Family & Parent Faith Formation
Principles & Practices
9 Parenting Strategies
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Search research has shown how parents can make a significant, positive difference through a nine parenting strategies. This chart summarizes the nine strategies. Go to www.parentfurther.com/ why/9-parenting-strategies for more information.
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And a Little Child Shall Lead Them: The Advent and Event of Parenting as a Spiritual Journey
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Dawn Allitz conducted a research study that listened deeply to men and women to see what spiritual or theological questions or experiences they might be facing, how they were making meaning out of these experiences, and where they turned to find answers. Each parent in her research had been transformed in some way by becoming a parent - some of the transformations were personal, others were relational; some spoke of the transformation in the past tense, while others spoke of a change that was in process.
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Best Practices in Family Faith Formation
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This article on effective practices in family faith formation reviews research and current thinking on family faith practices and develops implications for faith formation with families. The article is structured around five questions: 1) How does family religious involvement benefit children, teens, and adults, and strengthen the family? 2) What is the impact of parental faith on children and teens? 3) How do families practice their faith at home? 4) What are the core family faith practices? and 5) How can congregations engage in family faith formation?
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Biblical and Theological Resources for Raising Children
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Marcia Bunge identifies some fundamental insights from the Bible and the Christian tradition about the roles and responsibilities of parents, parental practices and responsibilities for nurturing the moral and spiritual lives of children, and nd the complexity and dignity of children as resources for raising our children in the faith.
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Best Practices in Parent Faith Formation
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This article draws on a number of studies and sources to identify the practices that contribute to effectiveness in parenting and parent education. The article offers practical suggestions for utilizing each practice, and a planning tool for reflecting on the practices and charting directions for the development of the parent faith formation and parent education.
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A Blueprint for Family Ministry
Christy Young Jones
Can a Congregation Imagine "Something New"
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This is the story of Grace Lutheran Church that decided to “cancel” the current Sunday School model for a year and try “Something Else”. They believed in the gift of community and the richness in telling and sharing stories, and understood the current program struggled with both sustainability and rooted faith formation. An organic team of leaders, most in their 30s and 40s, created weekly intergenerational experiences paired with the narrative lectionary stories from the worship texts, tying together conversations and experiences each week, and named these opportunities Something Else.
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Christian Families Serving Together: A Review of the Research
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Engagement in community service is a strongly felt need of Christian families and is central to family faith. The findings suggest guidelines for ministry leadership that effectively activate and support family service.
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Coaching Parents
Bill Huebsch
The Critical Role of Education in a Congregation’s Mission: Congregation and Family Together
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John Oberdeck contents that nothing will be transformed in congregational education without the participation of the congregation’s families. Transforming congregational education will happen within a context where the family itself is under transformation. The cultural pressure on families is enormous. The target for transforming Christian education within families centers on care. Do families care about Christian education, or don’t they? We bring the Gospel to families that may be losing it!
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Equipping Families to Worship
at Home
Carolyn Brown
Equipping Parents to Be Spiritual Champions in Their Homes
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Leadership Network hosted an Innovation Lab for Family Ministries for visionary pastoral staff from around the United States. These leaders aren’t content to let the surrounding culture dictate the roles of parents and church ministries. They have developed a clear strategy and effective practices to equip parents to fulfill their roles of spiritual leaders. This article reports on what several churches are doing.
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Faith-Nurturing Family Activities
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A spiritual home will produce a spiritual child who matures into a spiritual adult. Here are specific activities to help parents build their children's faith at home.
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Faith Formation with Families in Today's Church
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Leif Kehrwald proposes a four-step process to help families recognize God’s gracious presence in their daily lives, and see how the Christian tradition can illuminate their experience, turning “ordinary” human moments into religiously significant ones. He challenges churches to use processes like this to help families become aware of the moments of meaning in their lives.
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Faith Formation with Hispanic/Latino Families
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Ida Miranda addresses three key issues and challenges for faith formation with Hispanic/Latino families:1) understanding their faith and religious practices; 2) presenting ways in which we can support and encourage Hispanic families to nurture, celebrate, and share faith at home; and 3) identifying ways in which churches can nurture family faith through family-centered faith formation models.
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Family Daily Living Faith Practices
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Christy Olson challenges churches to re-look at the delivery system for knowledge about faith practices. To honor the faith growth of the family within the household, churches need to concentrate on family in-sourcing: getting the information to families in their homes with someone who can help in the family discovery. The new goal is to deliver faith information to the family at the place where they live. She provides a series of practical "how-to" suggestions that churches can use to help families live faith practices.
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Family: The New Mission Field
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David Ludwig contends that the family is the new mission field. Broken relationships, resentment, escalation of anger, deep hurt - these all are the state of so many homes. Families need help, but the church is too often seen as having no power except to make people feel guilty. To enter this mission field, the church needs to show it has real solutions - and this article provides directions to help congregations.
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Family Perspectives
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For the past two decades, the Lilly Endowment has supported several projects among religious institutions designed to empower and serve families. This work has helped to shape discussions, policy-making, scholarship, ministries, and practices on national and local levels alike. This essay by Brad Wigger sketches out some of these efforts, exploring along the way, how attention to families can affect visions of ministry, communities, and the larger society.
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The Greatest Family Legacy: Nurturing a Healthy Person of Faith
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Roland Martinson writes that what many parents and teachers know from everyday experience, scholars are discovering scientifically: “children learn what they live.” The Scriptures reflect this understanding of the formative power of families. Families are God’s primary relational communities for propagating and nurturing life and faith. Martinson describes five clusters of formative relationships and their formative potential: 1) among the generations; 2) between husband and wife; 3) between parent and child; 4) among siblings; and 5) between private and public life.
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Helping Kids Keep the Faith: Four Research Insights
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The status of the next generation of Christians has been the cause of much hand-wringing, but only recently has there been much reliable data from which parents and youth workers can learn. What’s even better is that more and more consensus is building around what actually works in helping faith stick into young adulthood. The article identifies four key findings most relevant to families and congregations.
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Helping Parents Lead their Children Biblically
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Brian Haynes describes three things that churches can do to empower parents to lead their children spiritually. He describes how his church realized they had been leaving parents out of the discipleship equation. They made the shift from the compartmentalized status quo of “church alone discipleship” to the ancient path linking church and family to equip the generations. They decided to equip parents to be the primary faith influencers of their children every day.
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The Importance of Family Faith for Lifelong Faith Formation
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This article summarizes the key research findings on the importance of family faith for nurturing faith in children and teens and offers a variety of practical strategies congregations can use in developing or strengthening family faith formation.
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An Intentional Ministry—Family Ministry
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Some have said, “All that the church needs to do is to provide Word and Sacraments.” Roger Sonnenberg writes that though the Word and Sacraments are the “Means of Grace,” intentional, Gospel-focused family ministry helps to connect the grace of God and the lives of family members. A Gospel focus in intentional family ministry empowers individuals and families for their living and dying.
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Making Parents a Priority
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Using research from the Building Strong Families study, Jolene and Gene Roehlkepartain describe five key findings about parents today and offer practical strategies and ideas that congregations can use to make parents a priority in congregational life and programming.
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Milestones of Faith
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What would it look like for my church to celebrate faith-development rites of passage for children and teenagers? Begin with the faith celebrations already present in their community: first communion, first Bible, and confirmation. Then develop these celebrations into something that accomplishes the other two goals of the milestone program—equipping parents and inviting the community to celebrate with the kids.
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One Home at a Time
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Jennifer Hooks describes the Legacy Milestones approach that Brian Haynes and Kingsland Baptist Church use to create a common path that integrates church and home in spiritual formation. The milestone strategy syncs-up church and home through a path of seven milestones that are used to chart spiritual development.
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Pass the Peas, Catch the Faith
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Linda Staats describes how congregations can partner with and equip the domestic church called "home" to help families share and teach the faith amid their busy and sometimes chaotic lives. Research and mental health experts consistently tell us that rituals and traditions, like those around sharing a meal, ground us and give us a sense of identity and belonging. The simplest of daily acts are the glue that keep families together.
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Passing on Faith: Milestone to Milestone
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Linda Staats describes how to use milestones as a powerful way to engage parishioners of all ages and stages of life in nurturing their faith and spiritual growth. Milestones offer an opportunity to bring God’s presence into the home and connect the rituals of daily life with the life of the congregation, thus shaping a vital partnership between home and congregation. Most important, milestones ministry renews and transforms congregations by tending the baptismal journey through all the ages and stages of a life centered in Christ.
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The Proper Care and Feeding of Emerging Adults: Parenting Strategies for Launching Kids into Adulthood
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“Emerging adulthood” has been recognized as a separate developmental life-stage for more than a decade. So what does this mean for parents and mentors? How can we best support emerging adults and stay connected? This article look at three common big questions about emerging adulthood and their implications for parents and mentors who want to stay in healthy relationship with the newly winged.
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Renaming and Reclaiming a Faith Practice
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FAITH 5 - Faith Acts In The Home - is a a 5-step outline to be modeled every time small groups meet in the congregation and used as a faith formation tool in the home. The FAITH5 steps are: 1) Share highs and lows of the day; 2) Read a verse from the Bible; 3) Talk about how the Bible verse relates to highs and lows; 4) Pray for one another’s highs and lows, for your family, and for the world;and 5) Bless one another by tracing the sign of the cross on one another’s forehead or palm as a reminder that we belong to God and to one another.
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The Rule of Family Faith: Practicing the Presence of God in Our Outward Lives
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Bonnie Miller-McLemore explains that many of our preconceptions about spirituality mean that we do not recognize family spirituality when we see it. The problem is as much the common perception of spirituality as any failure to practice our faith. In her article, she explores ways to envision the rule of faith in families so church leaders and those in families can nurture and uphold it. She seeks to help enrich the active practice of faith already percolating in families and congregations by exploring the peculiar character of the rule of family faith.
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Show Me the Way: How Can Parents Pass on the Faith?
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Whether you’re a parent or a volunteer catechist, Thomas Groome says the art of persuasion is key to handing on the faith. Want proof? Just watch Jesus in the gospels.
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Sticky Faith "Posts" from the Fuller Youth Insitute |
The team at the Fuller Youth Institute regular posts articles and resources on ministry with families and parents based on their Sticky Faith research and project. Connect with them online and sign-up for their newsletter.
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Transforming Family Faith One Family at a Time
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Jim Merhaut writes that authentic faith formation in the home is absolutely essential if there will be any successful congregational formation. Institutional Christianity will decline into insignificance if congregations do not find ways to work from the family back to the institution, rather than from the institution into the family. This paradigm shift, from the false perception that faith formation originates in ecclesial institutions to the truth that faith formation, in fact, originates in the home, guides the suggestions and ideas that are presented in the article.
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Using Social Media to Strengthen Family Bonds: A Practical Guide for Parents
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We can learn a few things from research that shed light parenting in a digital world. The good news for parents is that the very digital tools that have the potential to be destructive for families can also be used instead towards building new bridges of communication and family intimacy.
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What Makes a Good Parent - A Scientific Analysis Ranks the 10 Most Effective Child-Rearing Practices
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This study compared the effectiveness of 10 kinds of parenting practices that have gotten the thumbs-up in various scientific studies. It also showed how parenting experts rate those practices and looked at just how many parents actually use those practices. The study compared three things: what experts advise, what really seems to work, and what parents actually do. The study confirmed some widely held beliefs about parenting and it also yielded some surprises, especially regarding the importance of a parent’s ability to manage stress in his or her own life. (Scientific American Mind, November/December 2010)
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