Detailing a recent shift in the way
ministry takes place in the church, the author offers guidance to leaders
who want to address today’s new reality through the effective partnering of
home and congregation for the sake of passing on the faith.
Youth and Family Ministry. Family Ministry.
Life-long Learning. Intergenerational Ministry. Seminary courses and
undergraduate majors bear these titles. Position descriptions are posted for
directors or coordinators or ministers in these fields. What is this all about?
All of these labels and many others are used to
describe a shift in congregational ministry. It is a movement away from the
assumption that faith formation happens only in congregations.
Then and Now
For the last fifty years, the congregation typically was placed in the center,
supported by its members. It was assumed that this is where faith formation took
place. In a time of professionalizing everything
 from education to fire fighting
to coaching youth sports, parents looked to church professionals and those
trained by church professionals to do all of the Christian education, spiritual
direction, and values inculcation for their children and youth.
And we church professionals picked up that
mandate and did our level best to fulfill those expectations. Inadvertently, we
led parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and friends to
believe that they were not needed in this arena.
This is not biblical, however. Deuteronomy paints
a very different picture of what parents are called to do: “Keep these words
that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your 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).
So, parents have to “keep these words... in your
heart.” Keeping things in hearts is easy for Lutherans to do. But then parents
receive their marching orders: “talk about them when you are at home and when
you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.” Well, thank heavens, parents
have to talk about faith only when they are at home and when they are not at
home, when they are lying down and not lying down! Hmmm — that doesn’t leave
much time during which parents are not to talk about faith.
Martin Luther had something to say on this topic,
too. In The Estate of Marriage, 1522, Luther proclaimed, “Most certainly
father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it
is they who make them acquainted with the Gospel.” 1
The New Reality
But we have a problem in 2007: Father and mother may not know the gospel, so
they may not have these words in their hearts to recite and talk about with
their children. Many parents don’t have a life-transforming faith to pass on.
There is another problem. Many congregations
relegate parents and other adults who love kids to be chauffeurs, chaperones,
and sloppy-joe slingers. They hover around the edges of ministry with their
children, expected only to provide rides, monitor behavior, and provide food
service. They aren’t invited to feed their children with spiritual food.
Research finds that only one family in ten of our
churched families ever talks about faith outside the walls of the congregation.
Pay attention: These are the families who actually come to worship!
| This astonishing statistic is all the
more alarming when we learn that the top four factors in whether our
children will have faith are: |
- what mom does
- what dad does
- what mom says
- what dad says
What can be done? Scripture, Luther, and
current research point to a different way of doing church. They all
point to the first marker of youth and family ministry: partnering home
and congregation to pass on faith. Congregations become the place where
all of the generations are equipped to pass on a life-transforming
faith in Jesus Christ. This is about ministry not only to nuclear
families but to all of us, the whole family of God. All of us,
regardless of age, are involved in leadership and worship, learning and
serving.
Years ago, at the Church of the Savior
Lutheran Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Pastor Frank Showers
peeled the sign off his office door that read “Senior Pastor” and
replaced it with a new one: “The Equipment Room.” Pastor Showers
understands that his call is to equip the saints to be the priesthood of
all believers. All Christian adults are understood to be faith parents,
with a responsibility to pass on faith. At every baptism, the
congregation welcomes the baptized child as a brother or sister in
Christ, a fellow worker in the kingdom. The congregation promises to
support the family to nurture faith in the baby.
So, if we want our children, youth, and
adults to know, love, and follow Jesus Christ and share the gospel with
a world sorely in need of the good news, we need to figure out how to do
this differently.
Partnering
We need to begin with a different understanding of “church,” articulated
in the Five Principles for Youth and Family Ministry, identified
by Dr. David Anderson. 2 Faith is always passed on
relationally and incarnationally, as God demonstrated in Jesus Christ,
God’s ultimate gift to humankind, with the Word made flesh.
- Faith is formed by the power of
the Holy Spirit through personal, trusted relationships.
Virtually all of us can point to adults who were the first voice and
hands and face of Jesus in our lives. We can equip all of our adults
to become this God-bearer in the lives of children and youth.
- The church is a living
partnership between the ministry of the congregation and the
ministry of the home.
The body of Christ is not limited to the building where we worship
on Sunday but is loose in the world and especially evident as we
partner congregations and homes to make Christ known.
- Where Christ is present in faith,
the home is church, too.
Home is often the first church for children, where they learn to
pray and hear the stories of faith from the people they love most.
For those who are not engaged in congregational life, the front door
of your congregation may very well be the front doors of the homes
of your members.
- Faith is caught more than it is
taught.
Who were the saints who made faith contagious and utterly
irresistible to you? How did they do that? Often, it was not by
preaching a sermon or having you memorize the Small Catechism but by
loving you, by being the person you wanted to become, by gently
sharing that you, too, were beloved of God.
- If we want Christian children and
youth, we need Christian adults and parents.
We have come full circle. We need to equip adults to be able to have
those personal, trusted relationships that the Holy Spirit will use
to help children and youth to see Jesus.
How do we begin?
A friend recently quipped, “Jesus blessed the children and taught the
adults. We, in the church, have reversed it. ”We need to make sure that
we have robust Christian education for all ages and that we connect the
generations so that they will hear one another’s faith stories. Then, we
need to teach all of our adults and youth and children to do the Four
Keys for Nurturing Faith 3 — at home, in the
congregation, on a walk, in the school cafeteria, in our workplace.
These are simple faith practices that can be woven into our everyday
life together:
- Caring conversations
We need to be available to talk with and especially to listen to one
another. This is the floor under relationships that allows us to
talk about all of the important things in life.
- Devotions
Turn up the faith talk under caring conversations, and you have
devotions. Help children find themselves in God’s story and God in
their story. Let Scripture be God’s fresh and living Word for them
each day.
- Rituals and traditions
We all have them; now, just fine-tune them to be God-bearing.
Light a candle to remind family and friends that we gather around
the Light of the world. Make the sign of the cross on each forehead
each night, remembering their baptism and God’s love that has
claimed them and will not let them go.
- Service
Filled with caring conversation, devotions, rituals and
traditions, we are free to pour ourselves out in service, sharing
the love of Christ that fills us to overflowing. Make it a part of
every day, a natural way of loving God back, not a “got to” but a
“get to.”
Calling all of us to be about passing on
the faith in Jesus Christ to all generations is at the heart of a
ministry called “youth and family.” And God is in the midst of this kind
of ministry. A friend calls this “the reformation of our time!”
| Endnotes |
- Luther’s Works, vol.
45, “The Estate of Marriage,” 1522, Walther I. Brandt, ed.
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), 49.
- David Anderson and Paul
Hill, Frogs without Legs Can’t Hear: Nurturing Disciples
in Home and Congregation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg
Fortress, 2003), 1-95.
- David Anderson and Paul
Hill, Frogs without Legs Can’t Hear: Nurturing Disciples
in Home and Congregation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg
Fortress, 2003), 96-176.
Marilyn Sharpe is the
director of Christian Parenting and Intergenerational Ministry
at The Youth & Family Institute in Bloomington, Minnesota, a
faith-based organization that partners home and congregation
through speaking, teaching, conferences, training, coaching, and
resources. |
For Further Information...
Here are some other resources which will help you further your
understanding of a ministry involving both youth and family.
Books
Thompson, Marjorie J. Family, the Forming Center: a Vision of the
Role of Family in Spiritual Formation (Nashville: Upper Room Books,
1989).
Yust, Karen-Marie. Real kids, Real Faith: Practices for Nurturing
Children’s Spiritual Lives (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
Faith Inkubators
Check out Faith Inkubators’ new confirmation ministry at
www.faithink.com/Inkubators/h2h_living.asp. Look for the link called
“Extending Confirmation into the Home” and its “Head to the Heart”
ministry system.
Christian Education — ELCA
According to the ELCA Web site, “101 Faith Place” is “designed as a
quick reference for parents looking for ways to nurture faith in their
home and family life.” It provides entry points for “nurturing faith in
the home.” Take a look at it at
www.elca.org/christianeducation/faith/101faith.html
Augsburg Fortress Publishers
Check out Augsburg’s Web-based faith formation resource called Akaloo.
Intergenerational, Akaloo connects home and church, and the individual
and his/her community. Go to
www.akaloo.org
Also take a look at Splash! Birth to
Three Faith Formation resources at
www2.augsburgfortress.org/learning/splash. Here are faith-filled
resources which congregations can mail to families of young children
monthly. The resources can also serve as an evangelism tool for families
who may not feel connected to the congregation after their child is
baptized.
Youth and Family Institute
A few more resources that may help you live the Four Keys and
Five Principles mentioned in the main feature are listed below. All
of these resources can be ordered by calling (877) 239-2492 or going to
the Institute’s website, www.tyfi.org:
1. Frogs without Legs Can’t Hear: Nurturing Discipes in Home and
Congregation
2. FaithTalk and FaithTalk with Children (Caring
Conversation)
3. Heart Ignite: 166 Prayer Designs (Devotions)
4. For Everything a Season: 75 Blessings for Everyday Life
(Rituals)
5. Busy Family’s Guide to Volunteering (Service) |
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