Preparing for our Book Discussion

Next Wednesday evening at 7:00 is the first of our book discussions of Elizabeth Caldwell's Making a Home for Faith: Nurturing the Spiritual Life of Your Child. I would like to focus our discussion around pages 40 -44, the section she calls Every Parent Needs. Caldwell writes that to raise faithful children, every parent needs to be able to do the following:

1. Read a story from the Bible.
2.Tell a Bible story.
3. Deal with children's questions.
4. Pray (privately and publicly).
5. Take some time daily or weekly for personal meditation.
6. Ask faith questions.
7. Struggle to understand and interpret affirmations of faith while balancing a life of faith in mission and witness and the being of faith in mediation, Scripture, reading and prayer.
8. Explain the meaning of the sacraments and the liturgical year.
9. Struggle with language for God.
10. Become familiar with the basic beliefs and religious pracitices of other faith traditions.
11. Regularly participate in adult education.
12. Be layleaders in worship.

Seems like you would need a full seminary education for this, doesn't it? It is a rather daunting list for any of us, but it is not beyond the realm of what any one of us can do. As you ponder these questions this week, identify those practices you already are doing. I'll bet you already have some practice of private prayer (even if the prayer is just of the "Help me, Lord!" variety as the bathtub overflows!) and most likely, you are struggling like the rest of us to understand the affirmations of faith and balance a life of service, witness, prayer, study and reflection! The other pieces are harder. Not all of us were raised in a faith tradition and we may not know the biblical stories - how to find the ones we know or how to figure out where the ones are that we maybe heard in Church once upon a time. We may not know what to say when our children ask us questions and it is hard enough to understand our own faith traditions, sacraments and liturgical year, never mind have enough knowledge of other faith tradtitions to share them with our children.

Please think about what you know and what you need to know more about as you prepare for our discussion on Wednesday. I am happy to guide and support you in your faith journey with your children, but I need to know what you would find most helpful. Would a session on the liturgical year be useful? What other classes would you be willing to come to? Does the blog provide you with helpful information? If not, what would you like to see in this space? Those are just the questions I begin with. Leave me a comment or email me. Better yet, come next Wednesday night and we'll talk about it! See you then.

Faithfully,
Elizabeth