Faith "extras"

By Matthew Phillips

Recently I held my newborn child for the first time. I gave thanks for the love his mother and I share and asked for the grace to show that love to him. Then my thoughts turned to the things my wife and I will teach him, and in particular, to our Christian faith.

We hear often now about public schools having to cut out offerings in the arts and languages because of finances or in order to teach to a test. What about his Christian education?

Our local churches struggle with how to teach and inspire faith to and in children in ways that ensure their ability to face the tests and struggles of life. Of course I want my newborn son to learn that God loves him, and that God created him and everything around him, and that God's son Jesus saved him from the tyranny of fear and death and injected unstoppable hope into this world. But will the church have time to teach him about the arts and culture of church?

As musicians ourselves, his mother and I can teach him the Christian arts. I can teach him to read music so that he can sing centuries worth of hymns from a shared book, and explain how his best friend's Presbyterian church is historically different than his Methodist church. I can walk him around a cathedral in Europe and tell him the names and purposes of the various worship spaces. He’ll receive many of the ingredients for a richer faith.

My Christian identity requires that I be as concerned about the richness of the faith of other children too, and so my prayer turns into a challenge—a calling. How do I act on my obligation to see that other children have the chance for a rich faith education?

Matthew T. Phillips is an estate planning attorney in Winston-Salem and the Lake Norman area of North Carolina.

Comments

[Tony]

Congratulations on your new baby boy. Transferring our faith to our children is challenge and a command Deut. 6:4-7. It is also a joy.

[Ellie]

Parenting is the most wonderful thing that can happen to a couple. My own experience has been that religion is "not taught; it's caught." Your child will watch you and learn the most from who you are and what you do. No matter what his Sunday School teachers say, he'll learn mostly from who they are. If they are "believers," it will show. Relax. Get ready for a new look at your creator through your child's eyes!

[rick brand]

Ellie proclaims a tradition that has a long history. Caught not taugh. But that is a very sad judgment on a host of people and churches who have watched their young children leave the church. In l969 a church had 36 members of a confirmation class. In l999 they invited them all back for a 30 year reunion. Only 13 were still in some church. The question is still valid, How do we provide a rich Christian education for all children?

[Matthew Phillips]

Thanks to Tony and Ellie for their encouragement and support. Rick returns us to the point thought with some sad confirmation that we don't know how to provide Christian education as well as we would like.
I'm not suggesting I have the answer to the decline in mainline membership, but most of my friends who have left the church (many of whom still cling to the importance of their baptism and identify themselves as Christians, by the way), note a feeling of distance from the rituals of church as a primary reason for their drifting. That leaves me convinced that education about worship theology and the historic and geographic communion of the church, which is largely ignored, is crucial.