Leave Your Parents Not Your Faith

Every year I minister to a lot of college freshmen as well as teach about 25 high school seniors. One of the biggest struggles I find for these students relates to making their faith their own. They were raised in the church, but they begin to feel like the faith they profess is their parents’ faith, not their own. 

Recently, I stumbled upon a short, but seemingly powerful answer from Scripture about a starting place in this discussion. And that’s all this claims to be—a starting place, not a full-scale model. But still, it was impactful for my students, so I wish to share it with the hope it might be helpful for others. In short, I realized that students at this age are preparing to leave the home (high school seniors) or have just left the home for the first time (college freshmen). The struggle they are feeling is one of separation: how do I chart my own path? 

A few weeks back I was teaching Augustine’s Confessions and shared how Augustine was struggling to accept the Christian faith, but not because it was unconvincing. Actually, he found that the answers he had been searching for over many years seemed to be answered in the Church. I proposed to the class that Augustine’s struggle may have been that his mother, the one that he had worked so hard to separate from when he left North Africa for Milan, was fervently praying for his conversion. If he accepted the Christian faith, I proposed, he would have to admit his mother was right and embrace her faith. But as I said this, I realized that it was not, in the end, her faith, but his own, even if it matched hers, for the Christian faith is both collective (the Church) and individual (my own personal, saving faith). 

I began to consider, “What if my students, like Augustine, feel like their desire to leave their parents requires that they leave their (their parents’) faith?” Then I shared with my students from Genesis 2:24—“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The Scriptures are clear that the desire to chart our own path and separate from our parents is biblical. We ought to grow up and chart that path. But the desire to chart our own path in a biblical sense does not mean abandoning the faith. In our struggle to navigate the difficult waters of “adulting,” the answer is not to abandon the faith (ours and our parents’), but to press into that faith for answers on how to leave our parents well. 

How we do that is an article for another day. But my encouragement for you today is to help students understand that the desire to separate from their parents is good and biblical; the idea that doing so requires abandoning faith is nothing but an absurd lie from the enemy.