Saint Paul Lutheran Church - Wheaton, Illinois

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Our Strategy for Raising Faithful Children: Faithful Adults

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to you children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.
--Deuteronomy 6:6-7

Want to know what had the deepest influence on my faith growing up?

Seeing my parents each in turn take our church’s two-year Crossways classes, and carrying around these giant red binders full of study helps to guide them in reading the Bible from Genesis through Revelation.
Overhearing my parents talk about how the church wouldn’t have such financial issues and we’d be able to pay our parochial school teachers a decent salary if everyone just gave their part (which told me about their own giving).
Practicing Sabbath-keeping every Sunday, which always involved worship in the morning, a Slurpee from 7-Eleven afterward, and usually doing stuff around the house in the afternoon (supposedly garden chores were a kind of recreating).
Seeing my dad pray silently in the pew each week after taking Communion.

To be honest, I don’t recall being much impressed with Sunday School or youth ministry at my home church, and confirmation class was at times downright dreadful. Worship services did not go out of their way to be “kid friendly.” But because I had parents—and also Lutheran schoolteachers and coaches—who led by example, even when the church’s ministries were lacking, the message got across and took root in my heart.

Sometimes, of course, when that parental modeling is thin or absent, God promotes aunts or uncles or grandparents or an older sibling or a trusted friend into a primary faith mentoring role. God is resourceful that way. But the truth of the matter is the same: we learn to trust God and live the Christian way of life through the example of others. Or, as our Making Disciples curriculum puts it, by apprenticeship.

This fact in no way diminishes the importance of Sunday School or ROOTS or Connections or our new KAMP program on Wednesday nights for K-8th graders. Indeed, there are some things that these group-designed ministries can do uniquely well, and often they bring adults and kids together in learning. Still, all you have to do is add up the hours of “faith incubation time” to recognize the church’s Christian education ministries for what they are: supporting players in a process whose center lies in family life.

This is one major reason why you are by now starting to see a renewed energy around St. Paul for adult faith formation ministry—because it’s at the heart of our strategy to communicate the Gospel to our young. We know that if we aren’t walking the walk ourselves, leading by example, our youth will quickly conclude that something like confirmation is just a strange hoop they have to jump through on their way to the wilderness.

Hence the Book of Faith Initiative. And hence our new adult catechumenate called BASIC. Hence the importance of faith-growing opportunities and outreach to twenty- and thirty-somethings, to prepare them in advance to be faith examplars before they have vocations as parents or godparents, as aunts or uncles. Hopefully in the years to come we start to see increased small group opportunities, prayer covenants formed between parents, and babysitting co-ops so that parents can more easily attend faith formation activities, enjoy fellowship with Christian peers, and get away for date nights.

You parents out there (so I’ve heard) sometimes feel guilty about being too immature in your faith to pass it on to your kids. At the same time, parents feel guilty when they have to say “no” or imagine they are inconveniencing a child in order to participate in something that strengthens their own spiritual life. The first kind of guilt doesn’t help, and the second simply isn’t warranted, given all the eventual good fruits..

Now I don’t have any easy answers as to how to make it all fit. But I do know this: when my parents studied those giant red Crossways binders for two years, and could be overheard at home talking enthusiastically about how much they were learning in their class, I never felt ignored or unattended to. And I certainly couldn’t claim they expected a level of Christian education for me they didn’t expect of themselves. All I thought was: “Wow, all that Bible stuff must really matter.” And I’ve been thinking it ever since.

May, 2011

630 668-5953 Fax: 630 668-0020