Lord about what your interaction with them looks like, and you pray for God to bring somebody into their life who's going to be revolutionary to help point them to the truth. I just hope moms and dads will catch a vision for what you've outlined in this book because, again, while it's not a recipe, it is a roadmap for the things we can do to help stack the deck. And that's to point our kids to an authentic relationship with Jesus, to meaningful relationships with others, to understand you're going to face cultural headwinds, and here's what it looks like to live counter-culturally in the midst of a culture that's going in a different direction. Here's what it looks like for your work to be meaningful as you live it out, and here's what it looks like to be on mission and to have God's purposes at the center of your life.
Get the book. It's going to change. We're excited about the work you guys have done and want to share this book with our listeners. Thank you guys for being on Family Life Today, and, David, thanks for joining us remotely here. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for having us. David and Mark's book is called Faith for Exiles, and you can order your copy online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL today to get a copy of the book. Again, the title is Faith for Exiles, Five Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon by David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock. Order from us at familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-358-6329.
That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, looking at the decline of spiritual interest in our culture can be discouraging. David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here with us today. Do you see reason for hope?
Absolutely. My primary reason for hope is that I know our faithful God who will continue to reveal himself to the rising generation. But then I also have a profound hope that though young people are not living as a culture majority as Christians that I got to enjoy growing up, those who are resilient disciples of Jesus can be a prophetic minority in this day.
I have lived in some secular places like New York City and Western Europe, and those who follow Jesus in those places shine like the stars. You don't do it because you are supposed to do it. You do it because you are emblazoned with passion for Jesus. And my word to you as parents and grandparents would be to believe in your kids and believe in the next generation. Keep interceding for them and keep investing in them.
Learn from them as they learn from you. The beauty is, is that Christ is in them, the hope of glory. And our kids know it's a complex world that they face and that they're navigating, and they understand the need for a holistic, integrated, deep faith that speaks to all of life. God's kingdom will continue to expand generation after generation through them. And so please join us at Family Life of being a part of pouring into the next generation and platforming the next generation of Christ followers with us. Well, and thank you to those regular listeners who partner with us in this ministry, help us reach hundreds of thousands of people every day with practical, biblical help and hope for their marriage, for their family. Your investment in this ministry is really an investment in the lives of so many couples, so many parents. We're working hard to effectively develop godly marriages and families, and you helped make that happen. In fact, we would love this month to say thank you for any financial support you can provide for the ministry. We've got copies of my new book, which is called Love Like You Mean It.
It's all about understanding a biblical definition of love in marriage rather than focusing on a cultural definition or a superficial definition of love. That book is our thank you gift when you make a donation today. You can do that online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call to donate 1-800-FL-TODAY is the number. We are so grateful for those of you who have stood with us in the past. And again, if you can help with a donation today, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks in advance for whatever you're able to do. Now tomorrow, we want to talk about how moms and dads can raise daughters who are strong and confident and courageous.
What does that look like? Tara Matson's going to join us to help with that. Hope you can tune in and be a part of that conversation. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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