A Crisis of Faith

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- When Jen Thompson looks at family pictures, the memories are still painful.

Her parents divorced when she was 14, and along with the sense of loss came a crisis of faith.

"My father was emotionally just barren -- just not available," she says.

"So I came across as thinking that my father was just impossible to please. And that definitely carried over into my relationship with God -- that I felt God was just very judgmental. God was just waiting for me to slip up and make a mistake, and that I was, in God's eyes, unforgivable and unlovable."

It's a surprisingly common experience.

A recent national survey of adults who were kids when their parents divorced found that the separation had a major impact on their spiritual lives. They were, for example, much less likely to go to church or to call themselves religious than those adults whose parents stayed married.

"One extraordinary finding in our study was that of those grown children of divorce who were active in a church at the time of their parents' divorce, two-thirds say that no one in the clergy or congregation reached out to them at that time," said Elizabeth Marquardt, the author of "Between Two Worlds," a study of children and divorce.

Her study found that adults often feel the church abandoned them as children when their parents were divorcing and that their pastors were no better than anyone else in helping them cope with the experience.

"At the time of divorce," Marquardt said, "people are reluctant to reach out to the children because they don't know what to say; they don't want to offend the parents. They're afraid they might upset the child, so they don't reach out."

Jeff Williams, a leader of the Association of Marriage and Family Ministries, was 10 when his parents divorced. He says no one seemed to notice the cataclysm that was taking place in his life.

"We went to church and the older ladies were complaining about the temperature of the sanctuary, and the ushers, the people who served, went on with their rituals, and nothing seemed to change there, while my life had radically changed.

"And I know now they didn't know what to say," Williams said. "But it's like you have had a leg blown off or you've had a wound and it's terrible and nobody sees it."

Linda Ranson Jacobs, executive director of Divorce Care for Kids, or DC4K, says her group's program, which has been adopted by some 2,000 congregations, argues that divorce affects every area of a child's life -- emotionally, spiritually and intellectually.

"We wanted to put together a program to teach churches what the children are experiencing, the grief that they're going through, the stress that they're under, and bring them into the church family," Jacobs said.

"You know, what better place for a child who's lost their earthly family to be than in a church family," she said.

Continued on page 2: Working on your image of God... »