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Familying the Faith - Podcast

Explore what we’re learning through conversations with ministry leaders who elevate the role of parents in discipleship and faith formation.

Vibrant Faith is working closely with 24 U.S. churches through two Lilly Endowment-funded projects. The churches are engaged in a wide variety of experiments to explore how to advance their ministry and culture toward a “Familying the Faith” mindset.

Vibrant Faith Research - Articles

Learn from their work with us by following our Research Blog stream.

What We’re Learning: What Parents Bring With Them Into Church

What We’re Learning: Pop-Up Conversations With Parents

What We’re Learning: Parenting As Calling

Vibrant Faith Grant Projects

The 4th Soil Parenting Project

“4^th-Soil Parenting – preparing ‘fertile soil’ among parents, where a rich harvest of faith can grow.”

Vibrant Faith began this work in 2022 with a grant from the Lilly Endowment to explore innovations in Christian Parenting and Caregiving. We call this our 4^th Soil Parenting Project -named for the soil in the Parable of the Soils that “produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!“ (Matthew 13:3-9). The research of Dr. Christian Smith and many others confirms, over and over, that parents who have a close, intimate relationship with God and also with their children offer this kind of “soil.”

Through our 4^th-Soil Parenting project, we are:

Developing congregational and home environments that nurture a vital and vibrant Christian faith through coaching and educating church/home leaders, and researching, designing, and creating innovative faith-formation projects and resources. Through Vibrant Faith’s 4^th-Soil Parenting project, we are researching, developing, and launching innovative strategies for supporting the vital role of parents in passing on the faith by.

We are introducing and embedding a 4^th-Soil Parenting approach in the culture of 20 diverse churches, using these three imperatives as our guide:

Connecting – Helping churches develop trusting, authentic relationships with and among parents.
Calling – Helping churches nurture a deep understanding of parenting as a calling, not simply a role.
Committed – Helping churches deepen relationships with parents to support their intentional, Jesus-centered life.

Theological Vision for 4^th Soil Parenting

Want to talk about these convictions with your team?Download our theological vision for “familying the faith.”

Guide for 4th-Soil Parenting Project Teams

Want to have a conversation about these ideas with your team?Download this leader guide for a team gathering.

Here’s a list of the 20 Churches who are part of the 4th Soil Parenting Project.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
St. John The Divine Episcopal
Faith Lutheran Church
Towson Presbyterian Church
Christ the Savior Lutheran Church
Immaculate Conception Catholic Church
Trinity Lutheran Church
First Congregational
Parish of the Epiphany
St. Rita of Cascias Catholic
Midtown Church
Church of Advent
Christ the Good Shepherd
St. Adelaide
World Changers Church
Wellspring
St. Mary’s
Broomfield UMC
First Presbyterian Church of Naples
Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Washington, DC
Houston, TX
Albuquerque, NM
Towson, MD
Fishers, IN
Hampton, VA
Lynnwood, WA
Boulder. CO
Winchester, MA
Chicago, Il
San Franciso
Washington, DC
Adelanto, CA
Highland, CA
Houston, TX
Englewood, CO
Fontana, CA
Broomfield, CO
Naples, FL
Minneapolis, MN

Each church is accompanied by a coach. Here’s our amazing Vibrant Faith 4th-Soil Parenting project coaching team.

Rev. Erik Samuelson

María G. Covarrubias

Jim Merhaut

Jim LaDoux

Fred Oduyoye

Denise Utter

Initiatives

Check out the initiatives that we and our 4^th-Soil Parenting project churches have explored in the last two years.

Parent Dinner Parties – listening to parents’ realities.
Listening to Jesus Together* – encouraging deep spiritual relationships in groups of three.
Parent Forums – with topical leader guides, helping parents talk with other parents about issues related to raising children.
Mirror/Mirror – sparking parent/child at-home conversations about life and Jesus with post-it notes and questions. Also parent-to-parent and parting journaling versions.
The Sacred Stories Project* – helping parents explore their own stories to unlock their parenting skills.
Advent TalkCards*, Lenten TalkCards*, and Life of Jesus TalkCards* – simple photo-based conversation starters for parents and kids.
Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids* – A six-week introduction into teaching simple faith practices for groups of parents to try out with their children.
Pop-Up Conversations – one-off conversations for small groups of parents around significant issues of our day, designed to help them explore their callings as parents through the realities of their kids’ struggles.
Faithful Parenting – 12 monthlong streams of spiritual content (editable posts and videos) to connect with parents’ daily lives and the spiritual longings that surface in and through parenting. Topics include: Letting Go, Time, Noticing God’s Presence, Feeling Overwhelmed, Waiting, Comparison, and others.

*Available for purchase

The Presence Project

In 2024, Vibrant Faith worked with the Lilly Endowment to create a new initiative that furthers the work that began with our Thriving Congregations Grant (2020-2024). Through The Presence Project, we’re building on our learnings by researching, developing, beta-testing, and launching an innovative approach to congregational thriving focused on creating a “familying” ecosystem in churches that intentionally extends into homes:

We call it:

The Presence Project – Partnering with congregations to embed innovative ministry experiments in “familying the faith”—moving them from a programing culture to a relationally-driven culture of abiding in Jesus.

The goal of the project is to broaden and deepen a core learning about thriving from our initial Thriving Congregations project: “Increasing our capacity to be present to God, and to be present to one another, is profoundly formative and leads to lives of thriving.”
Because we believe that a lifelong faith in Jesus is primarily formed through trusting relationships, often but not always in homes, The Presence Project will focus on ideas, tools, resources, and training that invite people into relational experiences with God.

We are beginning work with small cohorts of churches (four at a time), and with 4 experience coaches, to test out and embed a presence-building experiment designed to seed an ecosystem of “generational discipleship” —modeled through church relationships and designed to extend into the home.

This project will be built around 4 Core Pursuits that lead to a vibrant faith in Jesus:

Guiding people of all ages into a Jesus-centered life.
Embedding “Familying” as the relational process the Spirit uses to form faith.
Planting faith practices as verbs—active relational pursuits, not the accumulation of knowledge. These are activities, habits, and practices that help us remain and abide in Jesus.
Pursuing the research-keys to the primary catalysts for transformation: a) Faith conversations between parents (and people like parents) and kids, b) Modeling an authentic relationship with Jesus, c) Everyday experiences of faith, and d) Embracing faith formation as a lifelong process.