Chapter Six — Reasons That Call for a Conversation (2 of 3)

Ask what your children are being taught and by whom. Ask whether the church has written down how it keeps children safe, and whether it does what it wrote.

A church that cannot be trusted with your children is not a matter for a conversation. It is a reason to leave, and Chapter Eight says so.

Aging parents may be in the same church. Leaving may mean leaving them, or taking them from the only church they have known.

For some people the congregation is their whole world: the people who visit when they are sick, who bring meals, who notice when they do not come.

Weigh that. It is not sentimental to weigh it. It is what a family does.

When the faith was never your choice. Many believers were baptized as infants, or simply went to church because their parents went.

Then one day, often in the teenage years, it begins to feel as though none of it was ever theirs.

Some say they were brainwashed. Some resent the church as the institution that held them before they could think for themselves. Some quietly set it all down at the first chance, the first year away from home.

It usually happens young, often before the person is grown.

And how the faith was handed on matters a great deal. Those who remember a home where the faith was warm very often stay. Those who remember it as cold or harsh very often leave it altogether. (What has been counted is at the back.)

Here is what can be said honestly. Handing a faith to a child is not brainwashing.

Every home hands something on, and Scripture commands believing parents to hand on this: "you must teach them to your children and speak of them as you sit in your house, as you walk along the road, as you lie down, and as you get up" (Deuteronomy 6:7, NET).

Paul honored the faith Timothy received from his grandmother and mother (2 Timothy 1:5).

But a faith that is never explained, never questioned, and never offered as one's own can feel like a cage. And the one who breaks out of the cage may leave the faith behind with it.

None of the traditions teaches that a faith received as a child is the end of the matter. The churches that baptize infants say the opposite.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The faith required for Baptism is not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop," and "For all the baptized, children or adults, faith must grow after Baptism" (paragraphs 1253–1254).

The Westminster Larger Catechism calls "improving our Baptism" a duty "to be performed by us all our life long" (Question 167).

In the Orthodox Church a baptized infant is chrismated and receives Holy Communion, and grows up inside the life of the Church. Lutheran and many other churches practice confirmation, when the young affirm for themselves the promises made for them at their baptism.

And the Baptist and Anabaptist churches baptize only those who confess the faith themselves: "Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer" (Baptist Faith and Message, Article VII); baptism "shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life" (Schleitheim Confession, Article I).

This book does not settle the question of infant baptism. It only notes that every one of these traditions, in its own way, asks for your own yes.

So the choice is real, and it is yours now.

Joshua put it to a people who had inherited their faith from their fathers: "choose today whom you will worship" (Joshua 24:15, NET).

But choose with your eyes open. What you are tempted to set down may not be the faith at all. It may be the version of it you met at thirteen, or a parent's harshness, or one cold Sunday school room.

Before you leave the faith of your childhood, meet it as an adult.

The boy Jesus was found in the temple "sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46, NET). Do that.

Read a Gospel for yourself; John wrote his "so that you may believe" (John 20:31, NET). Ask your hardest questions out loud, to someone who can answer them. Separate Christ from the way He was handed to you.

"Come and you will see" (John 1:39, NET).

Dear friend, if you are one of those who left in anger, hear this. What you rejected may not have been Him.

He has not stopped calling you by name (John 10:3).

If you are the parent of a teenager who pushes back. Teenagers often disagree just to find out whether disagreement is allowed.

A parent who answers with anger, or with fear, can teach a child that the faith has no room for questions. The child may remember that lesson long after he has forgotten the argument.

Scripture speaks to parents directly: "Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they will not become disheartened" (Colossians 3:21, NET).

What has been counted says the same. The faith is handed down most often in homes where it is practiced, and where parents are warm as well as firm. Cold or harsh homes hand it down far less often, whatever the parents believe. (The details are at the back.)

So let the questions be asked at your table. Answer what you can, and say plainly what you do not know. Do not make every disagreement a battle for the soul.

Keep praying. Keep the door open.

The father in Jesus' story did not chase his son down the road with arguments. He watched the road, and when the son came home, he ran (Luke 15:20).

"There is no fear in love" (1 John 4:18, NET).

Your child will keep the faith he has seen loved far more often than the faith he has been forced to defend.

Tight churches and loose ones. Some of those who set down a faith that felt imposed do not leave church at all. They move to a church that holds its people more loosely: fewer rules, less structure, more room to question.

That freedom is real, and for some it is a relief. It also has a cost, and those who have lived on both sides can see it.

One believer was raised Catholic and now worships in a charismatic church. She has seen what can happen where there is little structure. People carry strange ideas for a long time, and no one corrects them. In the church she grew up in, that would not have lasted.

The Denominational Mapping Instrument on this site has two words for how tightly a church holds its people. "Grip asks how much of what these 19 questions could require the church actually requires." "Firmness asks a narrower question. When the church does speak, how firmly does it speak?"