My parents are probably the biggest influence out of anybody.
— Robyn
Both my mom and my dad have spent hours and hours and hours through my life talking to me about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to follow God, and what that should entail and how to do it.
— Billy
Tiffany had failed to turn out like Phil and Amy had hoped.
Like most parents, Phil and Amy had great visions of who their daughter would become as she entered high school and college.
Their expectations were high in part because Tiffany’s first steps down the yellow brick road of adolescence showed great promise. As a ninth grader, Tiffany was deeply committed to knowing Jesus and making Jesus known. While friends shared horror stories about their kids’ sullen attitudes, moodiness, and flagrant disregard for family rules, Tiffany was generally pleasant and obedient. Tiffany had lots of friends, but she also enjoyed being with her parents. And Phil and Amy enjoyed being with her.
From the first Sunday that she walked into the high school ministry at the church where I (Kara) served as one of the youth pastors, Tiffany plunged into every church activity possible. Any event that was offered — youth choir, beach days, weekend service trips to Tijuana — Tiffany was there. Not only was she there, but she usually showed up to church at least thirty minutes early to see if she could help.
And help she did. Tiffany was especially good at making posters. She would spread paper across the youth room floor and try to come up with creative images to promote upcoming events or reinforce the teaching topic for the next week. When we made posters together, we talked about our mutual desire to know Jesus and help others know him too.
Sure, Tiffany wasn’t perfect, but the other youth group parents envied how easy Phil and Amy seemed to have it with their daughter.
Around eleventh grade Tiffany started to change. She began to wear dark, heavy makeup.
Her skirts grew shorter. A lot shorter.
Phil and Amy found themselves locking horns with Tiffany over her wardrobe.
Soon they found themselves locking horns with Tiffany over just about everything. Grades, curfew, friends — everything was a battle.
Tiffany no longer came early to church. When I asked her if she wanted to help with posters, she said she was too busy. Throughout Tiffany’s senior year, her involvement at church grew more and more sporadic.
Six months after Tiffany graduated from high school, she became pregnant. Confused and ashamed, she wanted nothing to do with our church. Or me.
Phil called me from the hospital the day Tiffany gave birth to her son. Although Tiffany had avoided me during her pregnancy, I asked her dad if she would be okay with my visiting her that day and meeting her son. She said yes.
Phil, Tiffany, and the new baby were together in the hospital room. After we chatted for a few minutes, Tiffany offered to let me hold her son. It was the first time I had ever held a baby who was only a few hours old. I told her so, and she grinned.
Phil tried to grin, but I could see the deep sadness in his eyes. He looked at me and I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it too.
Why did Tiffany’s faith — a faith that seemed so vibrant at first — fail to stick?
Parents and churches are waking up to the harsh reality that there are more Tiffanys than we had previously realized. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing sixty denominations and dozens of ministries, has passed a resolution deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”1
But is it really an epidemic? Does the data suggest that kids’ exit from the faith is more like a trickle, or a flood?
As we have examined other research, our conclusion is that 40 to 50 percent of kids who graduate from a church or youth group will fail to stick with their faith in college.2
Let’s translate that statistic to the kids you know. Imagine your child and his or her friends standing in a line and facing you. (I’m sure they are smiling adoringly at you.) Just like you used to do on the playground to divide into teams, number off these kids, “one, two, one, two, one, two …” The ones will stick with their faith; the twos will shelve it.
And they’ll be making the decision about whether to shelve their faith after your most intensive season of parenting is over.
I’m not satisfied with a 50 percent rate of Sticky Faith.3
Are you?
I doubt it.
Here’s another alarming statistic: only 20 percent of college students who leave the faith planned to do so during high school. The remaining 80 percent intended to stick with their faith but didn’t.4
As has been rightly pointed out, young adulthood is often a season of inevitable experimentation for teenagers who were raised in the church and are learning to make the faith their own. That hunch is supported by the encouraging statistic that somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of youth group graduates who abandon their faith and the church return to both in their late twenties.5 Yet those young adults have already faced significant forks in the road regarding friendship, marriage, vocation, worldview, and lifestyle, all while their faith has been pushed to the back seat. They will have to live with the consequences of those decisions for the rest of their lives. Plus, while we can celebrate those who eventually place their faith back in the driver’s seat, we still grieve over the 40 to 70 percent who won’t.
From the movie Animal House to the Asher Roth song “I Love College,” college life has been depicted as a nonstop merry-go-round of sex, drugs, and alcohol, with a few hours of study thrown in here and there. Granted, sex, drugs, and alcohol are not the ultimate litmus test of a college student’s spirituality. (We’ll say more about that later.) And of course, media portrayals of college kids are certainly exaggerated. Nonetheless, since more students are partying than we might realize and since students’ partying often affects their relationship with God, it’s a factor of Sticky Faith we have to discuss.
Each month, just less than 50 percent of full-time college students binge drink, abuse prescription drugs, and/or abuse illegal drugs.6 According to one analysis conducted by a professor of public health at Harvard University, the number of fraternity and sorority members who binge drink has climbed to 80 percent.7
This heavy alcohol consumption is costing students — a lot. According to one estimate, college students spend $5.5 billion each year on alcohol — more than they spend on soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee, and schoolbooks combined.8
This widespread use of alcohol opens the door to the bedroom. Dr. Michael Kimmel, professor of sociology at State University of New York, has researched college behaviors extensively and has concluded that “virtually all hooking up is lubricated with copious amounts of alcohol.”9
You’ve almost certainly heard the term hooking up, a phrase that refers to a multitude of sexual behaviors ranging from kissing to oral sex to intercourse, without any expectation of emotional commitment. College seniors have an average of nearly seven hookups during their collegiate careers, with 28 percent of them hooking up ten times or more.10
Kimmel vividly captures the wild tone of college campuses by explaining the effects on local health care: “Every single emergency room in every single hospital adjoining or near a college campus stocks extra supplies on Thursday nights — rape kits for the sexual assault victims, IV fluids for those who are dehydrated from alcohol-induced vomiting, and blood for drunk driving accidents.”11
What about kids who come from Christian families? Are they as wild as the rest of college students?
The good news is that multiple studies indicate that students who are more religious and/or more likely to attend church or religious gatherings are less likely to consume alcohol or hook up.12 Yet just because religious kids are less likely to party doesn’t mean that they aren’t partying at all. In a pilot study we conducted early in our research, 100 percent of the sixty-nine youth group graduates we surveyed drank alcohol during their first few years of college.
One member of our Sticky Faith research team, Dr. Cheryl Crawford, focused her research on kids who had been designated as leaders in their youth ministries in high school. After extensive conversations with these former student leaders, Dr. Crawford concluded that “loneliness and the search for friends seem to push the buttons for everything else. The primary reason students gave for participating in the ‘party scene’ was because that’s where ‘everyone’ was. One student told me, ‘I don’t think I’ve met many people who don’t drink here. It’s really hard to meet people if you don’t drink.’ These key decisions about partying are made during the first two weeks of students’ freshman year.”
Partying and other challenges in transitioning from high school to college were described well by one college senior we interviewed: “Transitioning out of high school into college is like you’re leaving on a giant cruise ship. You’re heading out of this harbor and everyone’s waving you off. Let’s say this ship is your faith. As soon as you start sailing out to this new port called college, you realize you’re in a dinghy. You don’t have this huge ship, and you’re completely not prepared, and your boat is sinking! Unless there’s someone with a life raft who’s ready to say, ‘We got you. Come right here. This is where you can be, and this is where you can grow,’ you’re done.”
At the Fuller Youth Institute, we want to partner with you to offer your kids a stronger ship of faith and extend a life raft to those who feel like they are already drowning. In all of our research initiatives, our mission is to leverage research into resources that elevate leaders, kids, and families.
I’ve been parenting for ten years and serving kids in youth ministry for twenty-five. My coauthor, Chap Clark, has been parenting for thirty years and serving in various forms of youth, family, and pastoral ministry for, hmm, a few more years than I have! While that adds up to a lot of years of experience, we wanted to pair our experiences with insights from several additional research paths.
The first research path began with Chap’s spending most of a school year on a public school campus as a substitute teacher with permission to be a participant-observer researcher on campus. In his work, Chap recorded stories and other observations and sorted them first into impressions and then into coded conclusions. At the same time, a research team worked to integrate and compare Chap’s findings with what other experts had written on adolescence.
Following this, Chap conducted twelve focus groups across the US and Canada, and in the end published his study in the book Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers.13 Chap and his team of Fuller Seminary faculty and students continue to study and interview kids, and many of the insights in this book come from that research.
The second research path was my work on the College Transition Project, a series of comprehensive studies of more than five hundred graduating seniors.14 You’ll hear from these students (with fictitious names) through quotes in sidebars and at the start of each chapter. The six years of research by the College Transition faculty and student team have been fueled by two research goals: to better understand the dynamics of youth group graduates’ transition to college, and to pinpoint the steps that leaders, churches, parents, and seniors themselves can take to help students stay on the Sticky Faith path.15
For more on the questions we asked in our surveys, please see the appendixes as well as www.stickyfaith.org.
In many ways, the students in this long-term study represent typical Christian seniors transitioning to college (e.g., they come from different regions across the United States, they attend public, private, and Christian colleges and vocational schools, and 59 percent are female and 41 percent are male). Yet the kids in our sample tend to have higher high-school grade-point averages and are more likely to come from intact families than the typical student heading to college. We also recruited kids from churches that have full-time professional youth pastors, which means they are likely to come from bigger-than-average churches (average church size was five hundred to nine hundred people). From the outset, we want to admit that these factors bring a certain bias to our findings, which we diligently tried to counter by examining other research studies and by conducting face-to-face interviews with students with more diverse academic, family, and church backgrounds.
In an effort to bring focus to our College Transition Project, we recruited high school seniors who intended to enter college after graduation, whether a four-year university, a junior college, or a vocational school. We can’t be certain, but we think it’s likely that our findings are relevant to those graduates entering the workforce or the military. Our hunch has been supported by one parallel study indicating that church dropout rates for college students and noncollege students are not significantly different.16
Sometimes we get asked about gender differences when it comes to Sticky Faith. While we have not extensively explored this question, we can say that in our study, overall there were no strong differences between men’s and women’s faith based on the measures we used.
As we were initially conceptualizing this research, we quickly ran into one important question: what exactly is Sticky Faith? While it’s tempting to apply former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart’s famous definition of obscenity as “I know it when I see it,” that doesn’t fly in academic circles. Based on the research literature and our understanding of students, we arrived at three descriptors of Sticky Faith; the first two are relevant for all ages, while the last has heightened importance during students’ transition to college.
1. Sticky Faith is both internal and external. Sticky Faith is part of a student’s inner thoughts and emotions and is also externalized in choices and actions that reflect that faith commitment. These behaviors include regular attendance in a church or campus group, prayer and Bible reading, service to others, and lower participation in risky behaviors, especially engaging in sex and drinking alcohol. In other words, Sticky Faith involves whole-person integration, at least to some degree.
2. Sticky Faith is both personal and communal. Sticky Faith celebrates God’s specific care for each person while always locating faith in the global and local community of the church.17 God has designed us to grow in our individual relationships with him as well as through our relationships with others.
3. Sticky Faith is both mature and maturing. Sticky Faith shows marks of spiritual maturity but is also in the process of growth. We don’t assume that a high school senior or college freshman (or a parent, for that matter) will have a completely mature faith. We are all in process.18
The vast majority of kids we interviewed — even those who thrived in college — reported that college was both a growth experience and challenging, full of new perspectives and experiences. Reading through the transcripts, it seems that the typical college student sits down at a table full of new and interesting worldviews and people. Instead of allowing faith to be merely one of many voices clamoring to be heard, those with Sticky Faith had determined that their faith would sit at the head of the table.
In college I think my faith finally got really serious to me. God is so real, and so important in my life. My faith finally got hard and inconvenient, which I think makes my faith real.
— Shelby
Much of this chapter has been bad news. Chap calls me an eternal optimist. I don’t mind that label. So let me give you some good news from our research: your kids are more connected to you than you might think. We asked graduating seniors to rank five groups in terms of the quality and quantity of support they received from them. Those five groups were friends inside of youth group, friends outside of youth group, youth leaders, parents, and adults in the congregation.
Which group did they rank number one? Parents.
More good news: our research shows a relationship between this parental support and Sticky Faith.
But parental support, while important, is not the only way you influence your child. More than even your support, it’s who you are that shapes your kid. In fact, it’s challenging to point to a Sticky Faith factor that is more significant than you. How you express and live out your faith may have a greater impact on your son or daughter than anything else.
After his nationwide telephone survey of 3,290 teens and their parents, as well as after conducting 250 in-depth interviews, Dr. Christian Smith, a sociologist from the University of Notre Dame, concluded, “Most teenagers and their parents may not realize it, but a lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young people’s religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents.”19
My parents are my spiritual role models in every way; it is my goal to develop myself spiritually as they have.
— Tyler
As Christian Smith more simply summarized on a panel with Chap and myself, “When it comes to kids’ faith, parents get what they are.”20
To access the audio of this panel with both of us and Christian Smith, visit www.stickyfaith.org.
Of course, there are exceptions. Your faith might be vastly different from your parents’ faith. Plus, I’ve met plenty of parents whose kids end up all over the faith spectrum.
Nonetheless, a major reason Chap and I wanted to write this book was our deep desire for kids to journey through life with the God who loves them more than they can even imagine. You are more than a launching pad for that journey; you are also an ongoing companion, guide, and fellow journeyer.
We have divided each chapter into two sections, the first of which is called “Sticky Findings.” In that first section, we summarize what we’ve learned from the kids we have studied, as well as from our ongoing exploration of Scripture. As researchers who are Christ-followers, we are convinced that simply crunching numbers about students’ experiences will leave us splashing around in the shallow end. It’s when we pair our study of students with a thorough examination of theology and Scripture that we are able to dive into deeper waters.
For the last few years, we have been discussing these Sticky Findings with parents through one-on-one consultations, focus groups, and nationwide seminars. We invited twenty-eight innovative churches from around the US to apply our research to their settings by joining our Sticky Faith cohorts. Through two summits and monthly webinars, these churches became diverse incubators for Sticky Faith ministry. From what we have learned from parents at these churches, as well as from a host of other churches of various sizes, denominations, and geographical locations, we can recommend a robust list of practical parenting ideas. Those ideas are described in detail in the second section of each chapter, labeled “Sticky Faith Made Practical.”
I can’t emphasize enough how much of an influence my parents had on me, and the more people I am around, the more people I get to meet whose parents didn’t influence them in the same way my parents did.
— Chet
If you’re a parent or grandparent of teenagers or college students, you might be asking yourself if it’s too late to develop Sticky Faith in your kids. Hear this good news: because faith development is a lifelong process for all of us, it is never too late to be more intentional in your parenting and the faith you model and discuss with your kids.
Having said that, we suggest that if you are starting late in the process, go slowly. If you sound a Sticky Faith siren and immediately launch into a long list of new Sticky Faith parenting practices, your kids’ antennae will sense this as fake and forced. Instead, be more cautious and organic. Choose a few new rituals to try, and if they don’t go all that well, abandon them and try something else. Your older kids will be much more receptive if you slowly start to turn up the volume on the way you discuss and model Sticky Faith.
Early in our research, we concluded that building Sticky Faith doesn’t start when your kids are seniors, or even juniors. The reality is that your kids’ faith trajectories are formed long before twelfth grade. While we have devoted chapter 7, “A Sticky Bridge out of Home,” to discussing how to build Sticky Faith in your high school seniors, we encourage you to apply the rest of the book to your younger kids too. My three children are five, nine, and eleven years old, and our research impacts the way my husband and I parent every day. Chap’s kids are twenty-three, twenty-six, and almost thirty years old, but he and his wife, a marriage and family therapist, have been applying these principles along the way as they have discovered them.
In fact, you’ll be more likely to develop Sticky Faith in your kids when you share our research with other friends, parents, grandparents, and especially with your church. Try to create as broad of a Sticky Faith team as possible. After studying seniors’ transition to college, Dr. Tim Clydesdale, associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, concluded, “Given the seeming importance of retaining youth for most religious groups in the United States, it is striking how haphazardly most congregations go about it.”21 That’s why we spend quite a bit of time not only giving you parenting tips but also providing tips for churches on how to disciple their young people into a solid, maturing faith. And because the church is you, we hope you will introduce these findings to your congregation and look for ways to implement them in your relationships, worship, and activities.
It is time to end the haphazard way we prepare our kids for all they will face in the future.
As much as we wish there were a foolproof plan for Sticky Faith parenting, we will be the first to admit that there isn’t. During this research, we’ve met parents with amazing faith and parenting skills whose kids had shelved their faith, and we’ve met spiritually lukewarm parents whose kids were on fire. There is no Sticky Faith silver bullet. There is no simple list of steps you can take to give your kids a faith that lasts. Part of what makes parenting so demanding is that easy answers are rare.
That might be disappointing, but let us make a few additional admissions that we hope will encourage you.
As much as we love research, we will also be the first to admit that we love God more.
As much as we believe in research, we will also quickly admit that we believe in God more.
As much as we value sorting through data, we value prayer far, far more.
As we share our research with parents, including parents who are grieving the way their children have strayed from the Sticky Faith path, we are repeatedly reminded of the God who transcends all research and all easy answers. We are struck by how much we need to depend on God for wisdom and strength for ourselves, and sometimes just plain miracles for our families. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit, not us, develops Sticky Faith in kids.
In one of our Sticky Faith parent presentations, one heartbroken mom told the group that she had been on her knees praying that God would draw her kids back to his love.
Upon hearing this, a mom sitting nearby said that she was doing more than praying on her knees. She had spent so much time praying for her kids, lying prostrate before the Lord, crying out for him to intervene, that the floor had left a mark on her forehead.
Another mom once told me that she never realized how much control she would lose over her kids when they became teenagers. She told me, “The more control I lost, the more I craved to pray.”
Through our research, our nationwide conversations with kids and parents, and even our own parenting, we have learned much about Sticky Faith. We are full of suggestions. But our top suggestion is this: trust the Lord with your kids and continue to ask — maybe at times beg — the Lord to build in them a Sticky Faith.
1. When people decide to read a book, usually they are trying to solve a problem. What problems are you hoping to address by reading this book?
2. How would you define Sticky Faith?
3. How does it make you feel to think that you are the most important influence on your child’s faith?
4. As you think about how you’ve parented thus far, what have you done that has contributed to your kids’ faith? What do you wish you had done differently?
5. What do you think of the suggestion that parents trust the Lord with their kids and beg the Lord to build Sticky Faith in them? Perhaps you’d like to put this book down and pray for a few moments before you even turn the page.