Best way to get teens to church is to go with them
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___HOUSTON--The best way for parents to ensure their children will attend church once they leave home is to make a regular practice of attending church as a family while the kids live at home.
___That's the conclusion of a yearlong study by Carol Lytch, coordinator of Lilly Endowment programs for strengthening congregational leadership at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. She presented her findings during the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Houston this fall.
___"Families who cultivate the collective understanding that 'our family attends church' tend to produce teens who believe they should be there," she said.
___Over a year's time, Lytch followed the lives of 41 high school seniors in Louisville, Ky. The teens were at least loosely affiliated with Catholic, evangelical Protestant or mainline Protestant churches. She interviewed both the teens and their parents, and she attended school and church functions to observe their lives.
___Issues of race, class and social status were largely held constant to focus strictly on the issue of how faith values are transmitted to teens in a particular sample. The sample was almost all white, middle-class and suburban.
___The focal question she asked the high school seniors was, "Do you intend to be active in the church after you leave home?"
___While admittedly a premature indicator of what the young adults actually will do after high school, this question provides a window into the motivation they carry, Lytch said. And it is a question she cross-tabulated with responses from teens and parents alike to create a picture of what factors most influence teens toward a lifestyle of church attendance.
___Teen responses about future church attendance fell into three broad categories, which she labeled "loyalty," "provisional loyalty" and "unlikely loyalty."
___Lytch found the No. 1 factor influencing older teens' commitment to church attendance is the personal behavior of their parents.
___This is true for church attendance while living at home and predicted church attendance after leaving home.
___Regarding current church attendance, nearly 93 percent of the teens she studied replicated the pattern of church attendance lived out by one or both parents. "If parental frequencies differed, in all cases the teen replicated the pattern of the less-frequently attending parent," she noted.
___Likewise, "if parents living in the teens' household both attended church weekly, teens tended to predict they would be active in the church after they left home. If just one of the parents attended less than weekly, teen religious loyalty plummeted."
___Parenting style also plays a predictable role in this finding, she reported. Teens from families with the most permissive parenting styles were less likely to attend church regularly as teenagers and said they would be unlikely to attend church regularly once they left home.
___Teen commitment to church attendance was shaped more positively by every other style of parenting along the continuum, except the most permissive style.
___More than half the families in Lytch's study maintained a rule that "in our family, we attend church." Among these families, all but one teen predicted she would attend church after she left home. None of these teens predicted they would be unlikely to attend church.
___In contrast, only two teens from homes where one or both parents did not attend church regularly were in the habit of attending church regularly themselves now.
___"Teens, in and of themselves, cannot be expected to have the inner strength to keep participating in church on their own unless their parents urge them to do so," Lytch reported. "After young teens are confirmed and/or baptized and become active members of the church, they still are not mature enough to be committed to their community of faith.
___"If they are going to continue in their religious tradition in the late teen years, they benefit from the help of their parents or other adults who are close to them. The religious individualist stance that emphasizes choice actually hinders the teens' choice for religious participation unless the adults in the family have exercised their choice in favor of regular church participation."
___Further, teens living in families where church attendance is required told Lytch this rule is a supportive push rather than a dreaded requirement.
___One teen told her: "When I was little, I would say, 'Oh, do I have to go to church today?' and my mom would say, 'Get up, and you have to go to church,' and it was just something I did. ... Now I want to go to church, and I want to go to camp, and I want to go on choir tour, and it's because I want to."
___Despite the best intentions of churches to make their programs accessible to all, family finances do play a role in determining teens' participation, Lytch also found. Parents in lower-income families may be less likely to attend church themselves because of work commitments, which in turn produces a lower attendance rate among teens, she said.
___Church leaders should understand the monetary factor behind extra church activities has a bearing on church attendance as well, Lytch added.
___"Lower- and middle-income families have fewer resources to spend on church ski trips and church camps, as much as churches try to keep all activities affordable. Having to miss church activities for any reason, including working a part-time job, weakens the teen's church-based social network. If the teen participates in the full range of church youth activities, worship attendance tends to rise."
___The bottom line, Lytch said, is that the transmission of faith values is primarily influenced by parental role modeling, mixed with lesser influences from other variables.
___"When the link between home and church is strong, when teens assess their relationship with the parents as warm, and when there is a parent/teen social network in place, there is a higher level of religious loyalty exhibited by the teen."




The Baptist Standard