The question is: are you ok with that?
It's unnerving to think that you could pour your life and best efforts into your children with no guarantees that things will work out. Everyone takes advice - from books, from their own parents, from friends with same-aged kids, from mentors or speakers or "Nanny 911" - but in the end, not only could your particular expert be wrong, but even barring catastrophe, your kid could turn out very differently than you intended.
The question that faces every parent and youthworker and teacher and mentor at that point is a question of faithfulness: do you have what it takes to continue to do the right thing, even in the face of apparent failure or ineffectiveness?
The better part of this Fall, this space has been devoted a series called "Nine Things Your Child Needs to Spiritually Thrive." These nine assets are based on the work I've done with and observations I've made about kids and adolescents and their parents over 13 years. I believe if parents and churches and other caregivers are deliberate about building these nine factors into a child's life prior to - and continuing through - adolescence, a child will have the foundation they need to thrive spiritually. The "Nine Things" are not "biblical" in the sense that you'll find them systematically presented in the Bible as a template for parenting, nor outlined in 2 Parenting 5:1-10; yet what they accomplish is very biblical. They are means to an end, not an end in themselves. That end is the spiritual transformation - the salvation - of kids.
Too often we get caught up in evaluating kids' performance when we should be focused on our own faithfulness. This can work both ways. A kid fails to measure up ("I don't like your attitude", "You'll never get into college if you keep this up", "Your friends are losers") and we go into corrective management mode, attending to one derailment after another but ignoring the preventive maintenance. Short-term objectives win the day; long-term ones fall off the horizon. Ultimately, what does matter in raising a child? I would suggest that if a problem is unrelated to physical health, spiritual vitality, character development, or emotional maturation, it's minor. Sweat the big stuff, but let go of the little stuff. Or, a kid meets our expectations, but our objectives are misguided ("He's such a nice boy", but he has no character; "She said her memory verse!" but she has no idea what it means; "They got an A!" but their enthusiasm for learning was dulled in the process) and we think we're making progress, but it's just window dressing.
To be faithful is to formulate a plan and stick with it (keeping a promise to oneself). This is not an argument for staying with failed methods and practices, whether in ministry or parenting or education. Of course "training a child up in the way he should go" needs to be rooted firmly in realism, which sometimes necessitates changing strategy and making course corrections. But if anything, I'd say it's the church culture that's been inflexible and completely unwilling to reinvent itself. A statistic that shows 70% of churched youth walking away from the church by their early 20s is simply unacceptable. We are failing to transmit a legacy of faith to our kids. I'm all about reversing that trend, and it doesn't entail trying harder at what hasn't worked. It does involve looking very broadly at the factors that either support or detract from spiritual development and then doggedly pursuing those that give kids advantages. We'd fight for a free country and for the safety of our neighborhoods and to keep drugs away from kids and for adequate funding in our schools, and we're willing to keep the pressure on to achieve freedom, peace, safety, and prosperity. Why wouldn't we fight to establish the best spiritual climate possible too?
Faithfulness puts the onus on us - the adults who shepherd kids - to do the right thing, consistently...and to relax. What did the Apostle Paul say? "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. Therefore, neither he who plants or he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow." (1 Corinthians 3:6-7) There's great freedom in that, and it's not freedom from responsibility, but freedom that comes from readjusting our focus: we are accountable to God for the way we've raised kids; not to the College Board or to their future employer or their future spouse or their bank. Kids become accountable to those things as we release them to adulthood; but we remain accountable to God, who will judge our faithfulness.
It's for this reason that I started with 9 inputs, rather than focusing on outputs. I realized that individuals live out their spirituality in different ways: one is evangelistic, another is a prayer warrior, another questions everything, another's faith is profoundly simple. If we begin by casting a mold of "what a young Christian looks like" the temptation is simply too great to engineer for that mold, in which case our ministry work is reduced to a series of inducements. But kids aren't parrots or dogs, they're human lives, and they will develop in individual and interesting ways if we continue to nurture them with healthy inputs.
What might we see from a spiritually thriving child? One would hope that they would begin to live worship as a lifestyle - that beyond Sunday singing, the way they speak and interact and their values would reflect the worth of God. We would hope to see a transformed heart for people, evidenced by an improvement in relationships. This is a natural progression from a well-developed Christian worldview: first a person begins to see others the way God sees them, then they proceed to treat others accordingly. We would hope to see the Fruits of the Spirit characterizing their lives (Galatians 5:22-23). We would see their values transformed - again a product of having internalized God's view on people and possessions. We would see them willingly engaged in acts of service, large and small. Their days would be governed by the ways they might be of help to others.
All of this proceeds from their salvation, a once and future encounter with grace, which is not the end destination of our efforts but rather the self-sustaining wellspring of spiritual vitality. In other words, we fortify the inputs that drive our kids toward salvation, and once they have it, salvation overflows into various outworkings - which then turn around and re-fortify the inputs, and the spiritual being grows and strengthens. You cannot jump straight to the outflow and circumvent the heart of it, which is salvation. You could - but all you would succeed in producing is religiosity! For instance, do we want to produce kids who are kind? Well, yes, we do - but we want that kindness to be the fruit of the spirit that's living inside of them, not some behavior we've externally manipulated. Do we want our kids to serve others? Yes - but with the heart of God, not out of guilt or compulsion or pride or because it will improve their college resume. Do we want them to sing worship songs? Well, yes, but at some point we have to concern ourselves with the motivation behind the singing or it's just noise.
The fact is, the world wants for its kids much of what we want - but they come from a totally different motivation. The world treats spirituality like an "add-on"; if it tames people, makes them altruistic and responsible, it must be a good thing. That can't be our position. We have to aim higher for our kids than just mild conduct or A-Z Bible knowledge or participation in social justice movements. Our priority must be the development in each kid we serve of a spiritual life, which is, first and foremost, a life: it grows and stagnates and has an individualized character and needs support and nourishment. The exact form the overflow will take is not for us to determine. We just need to be faithful with the "building into".
Likewise, we need to watch that the inputs themselves don't become idols. If they point away from, and not towards, salvation, they're detracting from, not contributing to, spiritual growth. Thus, we want kids to have Christian friends, but if the character of those relationships isn't edifying, no one benefits. We want kids to learn to pray, but just because someone can voice an eloquent prayer doesn't mean they're being led into deeper communion with God. We want kids to be emotionally healthy, but lacking other spiritual influence, they'll just grow up to be well-adjusted pagans.
Finally, I believe that the inputs drive kids toward one of three "levels", as illustrated in the diagram below. At the first level is exposure - the earliest encounters a kid has with the message and its carrier, which is usually a faith community. The next level in is affiliation and identification - a kid begins to feel like these ideas belong to them, and that they belong with the people who hold them. Many kids get stuck at this level: they're comfortable identifying themselves as Christians and would even say they agree with what's being taught. But they haven't reached the third level, which is where growth begins - the level of repentance and conversion. It's at this stage where a kid actually takes the dive and commits their life. At the second level, it's merely regarded as a good idea. Repentance, though, is more than intellectual assent. It's an act of the will to change and be changed.
May every kid we touch in 2008 be driven toward this conversion, and may we be faithful in the process of building in.
