A child who walks away from the church at twenty usually began deciding what it was at eight, mostly by watching a parent. What can you start doing this week so your children keep loving God and his people? The answer worked out here is a practice called presence: time actually given, attention actually paid, a private life that matches the public one, and repair when you get it wrong. Faith is caught at home before it is taught anywhere else.
The material comes from a talk by Pastor Louis Fields Jr. of Grace International Church in Jacksonville, Florida. He gave it to pastors and church leaders after raising three children in ministry, but he widens the audience himself: “Children are children.” The guide runs in four weekly sessions, each with one passage, one idea from Fields, and one practice to finish before the next. Work it alone with a notebook, with a spouse or co-parent, or with a small group of parents.
Before you start, write two sentences. First, what is the main reason children raised in church come to resent it? Second, what can you do about that? You will return to them at the end.
Session one: presence that shows up
Start with the text
Read Deuteronomy 6:6-7 slowly, out loud if you can:
“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
Moses is speaking to Israel as they prepare to enter the land. Underline every place and time of day in the passage. None of them is a gathering for worship. The teaching assumes a parent who is around in the ordinary hours, close enough to talk. What would make that kind of teaching impossible in your house?
What Fields adds
Fields starts with knowing your child, and he ties knowing to time. Then he draws a line between two kinds of ownership: “Your children are your priority. The church is God’s priority. He takes care of the church.” The claim is not that church work is unimportant. It is that the parent is not the one holding the church up, while no one else is assigned to raise this child.
He also separates interest from enthusiasm. He disliked early Saturday mornings in the heat at his sons’ youth football games, admitted as much when another parent noticed, and went anyway, because “every time they turned around and looked up in the stands, I wanted them to see their dad.” The standard is attendance, not enjoyment. That makes it reachable for almost any parent.
His hardest example runs the other way. A pastor’s son wanted to learn to drive, and his father kept handing the job to a church member. Fields reports the boy’s wish: “That’s all I want is my daddy to teach me how to drive.” The task was small. What the son learned from it about his father’s priorities was not.
Test the claim before you use it
Two limits keep this principle honest. First, Deuteronomy 6 is addressed to the whole people of Israel, so the parent’s teaching happens inside a worshiping community, not instead of one. Fields is speaking to parents whose church commitments regularly crowd out their children, and his examples are about real collisions: the driving lesson, the Saturday game. Read as a license to treat church as optional, his line would teach a child something he never argued. Second, this is the testimony of one experienced pastor about his own family and the families he has watched, not a study of how children turn out. He admits he would redo some things. Weigh his counsel as seasoned wisdom you can test against Scripture and your own household, not as a formula.
The practice: a time audit and one appearance
Reconstruct the last seven days on paper. Mark every block that went to work, to church responsibilities, to your phone, and to each child by name. Do not grade it yet. Then pick one child and one thing that child cares about, ideally something you would normally skip. Show up this week with your phone put away. Afterward, write down one thing you learned about your child that you did not know before.
Session two: presence that sees
Start with the text
Read Ephesians 6:4: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
Paul writes to a household and speaks to the fathers who held most of its power. “Nurture” here carries the sense of training or discipline, and “admonition” the sense of instruction or warning; other translations render them as discipline and instruction. The verse keeps both halves together. A parent is supposed to shape a child, and the same parent is told not to exasperate that child. What kind of shaping provokes?
What Fields adds
Fields names several ways parents provoke without intending to. One is treating children as interchangeable, when “they’re not the same and therefore you can’t treat each one the same.” Another is expecting a child to be just like the parent, as smart as someone else, or perfect when the parent is not. A third is pressure from the church itself. He and his wife chose not to keep their children always on display, where people watched and expected things of them, and he describes pastors’ children who ran as soon as they could escape that pressure. His instruction is short: “Give them a chance to be children.” One of his children preaches and two do not, and he says it makes no difference to him. He wants them to know the Lord and be who they are.
Ephesians still asks parents to train, so the question is how to tell pressure from legitimate expectation. Three tests help. Whose need does this expectation serve, the child’s or the parent’s reputation? Does it fit this particular child, or a child you imagined? Would you still hold it if no one at church were watching? Expecting a child to tell the truth passes all three. Expecting a child to sit on the front row because the pastor’s family should usually fails at least one.
Seeing a child also includes guarding one. Fields warns that church families often hand children to whoever is convenient, sometimes to people who turn out to be harming them, and he urges parents to watch their own children, because some “former kids who are adults now hate church because that’s the place that they were violated.” A church role does not make someone safe.
The practice: name them separately
Give each child a page. List three things true of that child and not of their siblings, or, with one child, three ways they differ from you. Then list your expectations for each child and run every one through the three tests above. Choose one that fails and decide what setting it down would look like this week. Last, write the names of every adult who regularly has your child in their care, and ask how well you actually know each one.
For groups: a parent may realize during this session that a child was harmed in someone else’s care, or may disclose harm of their own. Take it seriously, do not move on quickly, and do not offer a verse as a solution. If a child may be in danger now, contact local authorities or child protective services. If abuse or violence is happening in the home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Session three: presence that matches
Start with the text
Return to Deuteronomy 6:6. The words “shall be in thine heart” come before “thou shalt teach them.” Moses does not picture a parent passing on what the parent does not hold. What does a child learn when the teaching arrives without the heart behind it?
What Fields adds
Fields calls living before your children one of the most important things a parent can do, because “What you do in private matters just as much as what you do in public.” A parent can lead well on Sunday and come home to fight with a spouse or lose patience with the children. He describes children who later rejected the faith after seeing that contrast and deciding the whole thing was not real.
Notice the child’s reasoning. The child does not conclude that a parent is a flawed person who believes something true. The child concludes the faith is a performance. That is why the gap carries so much weight: it becomes evidence. Fields does not ask for perfection, since everyone has bad days and bad seasons, but he insists children are watching even when parents assume they are not: “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. It’s how you live before them. That matters.”
This raises a real problem. If every parent fails at home sometimes, how can a child ever see a faith that is real? Hold the question until session four.
The practice: two columns
Draw a line down a page. On the left, describe yourself at church or in public: your patience, your speech, how you talk about people, how you pray. On the right, describe yourself on an ordinary weeknight at home. Circle the widest gap. If a spouse or trusted friend sees you at home and the relationship is safe for that honesty, you may ask where they see the gap; this is optional. Pick one step to narrow it this week, and only one.
Session four: presence that repairs
Start with the text
Read Psalm 103:12: “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” Then Lamentations 3:22-23: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”
The psalm is praise. Lamentations is poetry written amid national ruin, and these lines turn toward hope in the middle of grief. Both describe a God who does not keep reopening a forgiven offense.
Now read Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs is wisdom literature; its sayings describe how life generally works, not guarantees. Fields reads it the same way: “These are not necessarily promises, but there are principles that we can live by.” He credits his own children’s love for the church to how they were raised and also to the grace of God. A faithful parent can still grieve a child who walks away.
What Fields adds
Here is the answer to session three’s problem. A parent who fails can still show a real faith by how the failure is handled. Fields describes snapping at his children after a hard day and learning to go back and apologize. He treats it as a duty: “You have a responsibility to repent to your children when you’ve done wrong.” An apology from the person with all the power in the house shows a child that the gospel applies to the one in charge too. That is a different kind of evidence than flawlessness, and a more believable one.
Grace runs the other direction as well. After correcting his children, he tried to embrace them and tell them he forgave them and would not raise it again. His warning: “Don’t punish a child over and over again by bringing their mistakes up over and over again.” A parent who keeps a running record shows a child a picture of God that Psalm 103 contradicts.
For parents of grown children who are already distant, Fields says it is not over. Go back, own the failure, including putting ministry above your own child, and ask forgiveness. He offers hope without promising an outcome, grounding it in what was planted earlier: “The seed of the word of God is still in their heart.”
The practice: one apology, one release
Write down one specific wrong you have done to one child, then the sentence you would actually say, with no excuses and no correction of them tucked inside. Choose a day this week to say it. If the child is grown and distant, write a letter and decide later whether to send it. Then name one old failure of your child’s that you still bring up, and do not mention it for the rest of the week.
For groups: this session can surface grief, especially for parents of grown children who have left the faith. Quiet is not resistance. No one should be pressed to name a wrong aloud; the written apology belongs to the person who wrote it.
Questions for the four weeks
- Who showed you, by how they lived, what God the Father is like? How is that showing up in your parenting now?
- Where does putting your children ahead of church commitments become right, and where would it start teaching them that church does not matter?
- Which of your expectations for your child came from other adults rather than from the child or from Scripture? How did it get there?
- What changes for a parent who reads Proverbs 22:6 as a guarantee instead of a principle, both when a child thrives and when a child wanders?
- Fields’s counsel comes from one pastor’s family and the families he watched. Where does it fit your household, and where would you adjust it?
- What would your child say they have learned about the faith from watching you this year?
Back to the first page
Read the two sentences you wrote before session one. Did you expect the main cause of resentment to lie outside your home, in the church, the culture, or a youth program? Did the sessions confirm that, complicate it, or change it? Rewrite the second sentence as something you could start on a Tuesday, and keep doing the practice that cost you the most. That is probably the one your child noticed.