Family Faith Formation Resources | Parenting

This article is part of the Family Faith Formation Toolkit - a collection of resources for equipping ministry leaders, parents, and caregivers with family faith practices and resources, brought to you by Faith Formation Ministries.

In the following links you’ll find creative resources and practices for parenting to use both in community and at home. All of the resources below are as helpful for those who work with parents, children, and youth as they are for parents and caregivers. These ideas can be seamlessly woven into existing church programs and into family life.

Parenting: In Community and At Home

Books

• Dear Parent: A Guide for Family Faith Formation by Laura Keeley and Robert J. Keeley. Using the framework of four "Building Blocks of Faith," this 80-page book encourages and equips parents as they help children find their place in God’s family, know God’s story, live in hope, and discover their calling.

• The Home Grown Handbook for Christian Parenting provides practical, real-world advice for family faith nurture and answers 111 questions parents ask. A small group study guide is also available here.

• Faithful Families: Creating Spiritual Moments at Home contains ideas for adding family faith moments to daily life.

• The practical ideas in the book I Wonder: Engaging a Child’s Curiosity about the Bible empowers parents to talk about the Bible with their kids and provides expert advice about what translations may be best for children, which passages and stories of the Bible are age appropriate, and what methods are best to help children learn as they read Scripture.

• Making a Home for Faith: Nurturing the Spiritual Life of Your Children by Elizabeth Caldwell is an excellent resource.

• Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager by Eugene Peterson. Willoughby CRC children’s pastor Liz Tolkamp in Langley, British Columbia, says that although this book has been around for years, she continues to recommend it for use with parenting small groups because of its readability, its brevity, and its helpful questions for discussing each chapter.

• Parenting in the Pew: Guiding Your Children into the Joy of Worship is filled with practical and encouraging advice on worshiping with children.

• The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family is a research-backed, practical, and easy-to-read guide that provides parents over 100 practical and tested ideas to build lasting faith in kids. Read an excerpt here.

Courses

• The 7-session study Home Grown Study Guide and its companion the Home Grown Handbook for Christian Parenting helps parents discover how to form faith in the everyday details of family life.

• Faithful Families: Creating Sacred Moments at Home author Traci Smith has created a four-session study guide to help introduce parents to the faith practices found in her book. Access the guide for free here.

• Parenting for Faith offers a free video-based course to help parents discover that they are perfectly positioned to show their children the reality of a life with God and to empower them to have their own vibrant two-way relationship with him. It’s suitable for use with small groups or individual families.

• At Beth Lyon-Suhring’s church they use Ted Talks as their parenting curriculum. Read the post Ted Talks for Parents to find out how they do it and to access a list of the talks they’ve used.

Videos

• Every Day in December introduces families to an idea for preparing their children for the birth of Jesus.

• A Normal Day is an ode to moms and a powerful reminder of how children experience love.

• “Racism is our inheritance. It doesn’t have to be our legacy. But we had better do something about it,” says pastor Scott Neely. In his Tedx Talk What Will I Teach My Son? he shares his family history of white privilege, describes what he’s learned about racism, and explains the three things he’ll teach his children. (For more resources on racism see the resources in the Justice section of this toolkit.)

• It’s Just a Phase reminds parents, grandparents, and all others who have the opportunity to influence children and teens to be present in their lives today.

• The Joy of the Mundane encourages families by pointing out that faith formation doesn't only happen in clean houses with perfect children at weekly designated discipleship times. It happens in the ordinary details of everyday life.

Websites

• The Parent Cue site and the free Parent Cue app feature a multitude of blogs and podcasts on topics like phases and stages, family life, faith, technology, and more.

• The goal of Parenting for Faith is to resource and equip parents and caregivers to confidently parent for faith in the midst of the mundane everyday bits of parenthood.

• The tagline of the Practicing Families blog is “Real families. Real life. Real grace.” It provides families with liturgies and thoughts on experiencing God in the midst of family life.

• growchristians.org aims “to create an online community of discipleship focused on the practical details of life at home” through its stories and reflections on family faith formation.

• Worshiping with Children by Carolyn Brown is intended primarily for worship planners but contains wonderful, lectionary-based tools for families who worship together.

• Bread Not Stones, a blog written by a mother and Presbyterian pastor, provides practical suggestions for parents and others who seek to nurture kids’ faith.

• Family Fire and HomeFront are searchable sites with a wealth of encouraging posts for parents, grandparents, and caregivers.

• The CRCNA Network’s section on Parenting is a helpful place for parents to find and share outstanding resources on family faith nurture.

• ParentFurther.com is an online resource to help families strengthen relationships through shared activities.

• The Bible Project is a non-profit animation studio that produces short-form, fully animated videos to make the biblical story accessible to everyone, everywhere. Although the video content is aimed at older teens and adults, we’ve included it here as a way to support parents who would like to become more familiar with the Bible.

QUESTIONS?

If you’re part of the Christian Reformed Church in North America and you have questions about how to equip ministry leaders, parents, and caregivers with family faith practices and resources, one of Faith Formation Ministries’ Regional Catalyzers would love to talk with you about ideas and strategies.