She sat in her mother’s lap like a little princess in her full-skirt white dress. Her mother and father were center stage in the church, gazing at her with deep love and sweet pride. The congregation glowed. She cooed and smiled.

Is it possible that 18 years from now when she graduates from high school, she’ll graduate from church, as well? There’s about a 50/50 chance, according to Kara E. Powell, PhD, Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary.

In an interview with the Leadership Journal, an online ministry for pastors, support staff and lay leaders, Dr. Powell said statistics indicate a large shift when high school seniors graduate.

“My best estimate is that between 40 and 50 percent of seniors from youth groups really struggle to continue in their faith and connect with a faith community after graduation.”

Some reports say that by the time they reach 30 years old, only 80 percent of those young people will still attend church. However, if they’re like me, they’ll come back to church after having an adorable little bundle of their own like that one sitting with her parents. Some new parents decide they want to raise their child in church or in the faith of their own childhood.

But the Sunday morning I saw little Madelyn, the church wasn’t holding a “baby dedication service,” as it’s more commonly called at various Protestant churches. It wasn’t a baptism or a Christening. It was a “Parent Dedication” ceremony and the parents completed an hour and a half class beforehand to learn more about Biblical principles of parenting and what it means for them to dedicate their child to God.

“Chuck Swindoll said, ‘The church seldom resurrects what the home puts to death,’” said Community Christian Church Pastor Greg Curtis in an email after the service. “We just can’t compete with the God-given influence and hours of time that parents have at their disposal.

“The difference between a child dedication and a parent dedication is who is accountable,” Curtis added. “We started the Parent Dedication Class in an effort to shift the emphasis in responsibility for raising children spiritually from the church to the parents, with church resourcing them rather than doing it for them.”

Community Christian Church, located in Yorba Linda, Calif., has offered the class to parents of young children and new infants for about 10 years. During the class, the church tries to differentiate between God’s role and the parents’ role by putting it in terms of owner vs. manager. The manager, the parents, should serve the owner, God, and follow the owners’ apparent directives, which can be found in the Bible, or what could be called the Employee Manual.

A parent who took the class explained, “We were taught that we are the role models for the children and we have the greatest responsibility in training our children to follow the Lord, and to continue down that path the rest of their lives.”

Aside from the short parenting class, the church also decided to focus on intergenerational worship services which include the whole family rather than separating them by children, youth, and adults. This approach reverses a trend started many years ago in Protestant churches, born from research done decades earlier, according to Dr. Powell.

“We realized in the 1940s that we were not offering teens enough focused attention,” Powell told the Leadership Journal. “So what did we do? We started offering them too much. All of a sudden, churches had adult pastors and youth pastors, adult worship teams and youth worship teams, adult mission trips and youth mission trips. And there’s a place for that. But we’ve ended up segregating — and I use that word intentionally — our kids from the rest of the church.”

Powell said it is like having the “kids’ table” at holiday dinners. “The adult table had pleasant conversation, while the kids’ table usually degenerated into a Jell-O snorting contest.”

Separate spiritual feeding may not offer the same nourishment either. So, Community Christian Church is part of a trend reversal: returning to congregational worship, where the entire congregation — young children, teens, adults and the elderly — gather together at the same time and share the same experience.

Powell says that teens sometimes skip church service and come only for youth group. As a result, high school graduates are telling researchers that they don’t know how to find a church. “After years at the kids’ table, they know what youth group is, but they don’t know what church is,” adds Powell.

Churches — and, more importantly, families — that want everyone in the family to understand the importance of spiritual nourishment should focus on bringing everyone to the table…together.

Madelyn’s parents hope that, 18 years from now, she’ll still have a seat there.

Jaletta Albright Desmond is a self-syndicated columnist who writes about faith, family, and the fascinatingly mundane aspects of daily life. She lives in Davidson with her husband and two daughters. Contact her at jdesmond@bdtonline.com