No Christian parent wants a child to leave the faith or to drop church like a hot potato once they leave home, but it’s increasingly common for kids to do so. A five-year study completed by the Barna group in 2018 found that nearly 3 in 5 children raised in the church would leave after age fifteen, either for a long time or for good. When interviewed, the teens and young adults in the study cited...
You’ve been asked by your senior pastor to counsel an eight-year-old child. You don’t usually directly counsel children this young; you usually counsel parents and equip them to come alongside their young children to provide the hope and help the child needs. However, in this situation, based on other conversations with the parents, your pastor has concluded that offering to counsel the parents...
Loneliness and isolation continue. We’ve worked at home for months. We’re again juggling our jobs while facilitating our kids’ online schooling sessions. We face daily decisions about what precautions to take and when to take them. (We wear masks when we leave home. We wash our hands after we get home.) We struggle to get in God’s Word. (Quiet times were hard before the pandemic, now they are...
Dates and places are critical elements of our stories. I am glad to be a child of the 60s and a North Carolinian by birth, education (‘72 UNC), and music. I grew up loving, and playing, “beach music”—my most formative soundtrack. Beach music must not be confused with West Coast surfing music like the incredible melodies and images captured in the songs of The Beach Boys. Beach music is a sonic...
The American church suffers (among other maladies) from a severe case of chronological snobbery—the idea that we know better than the ancients that precede us. Because we feel we have become more advanced in our perceptions of the world around us, we tend to think we have outgrown the teaching, prayers, and examples of those who came before us. What we sometimes fail to understand, however, is...
