Podcast: Keeping Kids Christian with Cameron Shaffer

In this sixth episode of the new series of the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast, hosts Graham Nicholls and Lizzie Harewood sit down with Cameron Shaffer, author of Keeping Kids Christian, to talk about his book and the topics he covers in it, including:

• assumptions underpinning children’s and youth ministry in both the US and the UK;
• the growth in the US of those identifying as believing in “nothing in particular”;
• the significance of parental influence in handing down the Christian faith;
• the impact of different parenting styles;
• the importance of intergenerational ministry;
• parenting adult children.

https://youtu.be/DeaG0Qhqna0

Lizzie Harewood (0:12)

Hello and welcome to the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. I’m here with Graham Nicholls as usual, my name is Lizzie Harewood and we are joined by Cameron Shaffer. I presume I pronounced your name correctly Cameron, is that correct?

Cameron Shaffer (0:27)

Cameron, yep.

Lizzie Harewood (0:28)

Cameron Shaffer. I can pronounce Cameron.

Cameron Shaffer (0:32)

It’s been Americanised, it’s “Schaefer”.

Lizzie Harewood (0:35)

“Schaefer”. Okay, I apologise. We have quite a few Americans in our congregation and we always have a bit of a joke about our different pronunciations of words like rout and water and “Schaefer”, I do apologise.

Graham Nicholls (0:51)

You need an “e” in there to strictly speak.

Cameron Shaffer (0:54)

My last name is misspelled, even by American standards. 

Lizzie Harewood (1:01)

Okay, well, fair enough. So Cameron, you are here to talk to us about, well amongst other things, your new book, but in particular the topic of children, children’s ministry and children perhaps growing up and leaving the church. And yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to write this book.

Cameron Shaffer (1:27)

Well, I’m an American, I pastor a small Presbyterian congregation near the city of Philadelphia, which is on the eastern seaboard of the United States. I’m a parent and father of three young children, and like many American Christians of my generation, as I was growing up, I started to see my friends who grew up Christian with me walk away from the faith. In the United States over the last 35 years, there has been a massive de-churching, a de-conversion of Christians.The people who identify as not religious at all went from about 5% in 1990 to rapidly approaching 30% of the population currently. And they came from kids who grew up in the church. So my generation – for the most part, a little bit older, a little bit younger – and I saw this with some horror. And I, as I was pastoring young families and people of my generation as well, they were seeing quite a bit of trepidation of people they thought were faithful Christians grow up and walk away in mass. 

Cameron Shaffer (2:37)

And that raised some questions, especially as they looked at godly Christian parents. What went wrong?Why did this happen? And how can we, as far as we are able, how can we prevent this? How can we proactively raise our kids to hold on to the faith?So on a personal and pastoral level, that was one of the big motivators. As a pastor, I’m always looking for things that challenge assumptions that we bring to ministry. So in the United States, there’s a particular model for ministry to teenagers, the youth group model that has become very dominant over the last half century. And it has an assumption built into it, which is that the younger the leaders are, the more the students will resonate with the leaders and will listen and will therefore grow up Christian. So if you’ve got a 22 or 23 or 24 year old leading the youth group, there’s this presupposition that it will be effective for 13 through 17 year olds. And there was a series of books, sociological works that came out about five years ago, culminating in a book by a sociologist from Notre Dame and NYU called Handing Down the Faith. And it looked at what actually sociologically is effective for passing down the faith across all religions. And it primarily focused on the United States, but it took into account the broader Western world. And it challenged those sorts of assumptions, sociologically speaking.

Cameron Shaffer (4:09)

So I read this as a pastor and went, well, hang on, we’re not doing this in church. No one else in the church world is talking about this. How can we take this sociological information and utilise it, bring this information, this wisdom to bear on the life of the church? So between the parental and pastoral concerns on the one hand, and the sociological data that was being published on the other, I said, this needs to get out there. I wrote an article and I got contacted and that article got turned – I didn’t expect this – to become a book. And I got contacted and was asked to turn it into a book because it resonated with a lot of people. So that’s the background for how the book came about.

Graham Nicholls (4:50)

You may have done this already, but have you connected with the kind of UK culture and seen whether there’s any kind of analogues with that, parallels with that? I could talk about them a little bit, but yeah, I just wondered if you, from a distance, had thought, oh, this really works in the UK as well.

Cameron Shaffer (5:12)

Well, partially. So most of the sociological data is itself very focused on America. There are a lot of overlaps between the UK and the United States. So, for instance, the United Kingdom was previously a predominant Christian country in religious identification, and that shifted really in the last half century or so. So to be a Christian in the UK now is a matter of choice. It’s not the default setting. You don’t automatically grow up Anglican or Presbyterian in Scotland anymore. You have to choose and opt in or your family has to opt in. The United States, the default setting until really the 1980s and 90s, said if you were an average American, you went to church, you were a Christian. That’s not the case anymore. And that change where now the default is to be nothing in particular or spiritual, but not religious, that’s similar between the UK and the US, even if still in the United States, the number of self-professing Christians is substantially higher. So there is a lot of overlap there.

Graham Nicholls (6:16)

Yeah, yeah. And I think it would be fair to say in the UK, not exclusively, but we do have a similar problem with lots of children and young people’s workers being young. There’s all kinds of reasons for that. Not always just because everyone thinks they’re the most cool people and they’re the best to do it. Sometimes it is a matter of people who have disposable time and so forth. But yeah, it’s not a problem across all churches, but it still is a bit of a problem. I think in the UK, we have both the drop off of some children who are children of people in the church – around the 14/15 age group is where a lot of kind of dropping off happens. But probably also because we’ve got a large unchurched population, a lot of our children and youth work attracts people from outside the church. And it’s around about that period and just a little bit earlier for non-Christian families that the drop off happens with a lot of our youth work.So statistically, the crucial period is around our school year 8/9. That’s when people will stop coming to church as children. So that’s an interesting parallel. I don’t know if that works or helps at all. Yeah. Go on, Lizzie.

Lizzie Harewood (7:45)

Oh, I was just interested to know whether we could backtrack a bit and you could actually go in – dig into some of the data and tell us what did you learn about – do you have statistics and information about children leaving the church? What proportion decide to go down the none route or deconstruct their faith? Is there anything reliable that we can actually work with?

Cameron Shaffer (8:17)

Right now, there’s no reliable data on breaking down by generational cohort or birth cohort. That’s the way that sociologists prefer to talk about it within people born within a five-year span who becomes non-religious because they deconstructed or who becomes non-religious because they just wander. It seems like the majority of, in the United States, we call – sociologists, we call them nones. People with no religious senses will say “nothing in particular”. That might encompass atheists or agnostics, but usually it’s someone who just says, I don’t have a religion. In the United States, the “nothing in particulars” are far larger than atheists and agnostics. And it seems like the majority of my generation – so people in their mid-thirties to early forties and younger who become “nothing in particular” – don’t do it as a set of conscious decisions. It’s more of other things become more important to them. School activities, Netflix, Instagram and TikTok, hanging out with friends. It’s a lot easier to sleep in on Sunday morning than it is to go to church. There are a rise in the United States that are sometimes called exvangelicals or ex-evangelicals. There are a rise in those, but not statistically substantial compared to people who just stop caring.

Graham Nicholls (9:46)

Yeah, I think that would be true in the UK, to be honest. I’ve observed it in a reverse in the sense that some people who become Christians in later life or some people in the church who’ve drifted away, they normally don’t say, I’ve stopped believing. So the people who become Christians a bit later, you know, they’re 30 years old or something and they, some circumstance happens, they have a child or something and they start thinking, oh, it might be good to go back to church. And then they get converted. Then it’s, if you ask them to kind of trace it back, they won’t say, oh yeah, I got to age 15 and I stopped believing. They’ll tend to say something just like what you just said, that “It just wasn’t that relevant. It just wasn’t that interesting. You know, there were lots of other interesting things happened and I just drifted off.” They don’t normally go through a whole intellectual epiphany where they decide, “I totally reject everything I’ve been taught.” It’s more, they drift away for all the reasons that you said. So that’s interesting. That’s a parallel really with that.

Lizzie Harewood (10:51)

I wonder whether – sorry, Cameron, to butt in here – but I wonder whether there is perhaps more of the deconstruction ilk in the US than in the UK. I just get a sense that although there’s probably more polarisation in the US, there’s also in some parts of the US more of that Christian culture that perhaps had quite a hold on communities in some parts of the US. Whereas I think in the UK, when I was a kid, I didn’t think there was a big sort of Christian culture whatsoever.

Graham Nicholls (11:31)

No, it wasn’t when I was a kid and I’m older than you.

Lizzie Harewood (11:34)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot, a lot older now. I won’t go down that route again.

Graham Nicholls (11:39)

Yeah, you’ll have to apologise to me later. So it’s all right. Get it over with now. I forgive you already.

Lizzie Harewood (11:44)

Because I know that – I mean, I read a lot about – I mean, I see on social media, perhaps some Christians who have, or some who would now call themselves ex-Christians or exvangelicals who are dissecting the purity culture of the 90s or whatever. And although that did have a bit of an impact here, I really don’t think it made as many cultural inroads. I don’t know. That’s just my observation.

Cameron Shaffer (12:09)

I think that’s fair. I don’t touch on this too much in the book. The person who I recommend reading on this is a sociologist named Ryan Burge. But in the United States, there were two large – for a long time – two very large demographic groups of Christians, people in churches called the Mainline, so probably equivalent to the Anglican Church or the Church of Scotland in the UK. These were Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist churches. This was the equivalent of the established church in the United States. Through the 1950s, 7 out of 10 Americans belonged to these churches. Now it’s closer to about 10% of Americans. So it’s collapsed. And demographically, they’re very old. The membership is very old. The other large group are the evangelicals. And these are the ones that created, out of American fundamentalist culture, a parallel church culture. And that’s the group, I think, that you’re talking about with the purity culture. They would have all their own Christian camps, Christian music, Christian movie studios.And they peaked in the early 1990s with about 30% of the American population. It’s around 25%, maybe a little bit under that at the moment. Most of the de-constructioning seems to be happening from people who grew up in the evangelical world. Because you had to be more intense and more intentional to be part of that parallel world. Whereas in the main line, it was embedded in and just part of overall culture. So I do think there is, that’s accurate.A nd I can’t speak to how much that evangelical subculture connected in the UK.

Graham Nicholls (13:57)

Yeah. It’ll be good to go on now to talk about not just one thing, but your diagnosis of the problem. And then really spend most of the rest of the time just on what do you think we should do? What do you think we should do that’s different to what we are doing? Particularly in your Presbyterian culture, where you would be teaching the Bible already. So it’s not like you’re saying we need to recover interest in the Bible or something. So it’d be interesting to hear. Yeah. If you want to say a little bit more about the problem before you then talk about the solution, or you may have said enough, I don’t know.

Cameron Shaffer (14:35)

I think I’ve said enough about the problem. I actually probably spent more time on the problem in this conversation than I do in the actual book. I spend far more time talking about what to do. And I’m a pastor, not a sociologist. So I spend most of my time in the book talking about the Bible and what the Bible has to say. So I do think that’s applicable across cultures.

Graham Nicholls (15:02)

Absolutely. 

Cameron Shaffer (15:04)

So you’re right. Our congregation, we spend a lot of time talking about the Bible. And a lot of churches spend a lot of time talking about the Bible. But what the research has shown is that it’s parental influence and how parents, moms and dads interact with their kids, that is the greatest predictor of long term religiosity. So overwhelmingly, that is the solution, the most important aspect. I’m sorry, my computer has come unplugged and zoom is going to shut down. Just give me a second.

Graham Nicholls (15:40)

Great pressure on you now. There we go.

Cameron Shaffer (15:44)

I apologise.

Graham Nicholls (15:46)

No, you’re all right. I can see you looking anxious. It’s all fine. You’re still there. So keep going. Parental influence is the greatest predictor.

Cameron Shaffer (15:54)

Yes. Over overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly. And so there’s a mantra we used to sometimes here in the United States that Christianity is taught, not caught. You don’t just gain it by osmosis. You have to be catechised. You have to be instructed.You have to get to learn the information. You have to learn about Jesus. That’s absolutely true. But the majority of my book focuses on how it’s taught matters – less the format and more the posture and how Christianity is shared, the faith, is shared with the children of your family or your church is incredibly important for longevity and rootedness in the faith. 

Cameron Shaffer (16:38)

So you mentioned the kids in your churches, sometimes they’ll be eight, nine years old, and then they have this transition in age, and they move off, or maybe they get to middle or teenagers, and they move off. The biggest restraint to prevent something like that from happening actually is parental direction.Not all kids have parents in the church, which is something I talk about, but parental influence in the way that the church can disciple parents to raise their kids are the most important factors in passing down the faith.

Graham Nicholls (17:14)

Right. And so talk about what that looks like. And does it change any of the ministries in the church? So just talk about what it looks like in the parental realm first.

Cameron Shaffer (17:28)

Yes, I borrow a framework from Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk, a sociologist who wrote a book on parental style influence. And they say you can be an authoritarian, authoritative, a passive, or a permissive parent. So an authoritarian parent is the kind that says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” That is very rules-orientated, that is firm, but doesn’t show affection or love. The kids could not say with reflection or honesty that my parent loves me based on their treatment of me. Now a lot of godly Christian authoritarian parents will say that they’re doing – they’re setting down the rules, they’re laying down the law because they love their kids, but there’s no warmth and openness there. It’s authoritarian. So a good diagnostic question is, what do you do as a parent when your religion is challenged by your kid? If they question you on why we believe whatever about Jesus or sexuality or science or how we engage the culture or the resurrection or whatever, if you react defensively – “This is what we believe, here’s why we believe it, and you must believe it” – if you don’t have the openness of criticism and the openness to that, and the openness to be humble and interacting with your kid, they’re going to internalise that this is a faith that cannot be questioned, that can’t be wrestled with, that can’t handle my interactions with it, and they’re going to learn that from their parents. 

Cameron Shaffer (19:06)

On the other end of the spectrum, you have permissive or passive parents. An authoritarian would say, “You’re going to church whether or not you like it, and I don’t care whether or not you like it, this is what we’re doing no matter what, and I’m going to put down the rules.” A permissive parent – and we have a lot of these in the United States – would say, “Well kid, whatever you want to do is what you can do.” And a lot of this was written before – we have something called the gentle parenting phenomenon in the United States. 

Lizzie Harewood (19:38)

Yeah, we have it here too!

Cameron Shaffer (19:41)

The greatest example of permissive parenting is where the parent is something of a partner or an enabler to the child – rather than an authority figure, rather than someone who knows better, who can direct, correct, enforce, and say “These are the rules.” They might show affection, they might show love, but there is nothing robust or firm about their parenting. And a passive parent is someone who doesn’t really engage at all. If you have an authoritarian or permissive or passive parent with their child, they are less likely to hold onto the faith into adulthood. On the other hand, an authoritative parent is someone who is firm, [has] high standards, high expectations, but loving and affectionate. The kids know that the parent loves them. They know that their parent likes them. And that difference between the kid being able to say they are loved and liked is huge. There was an exercise that a counsellor in the United States did with a number of kids – adult children – and asked them, “Do you know that your parents love you?” And they all said, “Yes.” And they asked them, “Do you know if your parents like you?” And the kids couldn’t say yes. It was heartbreaking. And an authoritative parent is someone who is an authority figure that their kids know loves and likes them. That parenting style is huge and massively important when it comes to passing down the faith.

Cameron Shaffer (21:11)

Now, the style in and of itself is not enough. Parents need to be sincere in their faith. They need to personally be sincere in it because kids can detect whether or not parents really believe it. I sometimes see this, parents drop their children off at church because they think it’s important for kids to do, but not important for them to do. And as soon as kids pick up on that, they realise that church is not really for adults. It’s not for grownups. It’s something I could get through, like any of my other classes or adolescent activities. But the parenting model of a sincere, personally held belief that is known by the parents, is committed to by the parents, but humbly and non-defensively held by the parent as an authority figure that’s loving and affectionate. This parenting style is overwhelmingly the greatest indicator of children growing up in the faith.

Graham Nicholls (22:09)

So authoritative and sincere are the two key kind of things that you would label. Is that right?

Cameron Shaffer (22:18)

Yeah, I would add affectionate or humble, something like that. Open. The way I talk to parents in my church about this is: “If you sin against your child, what do you do next?” Some parents will say, “Well, I’m the authority” and/or will double down because they don’t want their authority questioned. But if you’re willing to say to the kid, “I wronged you, I sinned against you, I need your forgiveness” – that doesn’t diminish the parent’s authority in that situation. But it shows dignity and respect to the kid. It’s a humble acknowledgement that I, as a parent, am fallible and make mistakes. I don’t see myself as perfect. And it communicates to both the need for grace.

Lizzie Harewood (23:04)

As a parent, we’re still in need of forgiveness. I suppose it underlines that what you’re teaching them has cohesive and applicable meaning for the whole of life. It isn’t just something that you teach so that it will be useful out there in the world. But actually, this this is real stuff. We’re engaging in real business here. And I suppose I just assume that that is what a good Christian parent would do, would take that stance. I mean, I don’t actually – although I know gentle parenting happens sort of out there. I’ve not seen as much of it in the church, or at least not in my local context.

Graham Nicholls (23:47)

Yeah, I think there is quite a lot of it.

Lizzie Harewood (23:50)

Oh, really? Okay, fair enough.

Graham Nicholls (23:52)

I wouldn’t want to speak in any detail about my own experiences. But yeah, this is quite a phenomenon across the churches. I would say in general as well – you would be, maybe not – but I was surprised how many people who are parents don’t read the Bible with their kids. Or if they do read the Bible with their kids, it’s not much. And they don’t read the Bible on their own. And this is not – I mean, I actually was preaching on something and looked up some statistics for it, as best you can get statistics on it for the UK, not for the States. But the number of millennials age group who were not reading the Bible once a week even was a massive percentage. I didn’t think it was necessary for this discussion, so I didn’t find it, but I’ve got it somewhere that I could find pretty easily. And I could see some parallels across our own and some other churches I’m connected with. So it is a thing. And so, yeah, I don’t want to get into the whole parenting thing too much. 

Graham Nicholls (25:05)

But in order for that model to work that you’re talking about, Cameron, the parents need to be reading the Bible and teaching as well as all the other good character things. Also experiencing that good sense of not wanting to be authoritarian, but an overreaction by Christian families who perhaps even have been Christians through the generations. So not recent converts, but people who perhaps as children who are now parents who had authoritarian parents. So they’re reacting against that by trying not to be authoritarian with their children. And at a young age, it happens with them being a bit too child-centred. But when they get into teenagers, it does happen in terms of, I don’t want to force them to come to church. So, you know, if they stay in bed or they get up too late and say, “you know, “I haven’t got time to change” or whatever, they’ll just let it happen. So that is a phenomenon happening here. Sorry, Cameron, we’re just talking about the UK, but…

Cameron Shaffer (26:09)

Well, yeah, that’s where you are. And I hope the information is enlightening and helpful. That’s new. That’s not new for the United States either. That happens all the time here. And it’s not authoritarian to require your kids to go to church any more than it’s authoritarian to require your kids to go to school.I don’t know how true this is in the UK, but in the United States, especially middle class parents are doing everything they can to get their kids ahead in life, extracurriculars, through school. But if they don’t have that, when they don’t have that same mentality when it comes to the church, it reveals where their priorities actually are.

Lizzie Harewood (26:48)

Yeah, I think that’s the thing that concerns me most is that amongst my generation, my peers, and I do worry that there’s a real focus on extracurricular activities and churches is a good thing to do maybe twice a month. But there’s not that level of “This will actually have eternal significance”, whereas being part of a gymnastics team or football team or swim team or whatever, that seems to have that immediate reward that is very valuable in a kind of middle class social scene. And that sounds very judgemental, I suppose, because I’m married to the pastor. We don’t have any choice. We are there every single Sunday, every single service. And that’s a great blessing, though, because I see the opportunity for the whole church family to input into my children and for our children to see how important it is to be under the word every week and to be involved in ministry ourselves.

Graham Nicholls (28:02)

Can I just make a point on questions – which I thought was really helpful, Cameron, that you said, about being willing to answer questions. My observation with my – I have grown up kids who, by God’s grace, they’re all believers and going on with the Lord. So I’m very thankful for that. But what I found as a parent, when they asked a question – like a really big question about God’s sovereignty or about hell or about, I don’t know, morality or something – I would panic that they’re not going to believe, they’re starting to show signs of unbelief. And I had to learn that sometimes they just wanted the reassurance that I was happy to answer and was pretty chilled and that they just wanted an answer. Not because they were really disagreeing, but they just wanted help to understand how to frame their answer that they already thought. They didn’t think this thing that they were asking was correct, but they wanted help framing it. They wanted you to help. And I took a while to learn that, because they’d also panic. “OK, that’s it. They’re going away. They’re leaving the church. That’ll be next week.” And so, yeah, it’s really important what you said about being willing to answer. Yeah. And being ready for that. So I don’t know if you’ve got any other comments on that, Cameron, since I’ve just been talking about it for a few minutes.

Cameron Shaffer (29:28)

So overlapping with this, the sincerity is key. If you don’t actually believe it yourself, your kids, you’re not going to be able to hand off something inauthentic to your children. But sincerity, some of the way that some sociologists talk about this, of religion in the United States, that sometimes – and it sounds like in the UK, this is also the case – people view religion as an accessory. Something similar to the sports team you might root for or the clothes or political affiliation you might have. And if you view it as an accessory, it becomes more disposable. If you view your faith as something that forms you in your whole life and belong to the church, belong to the community of God’s people as a formation project, it permeates the way you go about living your entire life.

Cameron Shaffer (30:23)

So one of the verses I use as a motif in the book is the Shema from Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord God, the Lord is one.” And then Moses goes on and talks about how you got to be talking about this all the time. So I have a modernised variation on that, which is you talk about it when you’re driving your kids to school. You talk about it when you’re eating breakfast. You talk about it when you’re hanging out in the living room. You talk about it when you’re saying goodnight prayers and putting your kids to bed. And Moses’s point is not just constantly, constantly, constantly talking about God and nothing else. It’s that this should be a natural overflow from your heart. It should be part of your regular rhythm in life. It’s not something that shows up on Sunday, but something that informs who you are and the decisions you make in a deep-rooted, somewhat casual even, way that just kind of springs up in the way that you go about living your lives. And that is hugely important.That works for kids. It becomes something embedded within their hearts. So I think the most important way for the church to handle that is to be discipling parents to begin thinking in those ways, to begin acting in those ways. So that’s the challenge to some of the programming dimensions that are common in American evangelicalism.

Lizzie Harewood (31:47)

What would you say then churches perhaps need to take away from this book or other research on the way they do children’s and youth work? Because you say that there are perhaps some surprises – perhaps that we wouldn’t assume would work as well with regards to age of youth pastors or whatever.

Cameron Shaffer (32:09)

I think the most important practical things – if the church has the money, in the United States normally after you hire the pastor, after you have enough money, the next person you hire is the children’s or the youth minister. My recommendation would be, instead of doing that, hire a family ministries pastor. So you’re not thinking in terms of how am I discipling these kids, or how am I discipling these teenagers, but how am I discipling the parents and the families so that this becomes real in their own home. That would be the practical staffing issue of recommendation one. Now not all churches are in that position, and sometimes you – or sometimes they’re really big and have lots of pastors already, and so you might need to shuffle things around. The next thing would be to find the ways to incorporate the children of the church into the overall life of the church. Intergenerational as much as you can. Get the young dads, the young moms around the godly older men and women of the church. Have the kids of the church see not just their parents be Christians, but see a community of Christians. Cast a vision for them of what a lifelong disciple looks like. That a godly Christianity, godly following Jesus, is not just something that expires after you graduate, before you go off to college or university, but something that you can actually live your entire life. So find different ways to have the older mentors, fathers and mothers of the faith, interacting with the young families and be interacting with the children.

Graham Nicholls (33:50)

How have you seen that impact your own local church? Have you seen a change in your local church? Did you have a kind of fork in the road where you started going in a different direction in the local church?

Cameron Shaffer (34:02)

Yeah, that fork was Covid.

Graham Nicholls (34:04)

Okay.

Cameron Shaffer (34:05)

It forced some of these decisions because we couldn’t come back as fast as we could on some of the old approaches. So here are a couple of practical things that we’ve done. So as a dad, I’ve done this with my kids. We have a monthly men’s breakfast, which has turned into the monthly retired men’s breakfast because that’s when the retired guys like to gather together. So I bring my young boys with me. I go to this breakfast that is earlier than anything else that they do during the month. And they love it. They love it because I’m excited about it. They love it because I’m bringing them to be with the men. They’re being – my seven-year-old is being treated as a man and spending time with me and with the older men. There’s often, at our church, a women’s tea once or twice a month. My wife does that with our daughter.

Cameron Shaffer (35:06)

With the teenagers, one of the things that we have really tried to emphasise with them, we do have a youth group. I’m not anti-youth group, but the way that we have reconfigured it is we want to make sure that we have godly older adults who can be there in the room with them. We’re the ones taking the lead. That it’s not the cooler older cousins of the faith, but the moms and dads of the faith. So we’re experimenting tactically right now, but one of the things that we’re doing for our midweek discipleship gathering, we have a fellowship dinner at our church, which has adults and little kids who are running around making tonnes of noise, and the teenagers all together. And then we break up into different small groups around tables in the same room, far enough ways that we’re not overwhelming each other with the noise, but the teenagers are in the same room as the adults and their parents, and the older adults are taking the lead with the teenage discussion. And then we have a large lesson that everyone is sharing together. 

Cameron Shaffer (36:13)

So part of what that does is the teenagers are rubbing shoulders with the older adults. They’re part of the community. They’re seeing that this is not something that eventually we graduate out of, but what forms us our entire life long. Here is the vision of what that can look like. We’re with some limited success because it’s taken a while. Change takes time. Changing culture takes time, but one of the things we’re trying to do is have more of our youth gatherings occur in the homes of families from the church, rather than just the church building, but to be with the surrogate moms and dads of the church family. So the teenagers are there in the homes.They’re interacting with extended parents, which is especially important if the teenagers themselves don’t have parents who are Christian. We often run into this, that there will be kids who join in, who come from non-Christian homes, and we want to provide them with the next best thing to direct parental influence, which is moms and dads of the faith with good parental influence.

Lizzie Harewood (37:22)

I would say that I probably come into that, well, as a teenager, I was in that category, and it was the very intentional care and discipleship of others in my area that actually brought me into the faith and actually, yeah, discipled me and helped me to learn what it looked like to be part of a Christian family. So – and I have to say from a parental perspective, now from my own perspective – although obviously I’m very blessed, you know, I’m a Christian, my husband’s a Christian – the impact of those folks in the church who take a really proactive stance, looking after our children, not just physically and emotionally, but really spiritually, thinking about, you know, how we can pray for them, how we can come alongside them, how we can act, in loco parentis, in a way. Yeah, it’s just a beautiful thing. And we’ve got particular folks in our church who are our kids are very close to and who have a real affection for. So it’s a great blessing. What a blessing. What a privilege.

Graham Nicholls (38:38)

Yeah, yeah. Can you imagine this in the church setting you’re in now, or can you can you imagine this is not happening in UK churches, Lizzie?

Lizzie Harewood (38:48)

Sorry, what do you mean?

Graham Nicholls (38:50)

Yeah, it was too complicated a question, wasn’t it? I guess I was thinking we have moments of doing this and we have moments of not doing this. But I don’t know what your church experience is, what I’m saying. We do have some altogether intergenerational events, but probably not enough. We’ve never experimented with a kind of whole gathering. I mean, our church is about 200 [in the] congregation, so it would be a little bit more tricky to organise this. But we haven’t thought about a whole weeknight gathering where we then break into kind of individual groups.

Lizzie Harewood (39:26)

One of the things – so this is just probably not quite as organised as what you’re talking about, but on a Sunday evening, we have our evening service. And one of the things that we started was when our children were old enough to say stay up till, I don’t know, half seven, eight o’clock, we were like, “You’re coming along. And even if you’re just sitting there and doodling or reading a book…” when they were age six or whatever, they would be there. And they would be there for the whole service. And now that my son is 10, he’s able to sit in this and be under the ministry of the word. But also then because the service is a slightly different format and we usually have a shorter sermon and then a focus on, say, a particular issue or a particular need for prayer or a particular ministry within the church. I think that really helped the kids to feel part of the church and to understand how church works more. And then they just spent time with folks afterwards because it’s a bit of a treat being out at seven, half seven in the evening on a Sunday and they want to delay going to bed as long as possible. So they just go in and chat with them, with all the older or slightly older folks or much older folks. And because it’s a slightly more intimate setting, it just provides that wonderful opportunity. And now other folks have started bringing their kids along because they know, well, if the pastor’s kids are here, it’s a safe place for our kids to be. And they’re very good actually. But if it’s not as silent as it should be, there’s a level of ‘we bear with one another.’ Obviously, it wouldn’t work if there was chaos and lots of noise, but so far it’s worked fantastically.

Graham Nicholls (41:25)

Yeah, we will have to wrap in the next few minutes. But Cameron, is there any other big burdens of the book that you haven’t had the chance to mention yet? Any big messages that we will get when we – we’ll ask for the details in a minute – but any big messages from the book that we haven’t really touched on?

Cameron Shaffer (41:44)

I think the biggest would probably be [that], no matter what parents do, God’s the one in control. God establishes, the family, he establishes his church. So he grants gifts, those things to his people. And if we don’t use them well, if we don’t live into them well, we’re going upstream, we’re going against the wind. But the Holy Spirit is the Holy Wind. And the Holy Spirit is the one who saves. So you can have a parent who does everything right. God’s in control. You have a parent who does everything wrong, and God still saves their children. And for a lot of parents who have watched their adult children walk away from the faith, they are faced with – I know this as a pastor, I’m sure you guys have experienced this as well – a lot of anguish, a lot of reflection on what went wrong. Did I do everything right? And I spent a bit, quite a bit of time in the book talking about this. But the answer is maybe you didn’t – but the story’s not done yet. 

Cameron Shaffer (42:50)

Parenting is a lifelong calling. Parenting is not something that expires once children are adults. Now you don’t have the same kind of authority in their life anymore, but parents can still be firm and loving and affectionate and sincere. So one of the things I’ve witnessed anecdotally, and the data bears out, is that when your kids graduate from America High School and they move out of the home and they move on, if the parent then stops going to church – as the adult children see that, they might not explicitly think this, but they internalise, oh, it didn’t really matter. I’m not going back. So still as a parent, the number one way that you can be a good influence, a godly witness to your adult children, is your own sincere faith, to be embedded in the life of the church, and to have that openness, that posture towards your adult children. The amount of damage that is done to adult children – you see this in a lot of the deconstruction books and articles, are adult parents who refuse to acknowledge the wrongs that they did to their kids. Parents need it, but if you say, “I’m sorry, I need your forgiveness” – that amount of humility, that acknowledgement of grace, you can still do that. It’s hard, but in terms of communicating the value of the gospel and the way that the Christian faith has shaped your life in a real transformational way, that’s powerful. So parents can still have influence on their kids, even as adults, and especially if their kids have grandkids. The data is pretty clear that there is no negative downside to grandparents sharing their faith and influencing grandchildren, but the prodigals sometimes do come home, and it’s in God’s hands. And there’s no one better to rest in and trust in than God when our adult children, we raised to love Jesus, don’t, and we’re waiting and longing to see them come home. So that’s another key aspect of the book’s work.

Graham Nicholls (45:01)

Yeah, that sounds really good. Right, tell us the title of the book again, just for the recording, and who published it, where we can get it.

Cameron Shaffer (45:09)

The title of the book is Keeping Kids Christian. It is published by Baker, a publisher based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It can be found at bakerbookhouse.com and Amazon.

Graham Nicholls (45:23)

Yeah, brilliant. Well, really a lot to think about, and I’m really encouraged by what you’re doing with your church and your church family. So it’s been really great to hear about it, and thank you very much, Cameron, for being on Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. Thank you. 

Cameron Shaffer (45:39)

Thank you so much for having me.