Your kids go to church, show up at youth group and tell anyone who asks that they’re Christians. So their faith is their own, right? Natasha Crain isn’t so sure, because that used to be her.
Crain is a speaker, a podcast host and the author of five books, and she helps Christians hold on to a biblical worldview when the culture around them doesn’t share it. In this 2014 blog post, she tells her own story. She grew up in a family that deeply loved Jesus and spent 18 years in church. Yet soon after high school, a popular New Age novel, The Celestine Prophecy, swept her off her feet, and it never crossed her mind that its ideas contradicted what she had been taught.
Looking back, she compares her family’s faith to “parallel play,” the stage when toddlers play next to each other but not with each other. Everyone read the Bible, prayed and went to church, but each on their own. Nobody engaged with faith together, so she left home with a faith she had borrowed instead of made her own.
Many parents, she writes, feel safe as long as their kids seem to go along with the faith at home. But a borrowed faith can be just as risky as one that has already fallen apart; the trouble just shows up later. And when Crain thought about the signs that give a borrowed faith away, she found they all came down to one: kids who rarely or never ask questions. She suggests several reasons why they might stay quiet, from not seeing why faith matters to worrying about how you’ll react. Her answer is simple: if they don’t ask you, start asking them.
Read this short, personal post if your kids seem to be doing fine in their faith and you’d like to know for sure, or if you’re a youth leader who wants students to wrestle with faith instead of just going along with it.
More from Pulse
- 5 Principles for Starting Faith Conversations with Kids
- Questions Teenagers Ask About God, Faith and Life
- Navigating the (De)construction of Faith: Tips for Parents
- 14 Ideas for Teaching Apologetics to Young Kids
This article by Natasha Crain first appeared on her blog, natashacrain.com. Pulse published a German version in March 2024 (in German).
