About InCommon Insights

InCommon Insights is the research engine behind that vision: a project studying children's and youth ministry inside churches, country by country, to see how the five priorities actually show up on the ground. The project currently spans more than 10,000 churches across 30-plus countries, with country-specific reports built to give each region's leaders a clear picture of their own context: what's working, and where the gaps remain.

The premise is straightforward: leaders make better decisions when they can see their own context clearly, not when they're handed conclusions imported from elsewhere. InCommon Insights hands leaders data, not a fixed plan, and lets them decide the next step for their own church. Report by report, country by country, the project is building toward what InCommon has already named as its goal: a global Church united in vision, still diverse in practice, moving together toward the same five priorities.

Three Studies Featured in InCommon Insights

This issue reviews three studies on children's and youth ministry: Growing Young, Faith Beyond Youth Group, and The Faith of Our Children. None of them are InCommon Insights research. Each is secondary research, existing studies that give our writers and reviewers a wider lens for interpreting the primary data InCommon Insights collects directly from churches in each country. When a pattern turns up in a country report, a leadership gap, a shift in how young people describe trust, these studies help explain why that pattern might be surfacing and what other researchers have already learned about it.

None of these three studies replace what InCommon Insights collects directly from local churches. What they add is context: language for naming a pattern once it turns up in a specific country's data, and some sense of why that pattern might exist in the first place. As more InCommon Insights reports come in, expect Research Radar to keep pairing country-level findings with studies like these, secondary research in service of one global picture of what helps the next generation grow in lasting faith.

What the Research Found

• Caring adult relationships are critical to faith formation. Children with a meaningful adult relationship show up far more engaged in the practices of faith, yet only 39% of parents say their child has one. Even without a strong parent relationship at home, a consistent adult mentor becomes the single biggest factor in a child's faith formation instead. 

• Bible engagement is foundational, but often thin. 91% of leaders say they study the Bible with kids weekly. Only 52% say they teach a biblical worldview that often. Markins' concern: values taught without the full gospel story get absorbed into whatever cultural narrative is loudest instead.

• Even leaders aren't sure it's working. Leaders rate their ministry's overall success a 3.65 out of 5, and how carefully they evaluate that success even lower: 2.99. Nearly half say measuring their own impact is difficult, not for lack of care, but for lack of any shared way to do it.

Not a Conviction Problem

Churches don’t lack care or clarity. Leaders can describe, in detail, exactly what forms lasting faith in a child. What's missing is the harder, more practical work of closing the distance between what a ministry values and what its calendar, budget, and training make room for. The fix may not be a new theology of childhood discipleship. It's rebuilding relational time back into systems built for something else. 

What Children Said

One theme rose above every other, in every country. Researchers called it human connectivity: the love, trust, and support children receive from family, friends, and community. It ran underneath nearly all ten other themes researchers found, less a theme of its own and more the soil the others grew out of.

Six Signs, One Underlying Pattern

From those interviews, a working group of theologians built six "signs of hope": Compassion, Joy, Purpose, Resilience, Wisdom, and Spiritual Life.

But when the finished survey was tested with more than 4,600 adolescents, the six signs turned out to be tightly correlated with each other. This suggests hope may not break into six separate ingredients so much as one underlying experience wearing different faces.

Spiritual Life also proved the hardest sign to measure consistently. Researchers only asked those questions in three of the eight countries, citing sensitivities around measuring spiritual constructs across diverse faith backgrounds, even in a study built specifically to capture children's experience of God's love.