Relationship is the greatest faith-shaping tool a parent possesses. Because kids learn about following Christ mostly from their parents, we have a huge responsibility to model authentic faith and its practice on a daily basis. Steve and Valerie Bell offer Faith-Shaped Kids as a practical tool to help parents maximize their relationship with their children in such a way as to draw them to faith. Filled with life lessons and useful suggestions, this resource helps readers ride out the roller-coaster ride called parenting. Faith-Shaped Kids is co-published with the Willow Creek Association (WCA). The WCA is affiliated with Willow Creek Community Church, the largest church in America, and serves thousands of pastors and Christian leaders through North America. Its primary goal is to foster local church transformation and vitality.

Family life is a spiritual path Is your family calendar so jammed that there’s never enough time to “be spiritual”? Maybe you need to think about spirituality in a new way. Author, editor, and speaker Tom McGrath shows how the hectic and ordinary moments of family life offer endless opportunities to live more deeply. This book is full of stories and ideas for parents who care about their children’s souls. McGrath suggests how we can foster a healthy spirituality in our children—while tending to our own spirits as well. He presents many useful lessons and practical strategies for passing on religious heritage, including: • Introducing children to sacred time • Examining the image of God we actively (or passively) present to our children • Fostering empathy to build our children’s moral character • Learning to pray creatively as a family • Developing spiritual disciplines as parents • Cultivating a spirit of forgiveness in the home “If you ever wanted to be a great and inspiring parent, this book gives you the tools to learn how.” —Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator, #1 New York Times best-selling series Chicken Soup for the Soul

Fostering faith in children is a shared privilege and responsibility of parents, godparents, and the church community. We promise our children at baptism that we will support them in their faith formation--in the formation of their relationship with God. We need to take this promise seriously. This book is intended to be an accessible and helpful resource for parents and other adults who seek to foster children's faith. This book succinctly explores many ways we can support children's faith formation, including our day-to-day interactions with children, the images of God we share with them, how we pray together, the rituals we create, service opportunities we provide, music we share together, the stories we tell and listen to, our celebration of the sacraments, and more. While this book has a distinctly Roman Catholic orientation, much of the content will be relevant for a wider Christian audience. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, this book is rooted in the conviction that the God we seek relationship with and that we hope to foster our children's relationship with is one who is infinitely loving, welcoming, and always yearning for deeper connection with us.

During the 20th Century, Sunday school attendance fell from 55% to only 4% of children. Mission-shaped Children will show you how to turn this statistic around. The book outlines the many obstacles that are currently preventing growth in children’s work in the Church, and suggests practical and effective strategies for overcoming these.

Two seasoned parents share the personal story of how they made conscious, faithful choices to raise six successful and courageous children. Michelle and Jim Capra have given all parents a precious, practical gift by sharing their own honest journey to create six children of character. Their struggles to develop habits of excellence, accountability, and moral standards in a loving, godly way are lessons for us all. I only wish I had read this book when I was raising my own children! Barbara A. Glanz Hall of Fame Speaker and Author of "Priceless Gifts - Using What God's Given You to Bless Others" As parents to six children, what really resonates with me about James and Michelle Capra's book, 'Raising Courageous Children in a Cowardly Culture', is their candidness. I truly appreciate that he withstands the tide of political correctness and states what parents today really need to hear. This is the go-to resource for raising upright children. David Heavener, Evangelist, Revelation Media Ministry

Originally written in 1976, revised in 200, and translated in six languages, this classic critique of Christian education is newly revised and expanded and includes Westerhoff's overview and perspective on the state Christian education over the past forty years-plus his role in that history. According to Westerhoff, instead of guiding faith formation within the family, the church, and the school, we relegate religious education to Sunday morning classes. There, children learn the facts about religion, but how will they learn or experience faith? How can we nourish and nurture the faith of children, instead of only teaching the facts?

In most churches, Christian education for children is run by enthusiastic volunteers from the worshipping community. But how much support and training do they receive? Do they get the opportunity to explore and apply principles of child development or current theories of faith development? And to what extent are they supported by their ministers and congregations with a clear focus on children's work? Including empirical research and drawing on the author's extensive experience of working with children, Faith in Children offers a window into the process going on inside our children and enables those who work with them to understand what makes a particular child tick. With insights into a range of teaching methods, learning styles and the unique spirituality of children, this book suggests how adults can truly learn from children as they learn from us. There are tips for ministers and educators on how this precious teaching and nurturing resource can be sustained and used to work with children in a more effective manner. Through this increasing knowledge and understanding, adults can come closer to understanding children understanding God.

Much ministry to children looks more like mere entertainment than authentic spiritual formation. But what if children's ministries were rooted in a mind set whereby we taught children, with our words and actions, how the story of God, the story of church history, the story of the local community, and the story of the child intersect and speak to one another? What if children's ministry was less about downloading information into kids' heads and more about leading them into these powerful, compelling stories? Beckwith aims to help ministers and parents create a ministry that captures children's imaginations not just to keep them occupied, but to live as citizens of the kingdom of God. In addition to providing theological reasons for formational children's ministry, the book offers examples of how Ivy and other practitioners are implementing a formational model.

From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children's involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood provides a rich resource for students and scholars of this interdisciplinary field, and addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective. Divided into five thematic parts, the volume provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools. - Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa - An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors - Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage