Feature Articles
Feature articles explore one of our Faith Formation Strategies or a target audience in faith formation or
a significant issue or topic in faith formation today. To access an article click on the title
a significant issue or topic in faith formation today. To access an article click on the title
13 Ideas for Adult Faith Formation: Send the Faithful Out On Mission to the World
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There’s a church in my area which has a one-way driveway for entry and exit to its property. The posted signs on this driveway say: “Enter to Worship” and “Exit to Serve.” That is our Baptismal call. One of the results of our increased concentration on adult faith formation is, hopefully, the deepening of people’s awareness, desire, abilities and skills to be missioned for their role in the world.
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A Resolution for Peace
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Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” As we begin another new year of making resolutions, what greater resolution could there be then to commit ourselves – in whatever way we can – to work toward peace – within ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our church congregations, our communities, the nation and the world.
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A New Way to Approach Faith Formation
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Breathe new life into your faith formation by focusing on a provocative theme rather than filling up activities and programs. By choosing an interesting theme, you can often add more creativity, more depth, and more theological integrity to your faith formation activities and programs.
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Breath-Taking Responsibility, Exhilarating Challenge: Possibilities & Challenges for Faith Formation Today
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When we think of faith formation: Why does our focus often immediately and only go to children? Why do we think only of structured “classroom-type” programs as the only way of learning and passing on our faith? Are we ready to look at new models to meet today’s changing needs? Are we incorporating into all of our endeavors the best of today’s learning processes and faith-sharing methods, realizing that we are all co-learners on this journey? Do we understand how all-encompassing faith formation is, rather than just one function of who we are as church? Are we willing to look beyond our doors and find new ways to go to those who can’t or won’t come to us, especially in today’s world of technology? Let's explore three challenging opportunities.
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The Caring Church
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John’s gospel reminds us that Christians are known by the ways in which they love each other. At this moment in history, Christians are often criticized as being too much like the general culture. It’s hard to see that their faith is making any difference in their daily lives. If churches can bring caring to the center of their missions as is mandated in the Scriptures and in the traditions of Christianity, then others will look upon our communities and wonder where this joy comes from. Maybe they’ll become curious enough to ask us about it, and we’ll have a story to share that will touch their deepest needs. We can discover that our distinction in any culture is not captured by what we know; rather it is capture by the intensity with which we care.
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Caring Relationships Build Happiness: Here’s Proof!
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Stories abound detailing how people’s lives are changed from misery to happiness as a result of falling in love and staying in love. Are these people just lucky, or have they stumbled upon the secret to happiness? Harvard University researchers believe that they have experienced a discernible and repeatable pattern in human relationships. People who care about others and experience loving care from others are the happiest people on the planet. In a 75-year study, the longest of its kind, researchers followed a group of men from the time they were undergrads at Harvard until they were in their 90’s. They surveyed the group regularly throughout their lives about what makes them happy. The researchers released the results in 2013. Five major findings emerged that verify why churches should work diligently at promoting caring relationships in their congregations.
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Creating a High-Quality Church Nursery
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For many visiting families, your church nursery is one of the key places that make the difference between whether families keep coming to your church—or not. That’s why it’s important to take a close look at your church nursery to see how you can improve it to make it an even more welcoming place. A church nursery often is the most important room in your church for visiting families with young children. Even if your worship service is welcoming, if parents don’t feel welcomed and excited about the church nursery, they may never come back. That’s why a church nursery is a key place to put your thought, time, and energy into so that you can attract and keep families.
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Creative Practice as Spiritual Formation
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I’m currently part-way through Brian Jay Jones’s biography of puppeteer and entertainment visionary Jim Henson. Jones clearly shows how Henson infused his creations with liberal doses of his own personality and character. And yet it’s equally clear that this creative process was not a one-way street—that in bringing them into existence, Henson was himself becoming more fully who he was. Henson didn’t set out to become a puppeteer or even a performer. But he came to understand his gifts by living into them, through the daily practice of increasingly fearless public play and creative dreaming. Things are no different in the life of faith—or at least they shouldn’t be. The art we are exposed to helps make us who we are, and especially the art we bring into being. Creative expression is an important means to spiritual growth. Faith should, among so many other things, be fun, passionate, and expressive.
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The Emotional Side of Learning
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The softer side of learning, the emotional piece of the puzzle, just might be the most important thing teachers should be paying attention to when they plan learning sessions. The successful assimilation and integration of content relies upon an emotional state that opens one’s mind to learning. If the emotions aren’t right, good learning doesn’t happen. Teachers capture this idea when they talk about students who are “ready to learn” or “motivated”. Emotions are foundational to learning.
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Encouraging Meaningful Discussions and Conversations
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When we take the time to be intentional about the discussions we lead and the questions we ask, we can help people grow spiritually. We can help them examine their beliefs and discover what’s holding them back and encouraging them to move forward. “I am thinking of questions and reflective activities that encourage people to bring together their lives and the legacy of learning and to listen to their own interiority as they discern what is true, good, and beautiful, writes Thomas Groome in Educating for Life: A Spiritual Vision for Every Teacher and Parent. Questions matter. The way we ask questions matter. By developing thoughtful questions, we can encourage meaningful discussions and conversations that keep people talking long after we’ve starting asking the questions. This is what faith formation is all about.
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Expanding the Reach of Faith Formation with Hybrid Networks
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New patterns of American religiosity are changing (or should be changing) the tried-and-(no-longer)-true ministry models that churches have been using for decades. But congregational leaders are reluctant to give up on programs that have worked in the past, especially when the replacements are far from certain. There is an opportunity in this situation to be led by the Spirit into new territory. The Center for the Ministry of Teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary is bringing together faith formation practitioners from a a diverse sampling of churches to pilot a new model. Thus was born the Hybrid Faith Formation Network Initiative. Read Kyle's article to learn about this new initiative.
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Faith Milestones as a Tool to Grow Relationships
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Celebrating a milestone in our lives is important. Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and the list goes on. We can all think of a time when a milestone in our life was uplifted by our families with a party where friends and relatives gathered to honor important times in our lives. We received gifts and felt loved. It is good to be surrounded by many people who care about our lives and are with us for those special times. These times in our lives bring us together in an intergenerational setting where memories are made. We seldom forget about them and often seek to gather again with the same group of people to celebrate other milestones for ourselves and for others in the group.
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Forming the Whole Person: Holistic Education and Camp
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Much research, study, and writing has been done about the ways in which camp is important both in the life of a young person and in the life of the people who work on staff. Dr. Peter Scales of The Search Institute said, “The biggest plus of camp is that camps help young people discover and explore their talents, interests, and values. Most schools don't satisfy all these needs. Kids who have had these kinds of (camp) experiences end up being healthier and have less problems which concern us all." Ask most people who have ever been to a camp why they liked camp or what they got out of it and you will get a variety of answers. Most will say it was/is life changing or the best experience they ever had. Why is camp such a powerful experience? Why are people saying that it is good for children and youth – maybe even life changing? And if this is the case, what can we learn from the camp environment and how it feeds us?
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Forty Ideas for Lent
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As Lent approaches each year, often our minds turn to, “what will we do; what will we give up?” Instead let’s nudge our people to consider the following: instead of giving up, why not put something in, something that will take hold and stay with us for the rest of our lives. Remember Lent is about change/conversion. Real penance is to live life well: to be the mercy and peace of God toward others. Here are forty ideas to suggest to people in our faith communities.
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Generation X: Ministry Lessons from the Television Kids
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Generation X is now parenting the kids in your church. If you’ve noticed changes in the loyalty of parents to your program in the past ten years, that’s because Gen X has arrived and they’ll only be loyal if you prove that you’ve earned their loyalty. Their memory spans from Nixon to the collapse of financial systems in 2008 along with all the governmental and corporate corruption that has been exposed in between, not to mention disastrous church scandals from the Evangelical and Pentecostal branches to the Catholic sex abuse crisis. Institutions are not to be trusted and anything bigger than a family fits the institutional bill. John Mabry said it best in his book, Faithful Generations, “Because of their early betrayals, Xers have a nearly universal allergy towards idealism, and a finely tuned cynicism toward stated agendas (there’s always a hidden one). Generation X was born with a built-in Bullshit Detector, and it is turned up to eleven.” This may be their most defining characteristic.
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Growing a Faith Community Using a Cultural Lens
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Leaders often struggle to initiate change. They sense a need for the culture of a congregation to change to attend to the needs of the larger community. This is not easy and often causes stress and concern in a number of ways especially from those most established in the faith community. From my experience, we often reflect on the theological aspects and underestimate the need to simply begin with very basic questions about the core culture of the faith community. This begins with the history and background of a denomination.
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How Deep Is Your Faith?
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How do you know when you’re growing in your faith—and when you’re not? What markers do you aim for? Search Institute researchers in Minneapolis surveyed more than 11,000 adults, teenagers, Christian education leaders, and pastors in six denominations to determine what constitutes a deep faith. They identified four faith types: integrated and mature, vertical, horizontal, and undeveloped. The researchers also studied what exactly constitutes a mature, integrated faith? When they looked closer at an integrated, mature faith, researchers found that people who have this type of faith have these eight markers of faith.
Accompanying Documents (available for download) |
Immersion Leads to Daily Faith Application:
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Have you ever viewed the way we learn a language as an analogy to use in taking steps and setting goals to experience an immersion in faith and building Christian traditions as a way of life? My background in teaching and learning foreign languages has given me valuable insights into how we can view our faith communities as places where we can learn to speak the same language and provide opportunities for everyone to be immersed. The end result of immersion is fluency. Fluency happens through immersion. Fluency leads to a way of life. A way of life that is consistent with Christian teachings is how we envision ourselves in faith communities. This contributes to moving us beyond the walls of the building and in to the world to serve and love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
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The Importance of Mentoring
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Our parents have a huge impact on our lives and the kind of person we grow into being. We know this from experience and we know this from studies that have been done that prove this. However, positive role models can also have a huge impact on us as we are growing up and discovering who we are and where our passions lie. When I was growing up, I had the advantage of having both. My parents were very supportive of all that I did and wanted to do. My mentors, both official and unofficial, those adults who cared about me and took an interest in what I was to become were the people who helped mold me and encouraged me into becoming the person I am today. Many of those mentors still play a role in my life even though I am now an adult. Mentors do not take the place of parents and parents do not take the place of mentors. Each has a unique job that can enhance a young persons life as they are discovering who they are and what life means to them.
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The Large and Small Church: Building Dynamic Unity
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Churches are large organizations made up of many small interconnected parts. There are small faith communities within churches, Bible studies, support groups, families, committees, interest groups and, of course, individual members. Vibrant churches intentionally create meaningful lines of connection between the overall identity of the church community and each of the small groups that exist within its membership. Vibrant churches also intentionally create meaningful connections among all of the small groups. No one individual group is left to function as an island unto itself. Think of the groups or organizations in your church that would live on even if the church itself closed. That kind of independence is not healthy for a church. This essay is designed to help you fix that.
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Making Disciples: From the Fish Bowl to the Ocean Approach
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Jesus called the disciples by inviting them one or two at a time and met them where they were in their lives. In order to “fish for people,” we need to know a little more about the fish and where they live and learn how to go about catching them. There is always the question, “What happens after we catch them?”
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Nine Noteworthy Necessities for Activities
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Recently I overheard a conversation between two teachers: “There’s no place in faith formation sessions for artistic expression. That’s what happened when I was a child and it didn’t work. We don’t do that anymore.” If, by that, we mean arts and crafts for the sake of arts and crafts, that would be absolutely and totally true. Yet, think about it for a minute. Artistic expression is at the core of who we are, always have been throughout the years. It is also integral to who we have been as a church, for our entire history: icons, stained glass windows, poetry, journals, music, dance, paintings and murals, sculpture, drama, etc. Artistic expression is about the beauty of life.
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Our Future is Intergenerational
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Christian congregations across the United States are rediscovering the importance of intergenerational faith formation and relationship-building and making it a defining characteristic of their community life. This rediscovery comes at a time when research is finding the enduring importance of intergenerational relationships in the church community upon the faith life and church involvement of young adults. It also comes a time when churches are questioning their overreliance on age-specific programming to the detriment of intergenerational relationships and experiences in the faith community. This article focuses on the blessings and benefits of a being intentionally intergenerational and provides strategies and examples for strengthening intergenerational practices in faith formation and the entire congregation.
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Preparing for a Future of Digital Media Ministry: Trends in Technology Training
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To tackle twenty-first-century challenges, some people are proposing a back-to-basics approach with an emphasis on teaching, preaching, and increasing opportunity to practice the craft of spiritual leadership in a supervised, internship-like environment. Others advocate an appropriation of leadership techniques and organizational models drawn from the business world and recruitment of agile leaders usually described as “entrepreneurial.” Probably we need to embrace the insights of both perspectives.
The Faith Formation Learning Exchange asked me to reflect a bit on where we might be heading in the teaching/training/formation/certification world in the area most relevant to my job as a “digital missioner.” In this article, I’ll share some trends I’m noticing in this area. Where and how are we getting ready for a future shaped by digital media? Some of the answers may surprise you. |
Resources for "Doing Bible Better" in Congregations
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Stephen Lyon, coordinator of The Bible in the Life of the Church project for the worldwide office of the Anglican Communion, and his colleagues have been charged with offering “signposts of understanding” to help unite a global fellowship of Christians that encompasses a wide range of cultural contexts and theological convictions. I was encouraged to learn that one thrust of Lyon’s project has been collecting, curating, and distributing strategies and resources for “doing Bible better” in diverse local congregations. I think much of what I heard would be helpful for Christians of any denomination, especially given what we know about the importance of Bible reading and fluency in vibrant congregations and faith-filled homes. This article summarizes Lyon’s five recommended strategies for “doing Bible better” in your context.
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Running Church Meetings Skillfully and Carefully
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Running a successful meeting in a church setting takes a lot of work on the part of the chairperson and the participants. Everyone needs to do preparation work, everyone needs to be engaged in the meeting, and everyone needs to do follow-up work. Meetings do not effectively serve their purposes if these three things don’t happen. It is the role of the chairperson to assure that they happen. When they do happen, people feel like their leaders are both competent and caring and participants also feel like they are making significant and meaningful contributions to the community by sharing their time and talent.
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Spiritual Vitality
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We often focus on keeping congregations running smoothly by depending on the way it has been done for years and become so busy in day to day tasks that we feel need to be done that we seldom make plans for change. We name committees to accomplish tasks, assign duties to those not always equipped. We seek ways to check off the boxes needed to fill roles for worship, education, building maintenance, and other activities. Many times we overlook the need to grow and sustain healthy faith communities. The spiritual vitality of a congregation is important and we need to take intentional steps to equip and empower individuals.
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Six Stages of Spiritual Growth
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Which stage are you in on your spiritual journey? Marjory Zoet Bankson, former president of Faith At Work who has taught regularly at Virginia Theological Seminary, has identified six stages of spiritual growth. She contends that at each stage of life, we complete the six stages of spiritual growth and then begin the cycle again. “I think of call as a spiral path, circling around to start at a deeper place each time, with greater focus and more understanding of how we connect the temporal and eternal dimensions of life,” she writes in The Call to the Soul: Six Stages of Spiritual Development.
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The Spiritual Practice of Mussar
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Every day, we make countless decisions. How do we decide? The Mussar movement, a Jewish movement, focuses on how to live ethically and make decisions that bring out the best in us, rather than the worst in us. Mussar contends we each have a good inclination (Yezer ha tov) and an evil inclination (Yetzer ha rah). A number of movies and TV shows reveal this struggle when they show a character wrestling with a decision between the angel-looking aspect of themselves (the good inclination) and a devil-looking aspect of themselves (the evil inclination). The book, Everyday Holiness by Alan Morinis, outlines a practical way to incorporate the spiritual practice of Mussar while also giving context and the historical background of the movement. “A person’s primary mission in this world is to purify and elevate his soul,” says Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, a Mussar supervisor. “To do that we must walk the way of the soul,” Morinis writes, “and Mussar has been developed to guide our footsteps.”
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The Spirituality of Our Children: Today’s Pray-ers, Tomorrow’s Prophets
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Often when the topic of spirituality surfaces, people presume we are talking about adults. We don’t often talk about children and spirituality. I think we can. I think we need to. What is spirituality? I find some definitions too limiting; others so wordy that we forget where we started when we finally reach the end. I once heard the definition: Spirituality is what we do because of what we believe. This definition touches upon our beliefs as well as our actions. It calls us to much responsibility and challenge. Why do we need to talk about children and spirituality? Today’s adults are searching for the spirituality of their lives. Perhaps this is today’s reality because it wasn’t a part of their youth. If that is true, we need to change that for the next generation. The exploration and integration of spirituality has to begin during the young years so that they might build upon it, not begin it as adults.
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The Tough Issues Kids and Teens Face
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About half of all young people in the United States have experienced an adverse experience, which can create long-lasting negative effects. By the time young people become teenagers, about one in ten has experienced four or more of these adverse experiences, reports Child Trends. Young people who face tough issues are more at risk for obesity, alcoholism, depression, poor performance at school, and poor immune health.
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Turn On Your L.I.G.H.T: A Storytelling Model for Sharing Faith
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Stories draw us in from their first captivating moments. Great stories hold our attention with colorful characters, moments of tension and release, descriptive language, relevant and engaging plots, and hope-filled endings. Christian faith is founded upon a magnificent storyteller. His parabolic methods and unforgettable summaries are hopeful guides for churches that have grown stale from too much intellectual and doctrinal bickering. How can we incorporate great storytelling into our faith formation programs while we also teach others to tell their own faith stories? This essay will explore a method of faith sharing that is built around a storytelling framework.
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Using Technology in Faith Formation
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The possibilities for expanding our ministry efforts with technology are mind-boggling to say the least. The more vehicles we use to transmit the Gospel message, the more likely we are to be heard. Technology gives us the opportunity to speak the faith in multiple ways, making the message more accessible to a broader spectrum of church members and others. How will we use technology to form people in faith? What is appropriate use that will assure the integrity of human community in the digital age?
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The Virtues of Online (Faith) Learning
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I work as the digital missioner in a teaching and learning center at a large protestant seminary, so the notion that online learning is important is encoded in the DNA of my daily life and routines. My colleagues and I want to help the people we serve to nurture more consistent and intentional discipleship in the people they serve. I believe there are distinctive Christian virtues being nurtured when disciples learn and grow in faith online. And I think these virtues matter as much, if not more, for faith formation ministers serving in congregations as they do for those who teach in theological schools. Consider this essay a first draft in articulating them for the faith formation context.
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We’re More Than Friends, We’re Family: The Importance of Building Caring Relationships in the Congregation
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What would it look like if we envisioned our primary function in the faith community to produce and reproduce spiritually? Sounds like making disciples. This could surely occur through the sharing of food, conversation, and prayer. The end result would be the giving and receiving of care and nurture. What better way to build caring relationships? Until we take the time to initiate conversations with one another and begin to care for the “familia” we have in our own congregations, the likelihood of us serving others beyond our walls is less. Explore 10 suggestions for growing caring relationships in the congregation.
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Youth Ministry is Everyone’s Ministry
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Fellow youth ministers and I often joke that we can do anything. . . drive a bus, administer first aid, run a conference, lead a group at the drop of a hat, counsel people, fix toilets, create a meal out of nothing, and more. We are administrators, spiritual guides, fellow explorers, worship leaders, adventurers, boundary setters, retreat leaders, empowerers, listeners, cultural translators, and mentors. To sum it up, using the words of Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, we are “Godbearers.” We are people who juggle all these hats and have learned how to do all these things so that we can be truly present bearers of God’s presence in people’s lives. It is not about being able to “do” all these things, but about being in ministry with youth.
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