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Vibrant Faith Grant Projects
The 4th Soil Parenting Project
“4th-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 4th 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 4th-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 4th-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 4th-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 4th 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
Ministry Resources
Check out the resources we’ve created as part of our Fourth-Soil Parenting project, partnering with churches to experiment and iterate these ideas with parents and leaders.
Familying the Faith – In the e-book FAMILYING the Faith, and in the MasterClasses “Religious Parenting” with Dr. Christian Smith and “Faith Formation at Home” with Laura Kelly Fanucci, ministry leaders have a transformational resource—the pieces working together to plant and nurture a home-centered, church-supported focus in your church.
Parable Partners – These short Parable Partners audio files are designed to simply drop into parents’ everyday life via email, text, or social media. Each one-minute audio experience immerses parents in the core takeaway of a parable Jesus told, and offers them practical, creative ways to live out that truth in their parenting relationship with their kids. The simple engagement ideas are flexible, and can be morphed to any environment.
Parenting With Purpose – Our Vibrant Faith team has developed 30 story-based devotional experiences to help parents deeply explore questions about their own identity and purpose, then make clear connections to their parenting. These short story-videos explore the many facets of God’s call to parenting, from 30 diverse voices. Each video is paired with a short set of thoughtful questions.
Listening to Jesus Together – Listening to Jesus Together is a set of six carefully crafted “listening encounters” designed for three people to experience together. 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… In Listening to Jesus Together, trios meet online or in-person for six 30-minute sessions.
Practical Tools for Raising Faithful Kids – This small-group resource for parents bridges the gap between knowledge and practice in parents who want to influence their kids toward a deeper faith. This 6-session resource provides a comprehensive community-building experience for parents and anyone who loves kids. It’s designed for small groups or adult education contexts, and is a hybrid resource that works online or in-person.
Mirror/Mirror – This innovative resource helps spark parent/child at-home conversations about life and Jesus with post-it notes and questions. Since Vibrant Faith developed this resource as an experiment, but doesn’t carry physical inventory for our resources (all but this one are digital), we partnered with Group Publishing to produce this resource for wider distribution. They changed the name of the resource to Know-Me Notes. You can find it here.
The Sacred Stories Project –This resource includes individual guides for a Leader Session and three Participant Sessions—all designed to seed the start of a storytelling culture in your church. The simple goal is to invite members of your congregation into a simple, progressive way to tell the stories of their life. The outcome of this process has the power to transform your community and open your people to new depth in their relationship with God. Though these sessions are designed for small gatherings, they can also be used for larger-scale gatherings such as retreats, seminars, and congregational events.
Pop-Up Conversations for Parents – Includes seven flexible, one-hour conversation experiences that help parents connect with each other—and with God. Like a pop-up event, these sessions are easy to launch with little prep and are perfect for coffee shops, living rooms, or online gatherings. Each guide invites real, meaningful conversation around the everyday challenges of parenting, rooted in faith and purpose.
Faithful Parenting – Faithful Parenting is a digital resource, designed to be delivered via text or email, that helps you keep in almost-daily contact with parents in your church. These short, practical posts will help them connect more deeply to God, and to their kids, as they face their daily challenges. Each monthly theme in Faithful Parenting is tied to one of parents’ primary “pain points” in life. We start each set of monthly themed posts with a short “Intro Video,” then follow that with 20 or so Memes that drop right into texts or email messages.
Raising Faithful Kids – cultivating worship environments where faith takes root at home and in church.
Vibrant Faith launched the Raising Faithful Kids project to help churches and families rediscover the “why’s” of worship. This integrated approach to linking a parent experience to a worship-service experience looks like a curriculum, but Raising Faithful Kids is actually a spiritual and relational process designed to connect churches, parents, and children through shared worship experiences.
Research continues to affirm that parents are the primary influencers of their children’s faith. At the same time, churches play a vital role in creating environments that model and reinforce a life centered on Jesus. Raising Faithful Kids brings these two realities together, helping congregations develop worship practices that support both the church community and the home.
Through the Raising Faithful Kids project, we are:
Developing faith-formation environments that directly and indirectly influence homes in their vital role as the primary disciplers of children. Together with churches across the country, we are exploring innovative ways to strengthen worship experiences, deepen family faith conversations, and create meaningful connections between Sunday worship and everyday life.
We are partnering with churches to cultivate a home-centered, church-supported approach to worship through these three commitments:
We are partnering with churches to cultivate a home-centered, church-supported approach to worship through these three commitments:
Worship Together – Helping parents and children engage the same worship themes and experiences, creating opportunities for faith conversations that continue throughout the week.
Practice Faith at Home – Equipping families with simple, meaningful prompts and experiences that connect daily life to worship, prayer, and dependence on God.
Grow as a Community – Strengthening the partnership between church and home by creating worship environments where all generations learn, model, and grow in faith together.
Here’s a list of the 12 churches that are part of the Raising Faithful Kids project.
Bethlehem Lutheran Church
Christ the King Lutheran Church
Faith Lutheran Church
First Lutheran Church
First Presbyterian Church
Galilee Lutheran Church
Immaculate Conception
First Presbyterian Church
World Changers Church
Antioch Church
South Euclid United Church of Christ
St Mark’s Lutheran Church by The Narrows
Minneapolis, MN
New Brighton, MN
Golden, CO
New Richmond, WI
Allentown, PA
Pewaukee, WI
Hampton, VA
Naples, FL
Houston, TX
Walls, MS
South Euclid, OH
Tacoma, WA
Each church is accompanied by a coach. Here’s our amazing Vibrant Faith Raising Faithful Kids project coaching team.
Jim Merhaut
Jim LaDoux
Fred Oduyoye
Denise Utter
The Presence Project
The Presence Project is designed to prompt parents to grow in their ability to talk about their faith in their daily lives and in their relationship with their kids. Trios, with a designated Host, meet online for six weekly 30-minute sessions, using a very simple Leader Guide to move through their time together. Those 30-minute sessions are divided in half…
- The first half is a guided conversation about their faith life, where each person gets to share and feel seen and pursued by their partners.
- The second half is a guided prayer time, where each person feels supported and advocated for.
Sounds simple, but our carefully crafted guides that are simple to follow have helped many, many people experience both depth of impact in their relationship with God, while growing their relationships with others. These conversations are designed to establish a “reminder habit” to help parents practice and multiply relationships within a Christian community—the goal is to embed listening to Jesus as the center of their life, in the context of a short-term small-community experience…
HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:
Trios will meet online or in-person for six 30-minute sessions. We have discovered that even busy people can commit to 30 minutes per week for six weeks.
We have also discovered that a group of three allows meaningful, brief sharing by all—with flexibility as needed.
Each trio will need a designated leader, the Host, who follows the session outline each time they’re together.
- It’s powerful for community-building if the trios are made up of people who don’t know each other well, but these can be put them together flexibly—a host and a couple, a host and two dads, a host and two moms, a host and two unrelated parents, and so on.
- Ministry leaders or hosts put together these trios by specifically inviting participants to be a part of a specific trio for six weeks.
- First invite leaders who are open to guiding a trio as the Host—they join a trio to experience the power and value of this simple gathering before inviting others to join them.
- The Host convenes and lead their own Trio, guarding time allotments and following the meeting guidelines and prompts.
- The goal is for this presence and prayer experience to infiltrate and ground a Christian community over the course of a program year, beginning with parents—the people in each church who are having the greatest impact on the next generation of believers.
ONLINE OR IN-PERSON
Online meetings work well to keep 30 minutes crisply defined, and require no travel. The Host will need access to an online meeting account—Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, FaceTime are all possibilities. The Host sends out the link to the account ahead of time to the other participants. If it works better for a trio to meet in-person, the session guides are flexible.
SESSION ELEMENTS
The Host invites two others to practice a weekly habit that helps their friendship orbit around experiencing Jesus. Half of the 30 minutes is spent talking about Jesus to one another; the other half is spent talking to Jesus about one another.
1. Notice…
For the first half of the meeting, each person offers a 5-minute response to a Host-selected prompt question, spotlighting Jesus for celebration. The prompts encourage participants to share eye-witnessed, fresh Jesus sightings. Some examples:
“What have you noticed Jesus doing in your life during the past week?”
“Describe where and how Jesus has surprised you recently.”
“How does Jesus seem to be working with you in a difficulty you’re going through?”
As each person responds to the prompt, the two others in the trio ask follow-up questions until the sharing time for that person reaches 5 minutes.
2. Pray…
For the second half of the meeting, each person receives prayer from the other two trio partners, allotting 5 minutes for everyone to be prayed over. This means that prayer can afford to be contemplative, playful, and patient. Each person is directed by the Host to pause first to ask the Spirit of Jesus to lead them into prayer for the designated other—like children, we are open to “playing” with new forms of prayer, including prayer prompted by an image, a word, a Scripture passage, or an impression. The goal is to trust Jesus first before praying. At the end of 5 minutes, the focus of prayer shifts to the next person, until all in the trio have been prayed for.
3. Prompt for parent encouragement…
At the close of each session, the Host offers parents in the trio a simple, practical way for them to connect with their kids around the theme of that session. The Host encourages participants to follow through on the at-home prompt, then return the next week to share what happened as a result.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
After a Presence Project trio completes six weeks, they can:
- Decide to keep going another six weeks, with a new set of six guided experiences,
- Decide to repeat the same set of questions.
- End their weekly meetings, and/or
- Designate one or more members of the Trio to serve as Host for a new trio(s), inviting two new people into it and using the first set of six guided sessions.
Here’s our amazing Vibrant Faith Presence Project coaching team.
Jim LaDoux
Dr. Dave Rahn
Rev. Art Going
Andy Breckwoldt
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.
Learn from their work with us by following our Research Blog stream.
