Kara Powell > Quotes

“Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophical theology at Yale University, writes, “The state of shalom is the state of flourishing in all dimensions of one’s existence: in one’s relation to God, in one’s relation to one’s fellow human beings, in one’s relation to nature, and in one’s relation to oneself. Evidently justice has something to do with the fact that God’s love for each and every one of God’s human creatures takes the form of God desiring the shalom of each and every one.”1”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“Kids experience Jesus Christ when adults in the church give them grace, time, and genuine love with no hidden agenda.”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“In reality, Jesus’ vision for intergenerational relationships was anything but cute. It was and is both radical and revolutionary.”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“How you express and live out your faith may have a greater impact on your son or daughter than anything else.”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“Here’s another alarming statistic: only 20 percent of college students who leave the faith planned to do so during high school. The remaining 80 percent intended to stick with their faith but didn’t.4”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“Every single emergency room in every single hospital adjoining or near a college campus stocks extra supplies on Thursday nights — rape kits for the sexual assault victims, IV fluids for those who are dehydrated from alcohol-induced vomiting, and blood for drunk driving accidents.”11”
― Kara E. Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“Teenagers with doubts who felt the freedom and had the opportunity to express their questions actually showed greater faith
maturity.

Put more simply, it's not doubt that is toxic to faith-it's silence. Tough questions are most likely to sabotage faith when adults stifle
them.”
― Kara Powell, 3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager

“After all, we try hard as parents, but ultimately it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to build deep faith in our kids. (I hope you sighed in relief after you read that sentence. I did after I wrote it.) Because God is the one who ultimately sticks with us and our kids, we can trust him to walk with our families no matter what we face.”
― Kara E. Powell, The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family: Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids

“congregation. For example, rather than ask for a volunteer to fill a role, they ask for participation in the community. Volunteers feel like they are giving time and energy in order to fulfill a civic duty. In contrast, participants contribute work essential to the life of the church, work that binds them to other members of the body. “Many of our high school kids help with children’s ministry, not because they have to but because they love it. One beautiful thing that we do is set out a prayer chair in our kids’ ministry. You can sit in the prayer chair and tell God whatever you want. When we do the prayer chair, the high school kids all want to sit in it too. It warms my heart that they are modeling prayer for our younger kids.” —Susan, ministry volunteer”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“The first job of a leader is to define reality.”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“As today’s young people seek a more coherent sense of identity, the stress that formerly hit them in college, or even after college, now begins in middle school (or younger). By high school, many middle- and upper-class teenagers juggle digital calendars jammed with extracurricular activities that begin as early as 6:00 a.m., after-school study sessions, college entrance exam tutoring, and sports team practices that leave them trailing home after 10:00 p.m.11 Followed by two to three hours of homework.12 Athletes used to specialize in a single sport in high school; now that starts in elementary school. Previously, musicians and artists could freely dabble in various media and instruments throughout high school; present-day teenagers have to claim their craft in middle school. No longer can a kid flirt with a handful of hobbies, discovering various facets of their personality and passions, before choosing what they love. There’s so little time for thoughtful and measured exploration in high school that young adults end up exploring their skills and passions well into their twenties. A recent study showed that 13- to 17-year-olds are more likely to feel “extreme stress” than adults.13 Even more alarming is that the adults closest to young people are often blind to their heightened stress levels. Approximately 20 percent of teenagers confess that they worry “a great deal” about current and future life events. But only 8 percent of the parents of these same teenagers report that their child is experiencing a great deal of stress.14 Parents often don’t realize the constant heat felt by adolescents, increasing the pressure for them to figure out who they are and what’s important to them. After adolescence, emerging adults race from the proverbial stress-filled pot into the stress-fueled fire.15 Fewer college students are reporting “above-average” health since this question was first asked in 1985.16”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“As we interviewed parents who had developed enduring faith in their kids, one theme emerged: they made the cultivation of their own faith a priority.”
― Kara E. Powell, The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family: Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids

“The most important social influence in shaping young people’s religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents. — Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 56)”
― Kara E. Powell, The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family: Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids

“Amazing grace. Grace is what makes Christianity unique. In all other religions, you earn your salvation. There’s a ladder of good works you climb to reach God’s favor. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus smashes the ladder. Through the incarnation, God comes near to us, offering a gift of salvation that, like all true gifts, isn’t dependent upon our actions, our goodness, or our ability to clean ourselves up. It’s a gift we simply receive. And continue to receive as we stumble forward toward the author and perfecter of our faith.”
― Kara E. Powell, The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family: Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids

“And that segregation is causing kids to shelve their faith.”
― Kara Powell, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids

“But this appreciation for diversity—meaning an appreciation of others who are different—can also devolve into pluralism, meaning an acceptance of different religious and value systems as equally valid.36 It takes intellectual, social, and worldview maturity to be committed to one belief system while simultaneously recognizing the value of other belief systems. Not all young people (or adults) have this maturity. Thus”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” I have”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“John Ortberg, also a research advisor and senior pastor, added, “You can’t build a great church with a bad student ministry, and you can’t build a great student ministry with a languishing church.”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“¿Qué dirían tus amigos que les gusta de ti? ¿Qué desearías que fuera distinto en nuestra familia? ¿Crees que nuestra familia está demasiado ocupada, no lo suficiente o en la justa medida? ¿Cómo te imaginas el mejor día de tu vida? ¿Qué te gusta de tu maestro en estos días? ¿Qué te gustaría que fuera distinto?”
― Kara Powell, Cómo criar jóvenes de fe sólida: Ideas diarias para edificar sobre convicciones firmes

“The first job of a leader is to define reality.”1”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“What if I’m not the Christian I want my kids to be? If you feel that way, you and I should start a club. It would be a very large club.”
― Kara E. Powell, The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family: Over 100 Practical and Tested Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Kids