Forming Faith: Discipling the Next Generation in a Post-Christian Culture is by Matt Markins, Sam Luce, and Mike Handler, published by Moody. It won the 2025 ECPA Christian Book Award in the Ministry Resources category.
Who wrote it, and why that shapes the book
All three authors come out of Awana, the children’s discipleship organization that has been running club programs in churches for decades. That background is the book’s greatest strength and also the thing that sets its angle.
These are people with access to a lot of data about what happened to kids who went through church programs and then left, or did not. The book is built on that rather than on one pastor’s impressions, and it shows.
Know which book you are buying
Worth being precise, because this page previously sold it as a father’s guide to family devotions.
It won its award in Ministry Resources, and that is the right category. The primary reader is someone thinking about how a church disciples children: a children’s pastor, a ministry volunteer, an elder looking at what the church actually produces. Much of the argument concerns what is broken in current children’s ministry models and why.
A father will still get real value from it, and the authors clearly intend the home to be central rather than an afterthought. But it is a strategic book about faith formation, not a how-to for family worship. If you want a script for what to do at the dinner table tomorrow, this is not that book. If you want to understand why the last thirty years of children’s ministry has produced the results it has, it is excellent.
The argument
Broadly: that a great deal of children’s ministry has optimized for engagement, attendance, and fun, and has produced adults whose faith did not survive contact with a secular culture. The authors are not sentimental about it and they do not blame the culture alone. They ask what was actually formed in those kids, and conclude that the answer was often thinner than anyone intended.
From there they argue for formation over programming, with the home and the church working on the same thing rather than the church running an entertainment operation the family outsources to.
Where CalledToBetter stands
One correction to what this page said before. The old version concluded that the book helps men “obey their role as spiritual heads of their households.” That was our wording, not the book’s, and it goes further than CalledToBetter goes.
Our position is that men and women have different but equal roles: equal in worth and dignity before God, with distinct callings that Scripture describes. We hold that and we stop there. We do not issue rulings on the contested specifics, and we are not going to define household headship in our own voice as though the matter were settled among Christians who all take Scripture seriously. A father’s responsibility for his children’s faith is plain enough in Scripture to say without any of that.
What we removed
A “Team Reflections” section describing a reviewer’s bedtime conversation with his son about peer pressure and another reviewer’s new family prayer commitment. Both were invented and are gone. The claim that every chapter ends with reflections and discussion questions could not be verified, so it is no longer stated as fact.
Confirmed and kept: the three authors, the Awana background, Moody as publisher, the 2025 ECPA award, and roughly 256 pages.
Worth your time if
You have children and you have wondered whether what your church is doing with them is working. That question is worth taking seriously, and this is the most credible recent attempt to answer it. It is also a genuinely useful book to hand to a children’s pastor.