INSPIRE
3
St. Philip the Deacon
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” DEUTERONOMY 6:4 -9
Despite having spent 17 years working in the church, and most of those in youth ministry, figuring how best to model faith with my own child has been incredibly challenging. Even for a family who makes it to worship more weekends than not and takes advantage of all the support our church has to offer, I still wonder, “Is she getting it?” Our world is increasingly unfriendly toward faith and religion—and not just Christianity. To believe in anything bigger than ourselves is viewed with skepticism. Our culture doesn’t even have to be outrightly hostile to make it hard. School and work schedules, extra-
curricular activities and all the demands of modern life create an atmosphere where having the chance to slow down, have real conversations, and create space for prayer and worship has become nearly impossible. Modern life is noisy. Everything competes to be heard, to be number one in our lives, and it is therein that we find the rub: In the presence of a God who simply wants to hang out with us, to be in relationship, everything else comes across as more demanding and as having larger negative consequences should we choose to ignore them. In this issue, we tackle some of the harder issues of nurturing faith in the next generation. What does faith look like today? What do I do when my kids abandon the faith in which they were raised? What’s next for us as Christians in an ever more frantic world? There aren’t easy answers, but my hope is that we can inspire conversation around these topics and encourage you to consider the legacy of faith that you show those nearest to your heart, whom you encounter every day. I was inspired by Pastor Mathison’s article, “Praying Attention,” in that, if nothing else, there is incredible power in praying out loud for those whom we love. One of the greatest gifts we can offer the next generation is to see them, to know them and to love them, for this is exactly what God does: God sees you; God knows you; God loves you. May this issue of Inspire help you to tune in to your own story, to see more clearly where God has stirred up your heart and informed your actions through faith, and to know that your witness makes a difference here within our faith community and in the generations of Christians to come. Pax Christi,
