Cameron S. Shaffer. Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship. Baker, 2026. $21.99 (pb). 192 pp.
A number of years ago, the church where we were members for seven years before moving half-way across the country found itself in the middle of yet another baby boom. It came on the heels of multiple other baby waves in that church, which had effectively maxed out the capacity of nursery and children’s ministry volunteers up to that point. And so, the church instituted for a time a system affectionately known as “the draft.” All able-bodied adults in the church who could pass a background check were added to the rotation of one or more of the following: infant nursery, toddler nursery, children’s church during the sermon, and Sunday School. Exemptions were available by petition only for those whose back troubles or similar health issues could make serving in these capacities impossible. The church’s elders and pastoral staff were subject to the draft along with the rest of the members.
It was, as far as I could see, a highly successful system at the practical organizational level. A lot of volunteers were needed to staff the many areas of service, and the draft was a way to do so without making volunteers serve more than once every couple of months—perfectly doable. But second, this was a concrete way for the church body to fulfill the vow to assist parents with discipling their children—a vow that the congregation as a whole took as part of every baptism. Last but not least, the draft created an even greater sense of intergenerational community within the church body.
I fondly remembered the draft again while reading pastor Cameron S. Shaffer’s new book, Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship. Sometimes one may read a book and think: this could have just been a short essay. In this case, though, the reverse is true. Shaffer’s essay for Mere Orthodoxy became the foundation for this needed book.
Shaffer opens with a problem that we see unfolding in our own churches and communities: “The single greatest religious shift in American history is underway, driven by children of the church walking away from the Christian faith.” When we read about the rise of religious “nones,” many of them are people who grew up in church but left it as adults. And so, Shaffer aims to answer two connected questions stemming from this phenomenon. First, how and why do children who grow up in church choose to leave their faith behind as adults? And second, how can we prevent our children becoming part of that statistic? In other words, how do we raise kids who are equipped to keep their faith in this uncertain and volatile modern world?
Persons are not products to design or machines to program, Jake Meador reminds in his foreword. There are no guarantees and no magic formulas for raising kids who will love God. Still, there are practices that can be helpful to implement—for parents and for the larger body of Christ. First and foremost, there is no substitute for daily praying for our children, over our children, and with our children. But also, for those who like numbers nevertheless, ample up-to-date data exists for church activities for kids that are common but are not, in fact, as helpful as we may believe.
Relying on this data, Shaffer addresses some common misconceptions about discipling kids. Too often, Christian parents look to church to provide children’s discipleship programs—Sunday School and Wednesday night classes, a vibrant youth group, and VBS, to name just a few. Indeed, children’s programming is the key factor many parents consider when choosing a new church. And yet, as research has shown, “Kids become secular not when they go to college or enter the workforce or move out of their parent’s home but when they are children.” All the church programs that we trust for leading our kids to Christ, in other words, sometimes have the opposite effect. Why is that? In part, because some kids come to associate these children’s programs at church with childhood. In the process, they begin to see Christianity itself as the stuff of childhood, which they then outgrow as they leave home. But the larger explanation has to do with the faith of parents.
What happens at home is much more influential on a child’s faith than what happens at church. Faith, as it happens, is caught no less—and probably more—than taught, and parents are key to this process. It is, perhaps, not shocking to find research confirming that highly involved, relationally warm parents who have high standards for their children in all areas of life, including religion, are also the most likely of all to pass the faith to their children. Overly permissive or domineering parents, on the other hand, are less likely to raise children who will become believing adults. Seeing blatant parental hypocrisy is perhaps the most devastating blow for children’s fledgling faith. But parental apathy or a lack of maturity in the faith is likewise destructive.
Looking at both key Scripture passages and the abundant sociological research now available, Shaffer encourages churches to disciple parents, first and foremost, equipping them in turn to disciple their children. For example, as he has observed in his own pastoral experience, many parents simply do not know how to pray, so they do not know how to pray with their children. Furthermore, one problematic result of churches pouring their resources mostly into children’s programming is a myopic view on the part of both churches and parents themselves that this is enough. Relying on programs can make some parents, in other words, back away from doing as much spiritually with their children at home, assuming that they have effectively delegated this task. But church programming for kids can never replace the active spiritual leadership of the parents at home—rather, it must supplement it.
This is not to say that church programming for kids is not important. I see the utter delight that my children regularly receive from the classes and activities at our church. Furthermore, many retired adults in our church have become grandparent figures for my children, regularly inviting them to activities outside the church (e.g., grandparents day at the local fair), making it a point to speak with them each Sunday, writing notes of encouragement to them, remembering their birthdays. Older kids likewise need such support. Shaffer notes the need for church programs to support teens and college-aged believers in their transition to adulthood—a time when so many may drop out of church not for any terrible reason, but simply because they may have moved and couldn’t figure out how to find a new church. I also appreciated his exhortation for adults in the church to offer hospitality to kids and teens—discipleship happens not only within the church building, after all, but also in other interactions.
But even more important than programming specifically for children are the regular corporate practices of the local church as an assembly of God’s people—and chief among these is the reading and preaching of God’s Word in Sunday services. Shaffer is a big fan of keeping kids present for the entire service, rather than dismissing younger kids to children’s church time during the sermon: “kids learn far more doctrine and information from ‘adult’ sermons and services than they are often given credit for.” It is good for the body of Christ to learn together.
Shaffer’s book is encouraging and practical. It is also sobering. Church programs cannot save our children, and most parents presumably know this at some level—even as we may yet hope for the easy fix. I think about this as both a parent and an adult convert without personal experience myself as a child in the church. I pray that my two younger children, who have been in church since just a few days old, will grow up to love God and the church. And I pray for a stronger faith for my adult son. Yet I am also married to a historian of American evangelicalism, who has grown up in a faithful home, attending church anytime the doors were open. He too, nevertheless, found himself struggling with doubts and questions as an adult—before reconstructing his belief more deeply and earnestly in his thirties.
Spiritual questions are complicated, to say the least. Passing the faith could never be an exact science akin to teaching kids long division or basic literacy. Still, God is calling us as parents to disciple first and foremost our own kids, but also to be involved in discipling other children in our churches. And in the process, we will grow ourselves.