Is My Kids’ Faith Their Own? Justin Brierley

I have the opportunity to talk to a lot of moms. I'm hearing more often than ever conversations at the dinner table that are freaking moms out because their kids are asking more and more questions about faith.

They're watching more and more social media that's contrasting their faith and going against their faith and even their moral beliefs. And so they're asking me, like, how do I answer some of these questions, especially questions that I don't even know the answers to about apologetics. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. I think those are real valid questions that our kids have, and we as parents want to answer some of those questions, but we're not always sure where to go with it.

And who can we trust with reliable answers from Scripture? That's a good setup for who we got in the studio today. Somebody we can trust to help parents, especially in homes with, I mean, I think there's an angst in a lot of Christian parents' soul about what they're seeing in the culture and then they're seeing in their own family room, because their own sons and daughters as teenagers are walking away from something they've tried to instill in them their whole life.

So Justin Brierley is back. He is going to help us, and he's a dad. I mean, you're a parent. How many years have you been married? Well, now you're asking.

21 years it will be. And so, I mean, you're one of the world's foremost thinkers to help, not just parents, but all of us understand and use the term apologetics, which is the defense of the faith, understanding, thinking. And so you can help a lot of parents in homes. I love your new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. I think a lot of parents think there's no belief in God.

It's going away, not rebirthing. So where do we start as parents? I just want to, first of all, sympathize with parents, because it is that much harder. You know, maybe a generation ago, if you were a Christian parent especially, you could sort of raise your kids in a bit more of a bubble, I would say.

Yeah, it is that. A Christian bubble, and you didn't have to contend with constant skepticism coming, you know, through their iPhone or whatever. And I just think a lot of us are having to learn as we go along on how to live and to be faithful in this technological age we live in. I think some of the lessons are helpful, what I've learned in the UK, where I say we're further along this secularization journey than the US, because we haven't had a really a Christian bubble to put our kids in for quite some time in the UK. We don't have schools where they can just be surrounded by just Christians and that kind of thing. So we've had to learn already, well, what do we do for kids who are constantly surrounded by questions and objections and just a secular worldview? And even the bubble, is that always a good thing? Well, exactly.

To some extent, I think the problem with a bubble is that as soon as it comes along and gets popped, then you're left with all the same questions as before. I think what's really key and what I think a lot of parents need to learn now is that we need to prepare young people round the dinner table from the early age for the world that now exists around them and actually has always existed, that the secular world. We're in no different position at the end of the day to the first Christians who existed. They, two thousand years ago, there were lots of alternative options out there, the pagan world that they were surrounded by, and they had this strange belief in a Jewish Messiah who'd been raised from the dead, and people were calling them crazy for it. Well, you know, people call Christians crazy today for their beliefs, so nothing's changed that much. But two thousand years ago, that community went on and changed the world.

It can happen again. We're now living sort of in this post-Christian era, and I think as parents, the best we can do is actually help our kids to be ready for the questions they're going to face, rather than try to pretend that stuff doesn't exist, shield them from it. Actually, take the opportunity when you still have the influence to sit down at the dinner table and say, hey, I heard this interesting video of someone claiming God doesn't exist.

I heard this other view on sexuality being discussed. If you don't have the conversations with them at this point, when you're a parent with some influence, they're going to have those conversations somewhere else. Someone else is going to be educating your kids in that area. So I think you just have to be absolutely honest and say, look, the genie's out of the bottle. We can't pretend we live in a Christian bubble anymore, and so let's take seriously what we're called to do in terms of actually engaging these questions. So we encourage questions around our dinner table.

We have some wonderful conversations. It's fine if our kids have questions that we can't even answer at this point, because that's the whole point is you say, well, look, I'm not sure what the answer to that is, but let's keep the conversation going. I think the problem, the real problem for kids is when you shut down a conversation, when you say you're not allowed to ask that question, because kids have an inbuilt kind of detector that says, okay, so Christianity isn't something that's for real normal life. If I can't talk about this issue, then it's obviously something that's just for church on Sundays and doesn't really apply to the rest of my life. We have to get past that.

If Christianity isn't something you can take with you and ask all those questions about on Monday morning, then it's not real. So for me, it's important that we just accept where we are in the culture as parents and we accept that God's calling us to faithfully model Christ to our children in the way we live our lives, but also our willingness to encounter their questions and do the best job we can at helping to guide them as they navigate those things. The thing to realize is ultimately, we only have so much control. I mean, I look at my kids, they're all so different. We've raised them all essentially in the same way, but they're completely different personalities. They've got completely different questions, completely different ways in which I see them starting to put the pieces of Christianity together.

And that's okay, okay. You've got to in the end trust them into God's hands and that can be scary because we like to sort of be helicopter parents where everything is planned to within an inch of its life and we'd like it to be like that for their faith journey, but life isn't like that. Well, you know, I also think as I hear you say that, Justin, I'm like the average Christian parent is like, well, I'm not Justin Briarly.

I'm not a doctorate in this area and so I'm afraid to bring up something that I'm not going to be able to answer adequately and maybe I don't even know what I believe. So, I mean, for you it's like, okay, you're one of the best in the world. Of course you have that conversation.

What about the average person? I think you have to go back to 1 Peter 3.15. Now, most people read that in the context of us being out in the wider world when it says, always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the reason for the hope that you have. But that could be around the dinner table. It could be our kids, okay. They're asking us for a reason for the hope that we have and we have to be ready. Now, yeah, for parents this will mean when they have difficult questions saying, look, I can't answer that right now but I would love to go and find a resource that might help you to think through that. You don't have to have all the answers, okay, and it's okay to be honest with your kids and say, I'm still working some of this stuff out, all right. I think kids actually respect that kind of honesty and humility in the end.

But in the end it's about doing some of the hard work ourselves and being ready, as 1 Peter says, to start to try and point them in the right direction with some of those questions. It might be, you know, a great TikTok channel where they're actually doing some of this stuff and it's right where they're looking anyway. And you can say, look, I know you're seeing this skeptical stuff over here but have you seen this great communicator?

Oh, every parent's like, tell me one. Even your, did you start Unbelievable, your radio podcast show? Yeah, I did. I mean, would that be a good resource?

Well, now it's re-enchanting, right? Well, so the Unbelievable show continues and there's a vast archive of podcasts and video shows where we bring these questions, you know, into the public arena and debate them. The Re-enchanting podcast is another one where we're exploring the Christian worldview with a variety of thinkers. But there is an absolute wealth of apologetics material out there. I mean, in some ways we're more spoiled for choice than we've ever been before in terms of where we can point our young people to. The problem is sometimes we don't know where to begin. The internet is huge and we can't always tell the good from the bad.

But I would say do the work of actually looking at, you know, there are some great resources out there and some wonderful ways. I remember when our 12 year old son, Jeremy, he was telling us, oh, that the kids at school were telling me that Jesus doesn't exist. It's just fairy tales. And when I was just able to point him to one sort of three minute video on YouTube, just giving some basic historical facts about the existence of Jesus. And he, it's like a light bulb went off in his head and he's like, I'm going to show my friends this when I get back to school. What was it? Every parent's like, just tell me the video.

I'm afraid I can't even remember the name. I think it was by William Lane Craig, who has a wonderful ministry, reasonable faith. And they've done a number of short animated videos on things like the evidence for Jesus or the evidence for God and that kind of thing.

And again, they're there and they're just sometimes a wonderful resource. I've got one video myself that I quite often show when I'm doing talks and things. It's called how a dice can show that God exists. And it's basically a very simple four minute presentation on YouTube showing why there is this phenomenon called the fine tuning of the universe for life and the way in which it points to there being a designer behind the universe. And again, when I show this to young people, it's like light bulbs go off in their head. They realize, Oh, this is, this is, this is, I can, I can use this. I can show this, you know, this is only three minutes long. This is kind of within the, the attention span of my friend. And so I think we need to be ready to do that just to go, you know, most kids, sadly, they're probably not going to sit down and read a 70,000 word book, but they might watch a two minute video.

So, so find out what, where those resources are and you might just find there's enough there to, for them to take the next step. Yeah. And I think, you know, even as a, as a man, a husband or dad, I think, and maybe I'm unique. You tell me, Justin, every year I have to dive back into some questions. I have to refresh my mind, uh, with current thinking, even, even like you're writing what people are saying about different topics, but I don't think you need to do that. But doubts will rise and I need just to go, oh yeah, I just had to dive in again and remind myself that this is all true.

This is a, you know what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm unique in that way. You're wired skeptically and that's fine. As I said, some people are just wired that way. No, no, not everyone needs to do that because we're all different. But I'm one of those people who kind of has to say, okay, I need to, I need to do a stock take.

Like let's, let's work this out. No, I like that on theology though. Like I'll go into things in theology, like, oh yeah, this is good.

I need to hear this. Oh, I haven't thought of that before. I think it's just being in the word first, but also listening to other people that are reinforcing biblical worldview. Those are important things.

Absolutely. And, and that's the thing that, that the danger of course, and this is where I'd say you do need to be careful in this quote unquote kind of deconstruction world we live in. Some people try to do that completely in an isolated way outside of a church community, outside of simply, you know, faithful Christian prayer and worship and so on. And very often then it can become a purely academic subject.

And as soon as it becomes just that, the problem is we divorce it from really the context in which we're supposed to be understanding these things. So I would say, you know, as it says in scripture, don't forsake the meeting. You know, it's, we're meant to come to understanding together as a church, but actually when we do it, it's amazing how, you know, the wisdom of others around us, the pastoral stuff that, that is inevitably part of that journey, helps us to come to a living faith in the end. So you're saying don't let that be the church that you're just listening to. And yeah, you can't, you can't be pastored by podcast.

There's, there's a great value in going and listening to intellectual people speaking and everything. It's wonderful the resources we have, but it is not a substitute for church community. And so I think we need to be in the word, as you say, part of a church community.

And that's where we need to work these questions through, is with people rather than just in our own strength. Now how certain do you feel like we need to be? I'm thinking of Hebrews 11.1, you know, I'll read it to you.

You know it. Now faith is the confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. And that's where, you know, when I read a verse like that, I often feel, I don't always feel assurance. And so I'm like, oh, I'm less of my belief in God when, you know, the writer of Hebrews is like, man, you know, you got to have certainty.

The assurance of things unseen. I mean, the thing for me is that sometimes people take that word faith that's, that's being defined there in Hebrews and they think that it means certainty. That's not what the word means. You could translate the, the Greek word their pistes a few different ways, but none of the ways are going to mean certainty. It means hope. It means trust. Those are the kinds of ways in which the writer is meaning to define this thing called faith. So for me, if faith is about trust rather than sort of just being certain about something, it's not that we have a kind of iron cast bulletproof argument for God or for Christianity. It's that we have enough to be able to trust this.

Now what, what does trust mean? I love that there's a lovely story of a famous tightrope walker called Blondini in the, I think late 19th century, who was famous for crossing Niagara Falls on his tightrope. And one day the King of England came to see his act and he saw Blondini walk across the falls on the tightrope and then he saw him push a wheelbarrow across the falls on this tightrope.

Finally he put a sack of potatoes in and pushed it back and forth. And finally Blondini came to the King and said, do you believe that I could push a man in a wheelbarrow across the falls? And the King said, yes, of course I do. Of course I believe that. And he said, well, get in then. And the point of the story is faith is not just belief in something, it's trusting in that thing. And that's the difference.

Okay. What the King was being asked to do by Blondini was to trust, not just to believe that Blondini could do it, but to trust his own life in that. And that's, that's where faith comes in. We can believe lots of things about the Christian faith. The question is, do we entrust our life to it? That's where faith comes alive.

And it's, it's that, that is the bit where we kind of lean in, where we actually trust our life to something. And for me, that kind of faith is not simply about believing or a sort of set of doctrinal statements. You know, as James says, even the demons believe and tremble, it's not, belief isn't the key factor.

It's about trust. It's about, am I willing to stake something on this? Now for some people, the belief may kind of seem to waver and come and go in their mind. It's a kind of like, some days I feel like I really believe this stuff and some days I feel like I don't believe this stuff as much. What really counts is whether you're trusting in it. However much you feel like you do or don't believe that thing, does your life look like you're trusting in this? And that's what God's more interested, I think, is whether you're going to step out and do something about this faith. So that's what you're saying.

That would look like to get in the wheelbarrow is to step out. I would say, don't get too obsessed with how strongly you believe or not in a set of kind of doctrinal propositions. That will change.

It may just depend on what you had for dinner last night and what state of mind you're in. What God's interested in is people who trust Him. And for me, that's a different, slightly different thing. That's having the confidence that these things are true, but actually putting your life on the line because of it actually leaning in and doing something about it. And for me, that's far more what faith is supposed to be about. It's an active thing, not just a sort of a passive assent to a set of doctrines. It's, no, this stuff makes a difference in my life and I'm gonna act on it now. I mean, we do it every single day. You did it jumping on an airplane to fly. Yeah.

You know, I bet you didn't go out and check the engines and talk to the pilot. We just, we have enough certainty and evidence that we say, I'm going to trust this. And it's true of every worldview. What a lot of people don't realize is it's not a choice between crazy Christian belief and sort of some kind of neutral thing. If you're an atheist, you have a worldview, you're putting your trust in something and you've got to kind of give reasons for that just as much as I have. And in the end, the key thing is whether it actually works in your life.

Yeah. A lot of people, you know, find that even worldviews that they thought were very, you know, that they really believed in didn't work in the end. You know, friends of mine who were atheists who found actually this wasn't livable in the end.

Even though I find Christianity a bit strange and weird and I'm not completely sure I can sign up to all these things, there's something about it that works. And sometimes that's where faith is. It's kind of like stepping out and trying it, you know, stepping into this worldview, not having it all sorted in your mind. Sometimes you just have to take that Kierkegaardian leap of faith, or I'd say it's a step of faith rather than a leap.

A leap sounds like you're leaping into the unknown with nothing to support you. I think faith is kind of, it's doing something daring, but knowing that you're going to have something solid that will meet it, because that's been your experience, you know. What advice would you have for the parent we were talking about earlier that is watching their son or daughter as a teenager or a college-age student or whatever age that they have raised their whole life in the church. They've seen evidence of faith in their kids. And now that child is just saying, I don't believe this.

I'm walking away. The parent, we said earlier, there's an angst that's like, oh, I don't want this ever to happen. They're watching it happen.

What do they do? The first thing to know is God knows what that feels like because his first children walked away from him. You know, Adam and Eve, that's the story is that humans are rebellious. You can have the best parents in the world and kids are still going to do their thing.

Okay. The second thing is that there's some point at which you just have to do that thing. Faith is about trust. It's about saying, I don't know what's going to happen, but God, I'm trusting that you do and that I can put them in your hands. Pray for them. Obviously, always keep praying for them. Keep the door open to the questions and the conversations. Never shut that down.

Okay. And all you can do is be that loving presence at that point in their life, which is kind of encouraging them to keep the door open to the Christian faith. You never know what the thing is that might ultimately make the difference. It might look right now like they're going off in a completely different trajectory, but I've, I've met too many stories of people who looked like that was the end of the story for them. And then things turned around because a life event happened or someone stepped into their life or something, just a piece of the puzzle came together in a way that suddenly they were like, okay, now I understand why this story meant so much to my parents and why it could actually mean a lot to me.

As I say, sometimes that deconstruction is just an important part of the puzzle for people, but don't give up faith that they could reconstruct and just keep praying and loving them. I want to hear some of those stories because in your book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, you've interviewed probably thousands and thousands of people, very intellectual people, atheists, agnostics. Are there some stories and you share some in your book of like, this was a great interaction with this person.

Oh yeah. I'll give you two, one of a personal friend and one someone who I've met and interviewed and speak about in the book at some length, that person is Paul Kingsnorth. He's a poet and author in the UK. He just got the most interesting story because he's a celebrated author and had a big audience as an author and poet, but he had been through this fantastically sort of interesting religious route in his life. He sort of had a spell as a teenage atheist, you know, when he was, you know, decided none of it was true.

It was sort of nominal Anglican sort of background upbringing, but none of it had stuck. But as you said to me, even as this sort of teenage atheist phase, he still felt like the world was enchanted. He still loved reading mythology and, you know, J.R.R Tolkien and he loved being out in nature.

There was something about nature that just absolutely inspired him. So eventually he decided, no, atheism doesn't cut it for me. And he decided to become a Buddhist.

He thought, maybe it's like I can look inside and find, you know, this kind of transcendent meaning that I'm looking for. He did that for a number of years. He went on retreats, he did all everything. But even there, he had this desire to worship something, he realized he wanted to give thanks to somebody or something. And that wasn't really possible in his sort of Buddhist philosophy. So believe it or not, he went into Wicca, essentially, you know, a sort of modern form of witchcraft, which he said, you know, involved sort of turning up in the woods and chanting and sort of basically worshiping nature, essentially. He said it was a bit of an odd. He said in the end, he realized it was a bit of a Christian heresy, basically.

It was taking bits and pieces of Eastern mythology and combining it with certain Christian rituals and so on. But to his great surprise, he was having dinner one evening with his wife and she said, completely out of the blue, you're going to become a Christian. He said to her, what are you talking about, of course, I'm not going to become a Christian. But within about two years, he had become a Christian.

And this was through a whole series of circumstances. He started suddenly to bump into all kinds of people who followed his work, who turned out to be church leaders who were interested, he started having dreams about Jesus. He had a bit of a CS Lewis sort of journey where he said he just felt he wanted nothing to do with God, but God kept sort of chasing him down the hallways. And he eventually just had a profound experience where he realized, you know, this story actually makes sense in my story.

He looked into it, he started to, and he entered the Eastern Orthodox Church in the end. And he's got just an extraordinary story. And I look at someone like Paul King's North, it's highly intellectual, you know, Western sort of person and this adult convert to faith.

And I think if it can happen to Paul King's North, it could happen to anyone. He's got that, not everyone's going to have that journey of, you know, quite esoteric journey through these various religious traditions, dreams, and all kinds of things that eventually led them to faith. The other story I'll share is a personal friend of mine called Peter Byram, who started listening to my unbelievable show, sort of in the mid 2000s. He was at university at the time. He'd grown up in a Christian family, but sort of jettisoned it really, by the time he went to university, one of his flatmates was an atheist and said, you should read this book by Richard Dawkins, you know, and he read it and he thought, yes, well, this puts the nail in the coffin of Christianity for me. Then very awkwardly, one of his other housemates became a Christian. And he says, the problem was he now was living with a devout atheist and a devout Christian and he couldn't escape the God question. And so he started to watch YouTube videos of the new atheist people like Dawkins and he found their arguments quite persuasive. But it also led him to start watching some of the people who were responding.

And one of these people was William Lane Craig. And as he did that, he started to realize, oh, there are some quite persuasive counter-arguments to this new atheist stuff. And increasingly as he saw these conversations happening and he started listening to my show where these conversations were happening, he realized, oh, there's another story here. Eventually we became friends. He even came on my show in his sort of agnostic phase, sort of still with lots of doubts and questions about Christianity, but he eventually ended up helping with a tour that we put on with William Lane Craig back in 2011. And it was on that tour that he became a Christian and he'd been on this big intellectual journey. Eventually it was having dinner one evening and it was William Lane Craig's wife, Jan, he was speaking to because Peter had been helping with the tour. And Jan said, well, look, my advice to you Peter is if you're going to become a Christian, go all in, don't do it half-heartedly. If it's not everything, don't go for it. And he said that was enough for him to sort of decide, actually, I need to take this seriously now.

I can't keep messing around the edges of this. And he's been- Did you guys hear the common denominator with the wife? It's always the wife. It's always the wife.

Absolutely. Sorry, Justin. No, no, nobody's true. So this is a person who continues to have a very sort of intellectual approach to faith. He needs to put the pieces together. That's just the way Peter is wired, but I've just seen the way God has used him in that to be able to do so much. I've worked alongside Peter in recent years and it's just been a wonderful journey to see someone going through that. Again, you go back, I don't know, 15 years when he started listening to the show, you would never have thought he was going to become a Christian.

It didn't look that way at all. And what I would say is, you know, coming back to the new atheism where we began the conversation, one of the funny things Peter Byron says to me now is actually, I thank God for Richard Dawkins. I mean, he actually raised the God question for me and I'm a Christian now because of him. So God has a sense of humor, I would say, can even use the new atheist to bring people to faith. So never give up hope, trust that there's a bigger picture. My hope is with the book especially that the people will see that God's not finished, that there's always been times when the tide of faith goes out and we're in one of those moments in our culture. Everyone's talking about, you know, the rise of the nuns, deconstruction, secularism, but that's never the end of the story. If you go back through history, you will see times when the tide of faith seemed to be going out on the church, but something happened. There was a Wesley, a Whitfield, a revival. God did something surprising and I think there's something surprising just around the corner in our culture as well. I sense that we're starting to see the turning of that tide in that sense. People are questioning the atheist story of reality increasingly in lots of the circles I move in and people, I think, are just getting to the point where they might be ready to hear the Christian story again because all the other stories we're telling ourselves aren't working.

And once people get to the end of those stories, people like Paul Kingsnorth who tried all these other stories, they might just find the Christian story is waiting for them after all. Isn't that exciting? I for one love to hear people like Justin talk about the interest other people are having in God because it gives us such an incredible opportunity to join God in what he's doing to bring people to himself. So cool.

I'm Shelby Abbott. You've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Justin Brierly on Family Life Today. Justin's written a book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. This book really outlines the dramatic fall of new atheism and the birth of a new conversation on whether God makes sense out of things like science and history and culture and the search for meaning. So you can go online and get a copy of Justin Brierly's book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God at familylifetoday.com.

Just click on today's resources or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. Again that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And you know, I just wanted to take a second to thank you if you gave to our matching program that happened in December. You know, checks are still coming in and we don't have all the numbers just yet, but if you gave, I sincerely want to say how grateful I am for your generosity to help make Family Life Today possible. Thank you so much for giving and supporting this ministry, and even if you didn't give and you've just shared episodes with someone, or even if you've just listened, thank you so much for being a part of Family Life Today. I'm really, really thankful. Now tomorrow, Justin Brierly is back with David Ann Wilson to talk about the rebirth of belief in God. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.