Father’s Day is often an opportunity to celebrate the ordinary sacrifices fathers make for their families.
Children make cards, families gather for meals and dads are thanked for fixing what breaks, driving to practices, paying bills, helping with homework, giving advice, offering quiet reassurance and showing up in countless ways that rarely attract attention.
Those contributions deserve to be celebrated. Yet this Father’s Day, fathers have another reason to be encouraged.
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At Communio, the ministry I founded to strengthen marriages and family life, we recently partnered with the Institute for Family Studies on a major new report that shows dads may be underestimating one of the most important contributions they make to their children. Beyond providing for their families, they play a massive role in determining whether their children carry Christian faith into adulthood.
The report, Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations, draws on data from more than 60,000 Americans and examines why some children retain religious belief and practice as adults while others leave it behind. While much of the discussion around faith formation focuses on churches, youth ministries and Christian education, the study suggests that fathers themselves may be one of the most important influences in whether children keep the faith.
‘Surprising findings’
One of the more surprising findings is that many fathers do not fully appreciate the role they play on faith. Only 17% of dads felt they were the person primarily responsible for how their children learn about religion, compared with 39% of mothers. That gap suggests they see faith formation as something led by others — perhaps youth leaders or Sunday school teachers. But the evidence points elsewhere.
The data is even stronger when fathers move from the sidelines into active participation. Children who attended church weekly with both mom and dad were significantly more likely to attend church weekly as adults than children who attended with only one parent.
Similar results emerged when researchers examined prayer, belief in God, reading sacred texts and the importance of religion in everyday life. The findings suggest that children notice whether faith is simply something their father endorses or whether it is something he actively participates in alongside them.
Encouragement
Perhaps even more striking was what the report revealed about the relationship between fathers and their children. Adults who described their relationship with their father as very good were substantially more likely to attend church, pray regularly, believe in God and describe religion as highly important in their lives.
The report found that when parents have regular conversations that encourage their child’s faith, those children were twice as likely to attend church, pray daily, and say religion was very important to them in young adulthood.
That should encourage fathers who sometimes feel ill-equipped to guide their children spiritually. Many dads worry that they don’t read the Bible enough, that they lack answers to difficult questions, or that they are somehow less qualified than pastors and ministry leaders.
But influencing children begins much earlier and in much simpler ways. Children are paying attention long before they ask difficult theological questions. They notice whether faith is taken seriously, whether prayer is natural, whether church attendance is a priority and whether Christianity appears to shape everyday decisions. Fathers are teaching far more often than they realize.
Ordinary routines
The research also places fatherhood within a broader family context. A father’s influence is strongest when it is woven into the ordinary routines of family life rather than compressed into occasional contact. In short, marriage matters for fathers.
Research on unmarried, non-resident fathers has found that the vast majority see their children only a limited number of days each month within a few years after they separate from the mother of their child. This narrows the opportunities for the daily modelling, conversation and reinforcement through which faith is most often passed on. For churches, this makes marriage not a separate issue from faith formation and fatherhood but part of the structure that allows parents to pass faith on.
Dads shouldn’t be discouraged — the report points fathers toward forms of influence that are available to almost every man. Influence is not primarily about wealth, status or extraordinary talent but presence, participation and relationship. The fathers who leave the deepest mark are not necessarily those who do extraordinary things. More often, they are the fathers who are there, who build trust, who worship with their children and who create homes where faith becomes part of ordinary life.
Faith is rarely passed on through a single dramatic moment. More often it is transmitted through hundreds of ordinary interactions accumulated over many years. It is learned around dinner tables, during family prayers, on the drive to church and in the countless moments when children are deciding whether the faith they hear about is also visible in the lives of the people they trust most.
That is a message fathers should hear as encouragement, not condemnation. They do not need to be bible scholars to shape the faith of their children. If they’re present, engaged, consistent and willing to demonstrate faith, good times are ahead for both them and their children.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by J.P. De Gance, founder and president of Communio, a national ministry that equips churches to strengthen families. See communio.org for more.
