For more than 30 years, Vibrant Faith has worked to deepen the crucial partnership between home and church. Over and over, in too-many-to-count conversations, we’ve wrestled over how to make that partnership actually work.
And we know that you know this partnership struggle is real. Yes, parents (and people who are like parents) have the greatest impact on the faith formation of the next generation of believers. Three decades of research (for example, Handing Down the Faith by Dr. Christian Smith, The Exemplary Youth Ministry Project, Search Institute’s Effective Christian Education Study, and The Sticky Faith Project) ALL confirm this truth. Parents who have conversations about faith with their kids and intentionally live out their relationship with God in everyday life, tend to shape young people into followers of Jesus. Parents, not Sunday School or youth programs, have the greatest forming influence.
But here is the struggle—we all know this is true, but church communities still struggle to understand and implement a living, breathing partnership with homes. Instead, our strategies and structures effectively (almost always unintentionally) wrest this faith-forming responsibility from the hands of the people God has called to it. How can we engage, equip, and encourage parents, through our worship and prayer practices, to maximize their forming influence in their kids’ relationship with God?
Well, our Vibrant Faith team is thrilled to announce a new five-year year “active research” project, funded by the Lilly Endowment, to experiment with innovative and practical ways for churches and homes to work in tandem. Under Lilly’s “Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative,” we’ll be exploring and implementing new ways for the church to accompany parents as they influence their kids, then circulate that impact back into the church community. Our project is based on a “beta” relational experience called “Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids.”
We thought you might like to take a peek at our “formal” grant-award announcement, so here you go…
Vibrant Faith Ministries has received a grant of $1,250,000 from Lilly Endowment Inc. to help establish a church-based project called Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids. The project seeks to create a relationally rich working tool for parents, children, and churches to learn and live common practices for at-home and at-church worship and prayer.
The program is funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative. The aim of the national initiative is to support faith-based organizations as they help children grow in faith and deepen their relationships with God.
Our recently developed Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids project will exponentially expand a “pilot” experiment in home-centered, church-supported worship and prayer practices that maximizes both parent AND congregational modeling in spiritual disciplines, relational foundations of worship, prayer practices, and dependence habits that lead to an abiding attachment to Jesus.
Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids is an innovative approach to modeling core worship and prayer practices. The “beta” version of this resource was created for Vibrant Faith by Sarah Bentley Allred, the Associate for Christian Formation and Discipleship at Virginia Theological Seminary and a local-church children’s ministry leader.
Sarah tested her resource with parents and kids in her church, then partnered with our Vibrant Faith staff to develop it fully, inviting a cohort of churches to experiment with it. With church ministry leaders guiding the experience, this resource introduced parents—both online and in-person—to six worship and prayer practices that feed a deepening, ongoing relationship with God. Once parents experience these practices, they learn simple ways to model them for their children, inviting them into fun, organic shared experiences. Then they report back to the group, learning from each other.
The early results of this experiment were encouraging—parents reported a marked increase in “conversations about faith” with their kids. And they saw growth in their kids’ worship and prayer practices, which are key indicators for long-term faith formation, according to research by Search Institute and Dr. Christian Smith. However, now we will further develop this project to extend learning, modeling, and relational worship back into the church worship ecosystem—in order to develop and change the culture of the congregation’s worship experience. This approach embeds the church’s own traditions of worship and prayer experientially while parents engage their children in the practices of the faith.
“The Lilly Endowment’s funding of this five-year project will fuel an innovative experiment in church/home partnered faith formation, using a highly engaging, experiential approach to worship and prayer practices that (we believe) will profoundly deepen kids’ everyday relationship with God.”
– Rick Lawrence, Executive Director of Vibrant FaithVibrant Faith is one of 170 organizations funded through three rounds of the initiative, which was launched in 2022. The grants are funding efforts to help organizations that serve congregations in a broad spectrum of Christian traditions develop new and/or enhance existing programs as they design worship services and prayer practices that more intentionally and fully engage children.
About Lilly Endowment Inc
Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion and maintains a special commitment to its hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana. The principal aim of the Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the lives of Christians in the United States, primarily by seeking out and supporting efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities. The Endowment also seeks to improve public understanding of diverse religious traditions by supporting fair and accurate portrayals of the role religion plays in the United States and across the globe.
Two Questions to Mull:
1) In what ways am I helping parents live out their calling as primary faith-nurturers in their kids’ lives, and in what ways am I unconsciously hindering them?
2) What’s one simple thing I could do today to encourage parents in their faith-nurturing role with their kids?
Take Your Next Steps
At Vibrant Faith we’ve created two resources designed to help ministry leaders live out what Ben dreamed of doing a quarter-century ago. Familying the Faith is a kit that includes a new e-book (written my Dr. Nancy Going and I) along with two MasterClass sessions featuring Dr. Christian Smith, sociology of religion professor at Notre Dame, and Laura Kelly Fanucci, writer and founder of Mothering Spirit. And Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids bridges the gap between knowledge and practice – for parents who want to influence their kids toward a deeper faith. You get six lessons for hybrid-learning formats, editable leader and participant guides, and a PowerPoint slide deck. Check out these one-of-a-kind resources, and take your next step toward a home-centered, church-supported revolution in your church culture.
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.
