Last weekend our firstborn turned 18. Just like they said, I blinked, and it happened. Thousands of imperceptible changes over millions of seconds amounted to a newborn becoming an emerging adult. I have long anticipated this transition with trepidation, knowing it had the potential to crack my heart into a million pieces. I did not anticipate that while my daughter was moving from child to adult, society at large would simultaneously undergo changes as traumatic and disruptive as adolescence. American culture and politics. Societal expectations. Faith communities. Each, unveiling a sudden new shape and tone. Typically, a child’s maturation moves at a rate faster than the rate of culture change. This allows for stability and allows trusted adults to function as guides from the wisdom of our life experiences. But in the last ten years, I feel aware of rapid shifts, without enough time to find that sense of equilibrium, leaving adults as turned around as anyone.

With 25 years in a movement of faith among college students and now two kids beginning to reach the target age group, having a graduating senior is a full-circle moment for me and my husband. Whatever happens next, we join all parents of faith, past and present, in our hope that the faith we nurtured sticks. It could be now or fifty years from now, but we long for the seeds we planted to produce fruit, and we will not stop praying because we believe a relationship with Christ is paramount for life and flourishing. However, we are not naive. The big leap parents used to prepare for while sending kids out the front door to college is a thing of the past. Whether to school, friends, or even church, we send our daughter regularly to environments where the case for genuine faith is thinly reinforced and scarcely visible. One big leap would imply firmly standing on one side of a sturdy canyon, rather than one that is being chipped away.

I remember when I was her age. My church had a program for graduating seniors to gather as a small cohort and prepare us for the challenges to faith that would occur in college. In 1998, this was strategic. As we completed the program, each got a giant book, A Ready Defense, organized by interrogations of Christianity and apologist Josh McDowell’s comprehensive responses. I utilized this book and kept it on my shelf all four years away at college. This type of programming worked perfectly for me. I came into my faith, felt confident and comfortable even while taking classes that were supposed to threaten it, and grew as a disciple of Jesus in a community of peers by choosing to join a campus fellowship.

This approach now works for few if any students. Most kids will not make it to college before they encounter significant difficulty engaging their faith and begin to question it, but apologetics answers questions they do not have from a world they do not live in and assumes too much about their formation and experiences. They go to church with a sea of other kids in the same boat. We are encouraged to allow young people to have healthy questions, and they do, but in a fog as thick as pea soup. The questioning outweighs the clarity at a developmental stage too young for such instability.

I estimate that it begins around the tween years. Our kids are slipping out the back door of home and church while we try to provide formative stability. You may not notice because they are still sleeping in their beds and sometimes still sitting in the pews. But, the walls are made of paper and they are increasingly absorbing what is outside more than what is inside. This phenomenon is not primarily due to an uptick in the willful disobedience of children or a new drive for freedom. It is not even due to the deconstruction that captured my generation of peers and below. It is happening because our formation in the home and church cannot outrun the counter-formation of the culture. We are not evolving side-by-side or in tandem, faith with culture and culture with faith. We are not sharpening one another. As a culture, we are at war with one another and ourselves and have become so fragmented that the dance of Christ redeeming culture and culture sharpening the tools for the mission which fueled so much of my life and ministry has an ever-fainter tune. Steady erosions have brought us into mudslide and flood conditions. I trained my whole life for this moment, but I never trained for a flood!

No matter one’s faith orientation, parents generally prefer to remain a primary influence in the lives of their kids while we raise them and to select other trusted adults for reinforcement and safety. The eroding of that place of parental and chosen adult influence isn’t a rare phenomenon happening in a few extreme cases. While it seems an obvious and overused punching bag, the reality of the internet and social media is at play with the culture reinforcing its algorithm. Here I confess, as a lifelong rule follower, my irritation that I have abided by them, studying and preparing for the points of vulnerability, but, like Jumanji, forces have interfered to change the rules and the board mid-play. It feels like caretakers of children have collectively drawn a metaphorical “Hot Lava” card. 

I will leave it to social scientists to distill all the influences converging to create these conditions and stay in my lane as a mother and minister to offer a maternal and spiritual concern. From here, I declare, “The single greatest challenge of our current time and context is the mission to our children and families.” On the one hand, select ministries have always focused on the family, but what I am seeing is a need for something on the macro level. Communal, where we all lean in with our needs, not just individual to each family unit. An all-play. A new mission movement. Like the PTA rallying the whole community to provide care for a school, but instead, it is parents of faith working all together and praying all together for all of our kids and their whole generation.

In our distraction to grow our churches and fill the plates, an entire generation of babies dedicated to God in the same churches move from slipping out the back door to falling through the hole in the floor. How much more can we take? I cannot ignore it. The cry of my heart is to gather the other parents and say, “Not on our watch!” It is an S.O.S., far beyond the many human solutions already being thrown at the problem. I believe it requires spiritual resources given to us in the authority of Jesus. It is time to stand in that spiritual authority and refuse to let forces beyond us claim our children before they even come of age to decide their faith on their own. Who is with me?