What We’re Learning: What Parents Bring With Them Into Church
Parents, even in ever-decreasing numbers, are the lifeblood of the church. Their children help us keep our standard programs running yet one more year. And they represent our primary volunteer pool for so many church activities. A church without an “inlet” of new families is, by definition, stagnating. So, on the one hand, we treasure them. And on the other hand, we dismiss them because they don’t prioritize their lives around the church and seem “biblically illiterate” to us.
But here’s one really important thing we are blind to in parents:
Yes, they bring their children to church, but they also bring their trauma with them…
When Trauma Comes to Church
Our Vibrant Faith team is midstream with several large church research projects, funded through the Lilly Endowment. Every year we get together with other grantees for a three-day training gathering tied to each grant project. At one of these gatherings I signed up for a workshop titled “When Trauma Comes to Church.” Much of what I heard in this workshop was practically important for our work with parents, and universally important for all ministry leaders to understand and embrace. As we seek to serve the next generation of believers, parents are the primary conduit for influencing their faith. That’s why these insights are so important for us to consider…
- We all bring our baggage with us into church, and we must “examine the baggage” with parents if we hope to serve them well. This sounds crazy, but in over 35 years of Vibrant Faith’s work in formation ministry focused primarily on the impact of homes, we have have never really concerned ourselves with this insight. We carry our life experiences with us into church. No one brings “neutral impact” into a community—we all bring our cultural expectations, family dynamics, and family traumas with us. And we bring our go-to strategies for navigating these challenges in our life. Parents’ life experiences are the already painted on the canvas of their soul, and we need to explore what’s already there before we layer on new colors and textures from our “palette” of a vibrant faith in Jesus.
- Almost everyone lives out the impact of their trauma in the church. We no longer understand trauma as merely a response to specific life-altering life events. We now understand what is called Complex Trauma, or Developmental Trauma. This is ongoing trauma that we carry with us from childhood experiences. Trauma does not merely reference the event itself; trauma is what we carry with us physically, emotionally, and psychologically as consequences of the experience. Most important, trauma changes how our brain functions.
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- Almost two-thirds (62%) of adults have had at least one “Adverse Childhood Experience” (ACE) that impacts who they are. And a quarter (25%) have had three or more. Please hear this—previous generations were walking around with just as much trauma in their lives, we just had no idea how profoundly these experiences were impacting us.
- We now know that trauma also impacts the entire family system. Our reactions to our life experiences have a profound impact on family dynamics. These reactions lead to parents (and kids) feeling overwhelmed, confused, anxious, neglected, and frustrated. Kids are often triggered by the unprocessed traumas of their parents.
- We now know that trauma manifests itself in behavior. All the problematic behaviors people see in one another—defensiveness, anger, fear, and so on—are rooted in our trauma coping mechanisms. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk affirms in his bestselling book, “the body keeps the score.”
What This Means for Ministry Leaders
What does all this mean for church ministry leaders, especially those who are working to engage parents and children in new ways? We must first acknowledge that, for all of us, trauma impacts how we perceive God and how able we are to take on challenges in life and live in the freedom Jesus invites us into. The less we are aware of our own trauma stories, the less likely we’ll be open to the transformation that a life of faith can offer.
At Vibrant Faith, we see parenting as a deeply spiritual process, not a technical process. Some people are called by God to the work of parenting. Understanding and accepting the task of parenting as a part of our God-given life purpose instead of focusing on parenting tips-and-techniques changes everything about how we engage our kids. Families that have a limited understanding of the impact of their life experiences have a profoundly limited capacity to take on and share the goodness of a life with God. It’s not about what we know or don’t know about God. It’s about our capacity to make space for God.
We all know that God works through us in spite of our traumas, coping mechanisms, and failings. Yes, sharing our stories draws us closer in community. But even deeper, understanding, embracing, and narrating our stories of trauma gives us open portals into a more intimate life with God. And the same is true in our relationship with our kids—the more aware we are of our need for healing, the more authentic our parenting will be.
This is why our Vibrant Faith team created a one-of-a-kind resource for the churches in our Fourth-Soil Parenting project—it’s called The Sacred Stories Project, and it’s designed to help people in Christian communities start the journey of sharing their stories with each other. We’ve now used that experience to iterate the resource and offer it to the wider community of ministry leaders—check it out HERE.
Help Is Here!
As we lean into a new year, with new ministry possibilities, check out our innovative, practical resources for help infusing your ministry environment with “rich soil” for transformation. Lent is just around the corner, so check out our simple, relational, resource Lenten TalkCards. And our newest resource is The Sacred Stories Project. This multi-media resource offers your people a simple, safe, and “normal” way to share aspects of their story in natural, genuine ways. And you get a more connected, honest, and “known” congregation. It’s four guided sessions with accompanying video segments from Adam Young, trauma counselor and host of the podcast The Place We Find Ourselves.
And check out our new resource Listening to Jesus Together. It’s a set of six carefully crafted “listening encounters” designed for three people to experience together—online or in-person. The goal is to give people in your congregation a weekly “reminder habit” to help them listen to Jesus in the context of a short-term small-community experience.
Next, Following Jesus is a curriculum resource you can use with both adults and teenagers in your church this fall—help them explore what an ABIDING/REMAINING relationship with Jesus is like. It’s an experiential, highly interactive, co-discovery way to invite people into deeper intimacy with Jesus.
And The Life of Jesus TalkCards is a simple, devotional way to invite small groups into the heart of Jesus.
Dr. Nancy Going serves as the Director of Research & Resource Development for Vibrant Faith. Nancy lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Art, an Anglican priest, and they have launched two new families from their children.