Parents who ask this usually aren’t worried about attendance. They want to know whether the faith they tried to hand down will survive the day their child gets to decide for themselves. Pastor Louis Fields Jr. of Grace International Church in Jacksonville, Florida, raised three children while pastoring, and all three still love the church. His answer is that children keep loving it when they received a parent’s real time, saw the same faith at home that they saw on Sunday, and heard that parent admit when they were wrong. None of that is a church program.
Fields speaks mainly to pastors and leaders, whose children feel church pressure most directly. But he insists the principles reach every home: “Children are children, whether it’s a pastor’s child or a manager’s child or a grocery worker’s child.” A pastor’s family is simply the place where the gap between public faith and private life is easiest to see.
One limit is worth stating at the start. This is one father’s testimony from raising three children, with what he observed in other ministry families. It is lived wisdom, and it isn’t a study of why young adults leave. Its strength is that it is specific and honest about failure.
Why does time matter more than the right program?
Fields starts with knowing your child, and you can’t know someone you don’t spend time with. He draws a line many busy church families have blurred: “Your children are your priority. The church is God’s priority. He takes care of the church.”
That line lifts a burden off the parent that was never theirs to carry. If God keeps his church, a parent who misses one meeting to be with a child has abandoned nothing. The parent who acts as if everything depends on their presence at church is quietly teaching the child where they rank.
Fields tells about a pastor he knew whose son wanted to learn to drive. The father kept sending church members to teach him. “Though it may have seemed small to some, it was big to the child,” Fields says, and the boy drew his own conclusion: “my dad got time for everybody else.” Counseling, weddings, funerals, preaching. Everyone got the father except the son.
No youth program could have repaired that. The boy wasn’t missing information about God. He was learning from his father’s calendar that ministry meant losing his dad to strangers. Fields reaches for Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” and turns it toward the preacher who reaches everyone and loses his own children. The verse itself concerns a person’s own soul, so this is an analogy rather than the passage’s meaning. The analogy still lands: a full ministry can be a real loss.
Do you have to love what your child loves?
No. Fields’s sons played Pop Warner football, which meant early Saturday mornings in the Florida heat. “I hated it because I’m not that kind of person,” he admits, and other parents could tell. He went anyway, and his reason is the heart of this whole point: “every time they turned around and looked up in the stands, I wanted them to see their dad.”
He separates interest from presence. You don’t have to play video games or run football drills if that isn’t you. You do have to show up for what your child cares about. Most parents can’t share every hobby. Nearly every parent can make sure a child’s glance into the crowd finds a familiar face.
What makes a child decide the faith is fake?
This is the center of his argument. “What you do in private matters just as much as what you do in public,” Fields says, and he names the failures: leading well on Sunday, then fighting with a spouse at home, losing patience with the children, or dropping the Christian life once the door closes.
Then he describes how children reason about that gap. In his words, “Some children will not serve the Lord or go to church because they’ll say, that church thing ain’t real because my parents did this and my parents did that.”
The child doesn’t conclude that their parents are flawed people who believe something true. The child concludes the faith itself is a performance. A mismatch between public and private life becomes the child’s evidence about whether Christianity is real at all.
Fields won’t let parents hide behind the idea that kids don’t notice. “Sometimes we think they’re not, but they are,” he says of children watching. He compresses it into a line he repeats near the end: “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. It’s how you live before them. That matters.”
He also refuses to turn this into a demand for perfection. He says plainly that no one is perfect and everyone has bad seasons. What he asks for is consistency: striving to live the same faith in private that you profess in public, especially when the week has gone badly. A tired parent who is honestly trying looks very different to a child than a polished one who changes at the front door.
How does church pressure push kids away?
The second half of his counsel is about what not to put on a child. Fields warns against expecting a child to be just like the parent, or as smart as someone else, or perfect when the parent isn’t.
He also names a pressure particular to church families: always putting the children “in the front,” where people watch them and expect certain things. He and his wife chose differently, as Fields explains: “I wanted my children to grow up and be who they were.” The back row was fine. So was the front.
He has seen what the other approach produces. Of pastors who kept their children constantly on display, Fields says, “And when they got an opportunity to get from under the pressure, boy they ran.”
The same applies to calling. One of his children preaches, and his two sons have no interest in it, at least for now. Fields is untroubled: “it doesn’t matter to me if they ever preach or not.” What he wants is simpler. “I just want them to know the Lord, but I want them to be who they are,” he says. He has watched pastors push reluctant children toward the pulpit and says it damaged them. Wanting your child to know the Lord is the goal. Wanting them to serve in your role, your style or your spotlight is a different wish, and it can make faith feel like something imposed from outside.
What does humility look like at home?
Fields names two practices, and they belong together.
The first is grace toward the child. His children did some truly bad things growing up, and after correcting them he would go back, embrace them, and tell them he forgave them and wouldn’t raise it again. Fields states the rule simply: “Don’t punish a child over and over again by bringing their mistakes up over and over again.” He grounds this in God’s own forgiveness, pointing to Psalm 103:12, “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” God doesn’t keep reminding us of what we did, he observes; the devil does. A parent who keeps a running record of a child’s failures shows the child a picture of God that Scripture contradicts.
The second is repentance toward the child, and it is harder. Fields describes snapping at his kids after a bad day over something small. “I had to learn how to go back to my children and say, I’m sorry,” he says, and he treats it as an obligation: “You have a responsibility to repent to your children when you’ve done wrong.”
This bears on how a child feels about church because it shows the faith working in the one relationship where the parent holds all the power. A parent who apologizes to a child shows that the gospel applies to the person in charge too. Children who see that grow up with evidence that Christianity is honest about sin, including the sin of the people who taught it to them.
Is it too late if my child already resents the church?
“It’s not over,” Fields answers. He pictures a parent going back to a child, even a grown one, and confessing: I made mistakes. I was so caught up in the ministry that I put it above everything, even you. He believes “repentance can do a lot of good and it can cause a lot of healing.”
His hope rests on something specific: the word of God planted in that child years ago is still there. Fields describes the parent’s apology this way: “that apology, that asking for forgiveness just might be the sun and the water needed to make that seed grow.” The word “might” matters. He offers the apology as a faithful act and leaves the outcome to God and the child.
He adds a harder warning that parents shouldn’t skip. Some adults hate the church because it is where they were harmed. Fields has seen parents hand their children off to someone at church for convenience, then learn years later that the person was violating the child. As he puts it, “many former kids who are adults now hate church because that’s the place that they were violated.” Watch your own children, he says, and don’t assume you know the person you’re handing them to.
If a child or adult child tells you something like this happened, believe them and get help. Don’t defend the church or ask them to make peace with the person who hurt them. Report abuse of a child to local law enforcement or child protective services. If abuse is happening in a home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. That kind of resentment isn’t a parenting problem to solve with better principles. It is a wound that needs justice and care.
Doesn’t this put all the blame on parents?
It would if Fields claimed parenting decides everything. He doesn’t. He opens with Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Then Fields adds a qualifier right away: “These are not necessarily promises, but there are principles that we can live by.”
That reading fits the genre. Proverbs describe how life generally goes under God’s wisdom; they don’t override a person’s choices. Faithful parents can raise a child who walks away, and careless parents can raise a child who comes to faith. Fields admits his own children went through rebellious seasons, credits their love for the church both to the principles he and his wife followed and to the grace of God alone, and says he would redo some things if he could.
Parents are also not the only cause. Some young people leave over real failures in church culture, and some leave because of honest questions about whether Christianity is true. Those deserve their own answers, and his testimony doesn’t try to give them. What it covers is the home, the place a child first learns what the faith looks like up close.
Read that way, his argument is modest and serious. Parents don’t control whether a child keeps the faith. They do shape what the child believes the faith is. A child who got your time, saw a faith that held up behind closed doors, and heard you say you were sorry has met the real thing. The church will carry on without you for an afternoon. What your child learns in your house will travel with them into every church they ever enter, or decide never to enter again.