Life Covenant Church

“It’s never too early to start.”

So says Dr. Kara Powell and Dr. Chap Clark of the Fuller Youth Institute.  When it comes to developing “sticky faith” in your children – the kind of faith that will become their own and stick with them as they go off to college and into adulthood – younger is better.

I want to call your attention to three significant ways we are currently integrating this into the life of our church:

• Family worship – In their research, Powell and Clark say there is no silver bullet when it comes to developing sticky faith, but the closest thing they have found to a silver bullet is regular times of all-church worship.  This takes effort on the part of weary parents who might rather have their kids in Sunday school, and effort on the part of non-parents who find themselves sitting next to a squirrelly five year old, but the effort is well worth it.  Last year we did six of these, and as we grow into this we want to make family worship a more regular part of our life together (including this Sunday as we begin the New Year together).
• 5:1 – When I was a teen the rule of thumb was 1 worker to every 5 kids.  As we learn more about what makes faith stick, we find that ratio needs to be reversed: For every one child we need five adults to take ownership (in small, medium, or large ways) for that child’s spiritual development.  We deliberately seek a broad involvement from the church in our children’s ministry, regularly involve our pastors in their time as well, and provide mentors for our teens.  Our kids are going to grow up with the benefit of seeing the faith of many of the adults in the congregation, and having a number of adults who care about and pray for them.
• Serving – Early active participation in serving others is another element of developing life-long faith in children.  Several times this past year we had “serve your church” nights, where our elementary age kids would serve alongside adults in various capacities on Sunday nights (tech, set up, hospitality, serving with younger children, etc.).  More and more as our kids grow we want to provide opportunities for them to experience the faith as lifestyle, not just belief system.

And this is a topic for another day, but I’m very excited about the plans we have as more of our kids approach middle and high school.

By way of announcement – if you missed it in the paragraph above, this Sunday will be family worship with the kids in the service.  Also, we are praying for three more workers to serve our kids this next semester on Sundays.  The commitment is once a month for six months.  Please prayerfully consider serving, and email Samantha (smorey2@yahoo.com) asap as the new term is about to start.

Lord bless you friends, and we’ll look forward to being with you this weekend –

Tim

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