Parenting and the Gospel

Rick Phillips has a great little read over at Reformation21 on passing on our faith to our kids. Read the whole thing here, but I'll give you some excerpts:

Not long ago I saw a study stating that 88% of evangelical youths abandon the faith by the time they leave college. Whatever evangelical faith is, it must not be very impressive if we can only pass it on to 12% of our own children. More recently, I saw this study, that shows that only 14% of evangelical parents consider faith in Christ to be a significant success indicator for their children. Well, there it is folks! Evangelical churches are not distinctively Christian and evangelical parents are not evidently Christian, so what a surprise that "a generation arose in Israel that did not know the Lord" (Jud. 2:10).

I take two lessons from this. First, what many have been saying for years is true: American evangelicalism is for the most part non-Christian...Evangelical parents have raised their children to carry on their own faith, and that faith has been a religiously sentimental form of materialism and hedonism. So evangelicals have passed on their own faith: it just has not been a biblical Christian faith.

Second, Christians committed to God's Word should not be intimidated by this trend. It is not as if the gospel has failed. The gospel has been abandoned.

This is a convicting (and encouraging!) reminder to me to continually hold out a true and vibrant gospel-believing faith to my children.