Back to Robert Wuthnow's six "deliberate religious activities" that help develop lifelong people of faith. The third activity is "having real conversations about what matters most in life." I believe that one of the best places for these conversations to take place is during regularly scheduled blocks of family time, structured somewhat like a covenant group. Indeed, the phrase "Family: A Child's Small Group Ministry" is being heard more and more these days.

 

I attended a workshop on that very subject in October, and I found out that there are three components to a family's small group time: values, practice, and ritual. As Wayne Dosick, author of Golden Rules: The Ten Ethical Values Parents Need to Teach Their Children, has said, “Children need a clear set of values by which to lead their lives. And it is you—their parents—who, through your love and devoted commitment, can teach your children a good and decent way to live." In an excellent two session workshop entitled "Unitarian Universalist Family Values," Emily Manvel Leite of the Follen Church Society in Lexington, Massachusetts, offers these thoughts on values:

How we live out those values in our lives is where practice comes in. In an article for Hungryhearts, Carol A. Wehrheim provides a brief summary of a variety of practices families can explore in a small group setting: prayers of thanksgiving, music of the faith, stories of the faith and the faithful, breath prayers, meditation, hospitality within the family and with the family, and Sabbath. While not all UU families will feel comfortable with all of the practices she lists, finding two or three that work for your family can go a long way toward building a lifelong Unitarian Universalist faith in your children.

For more information on Small Group Ministry for UU Families, check out the "Children and Families" section of Helen Zidowecki's website "Backyard to the Universe," where, among other things, you can find these thoughts from Gail Forsythe-Vail, Director of Religious Education in North Andover, Massachusetts:

If your congregation is already using small groups as part of your programming, consider adding information about small groups for families to your brochures. And if you haven't tried small groups in your congregation yet, why not start with your families? Who knows, it might help get small group ministry going for the entire congregation!

Here's an exchange between Lisa and Homer from one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons (Season Ten, Number 1008, "Homer Simpson in: 'Kidney Trouble'"):

Lisa: Hey dad, that light says check engine...
Homer: Uh oh... the tape must have fallen off.... (rummages under his seat, finds a piece of used electrical tape, uses it to cover the light). There, problem solved (engine stops).

I like this for two reasons: one, it's the Simpsons; and two, it reminds me a little of the current state of the UUA. You see, if Bill Sinkford is right when he says that, "Religious education is a primary engine for growth in our association today," then we've got a bit of a problem. According to UUA Financial Advisor Larry Ladd's report to GA 2004 (see "Healthy stewardship, declining enrollment"), "Religious education enrollment fell for the second time in three years." The RE decline should be “a warning signal for our movement,” said Ladd, an indicator “that likely predicts a decline in adult membership in the near future.”

1. Does the program account for different family forms represented by families in your congregation?
2. Does the program account for the variety of ethnic groups in the congregation and their particular needs?
3. Does the scheduling of the program reflect the busy and, often, complex calendar of families?
4. Does the program address the individuals in relation to their families or the overall needs of the entire family?
5. Does the program improve the capacity for families to understand and address the family developmental issues appropriate to their family life cycle stage?
6. Does the program have a process that helps the participating individuals and their families deal with the change and growth the program encourages?
7. Are parents involved in planning, implementing, and evaluating the program?
8. Does the program improve the relationship between the congregation and the family?
9. Does the program empower families to share and live their Unitarian Universalist faith at home, and help them grow together as family?
10. Does the program provide families with resources and activities for home use?
11. Does the program help families connect with other families in family groupings or intergenerational groupings to share and celebrate their Unitarian Universalist faith?
12. Does the program help families connect with other families in family groupings or intergenerational groupings to serve others in the congregation or community?

Like most Unitarian Universalists, I believe that our faith is unique…but for a different reason than many other UUs may have. I believe that Unitarian Universalism has the dubious distinction of being triply adolescent—and nowhere is this more apparent than in our youth programming.

 

First, as a combined religious movement, Unitarian Universalism is barely over 40 years old, young enough to be described as “immature” at best. In his sermon “The Language of Faith,” UUA President Bill Sinkford puts a positive spin on this:

I believe that Unitarian Universalism is growing up. Growing out of a cranky and contentious adolescence into a more confident maturity. A maturity in which we can not only claim our Good News, the value we have found in this free faith, but also begin to offer that Good News to the world outside these beautiful sanctuary walls. There is a new willingness on our part to come in from the margins.

Second, according to Forrest Church, our tradition is living in “Emerson’s Shadow,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson was, in Church’s words, “the quintessential adolescent sage.” While his influence was extraordinarily helpful in our early years, the times are indeed a-changing. Church believes that

...to be functional, adolescence must be age-appropriate. If Emerson's philosophy spoke to his own times, one might hope that our nation and faith have matured. In developmental theory the progression goes as follows: dependence, independence, interdependence. In an age of bondlessness, Emerson's script—sovereign individualism and self-reliance—does not address today's need for interdependence. This holds true for nation and denomination both. If we are ever to grow up, the anti-institutionalists who gravitate to our institutions must take a little of their precious Emersonian freedom and invest it more generously. Only then will we bond together in redemptive community. Until we, as Unitarian Universalists, come out from under Emerson's shadow, we will not mature as a movement.

And finally, as Mary Pipher has noted, our materialistic, media-driven culture leaves little room for adulthood. In “Surviving Toxic Media: How the Church Can Help,” an article I’ve quoted in this blog before, Pipher says that

...in the last decades of [the 20th] century, for the first time since the 1500s, children have access to the same information as adults. In our electronic village, the walls that protected children and elevated adulthood are coming down. In effect we are dismantling childhood.

 

Likewise adulthood is vanishing, if by “adults” we mean people who have special knowledge and accept special responsibilities. Many adults have no different information than their children have. They too watch MTV, Freddy Kruger, and the nightly news, and they play the same computer and video games. As Joshua Meyrowitz, author of No Sense of Place, writes: “We are becoming a nation of neither children nor adults. Rather we all exist in some age zone between childhood and adulthood. We’re a nation of adolescents—preoccupied with ourselves, sexualized, moody and impulsive, seeking freedom without responsibility.”

I believe that it’s time for us to reclaim the notion of adulthood in our movement, and the place we must begin is with our youth. As Dave Rahn, professor and director of Huntington College's Link Institute, has said, “Those who believe that student leadership in youth ministry is simply about adults getting out of the way so kids can take over are wrong-headed and short-sighted.” In his article “Who Let the Dogs Kids Out? Reclaiming the Adult Role in Student Leadership,” Rahn suggests that there are three things adults must not let happen in youth ministry:

• Don't Let Kids Set the Direction for the Ministry
• Don't Let Kids Decide Who Will Be Student Leaders
• Don't Let Kids Neglect Their First Priorities

Now Rahn is writing from a Christian perspective here, and he's using some politically incorrect language when he refers to youth as “kids,” but I do think what he has to say is worth our consideration, especially as we make plans for “Renewing Our Vision of Ministry for and with Youth” (formerly known as Common Ground III). Mature Unitarian Universalists do “have special knowledge,” and we must “accept special responsibilities” if we, as a people of faith, are ever going to grow out of our “cranky and contentious adolescence.”

Bedtime rituals are another of Robert Wuthnow’s six “deliberate religious activities” that can strengthen a child’s faith. In my original post on the subject, I suggested that “spending a few moments before bedtime to share the joys and worries of the day” was second only to “sharing family meals and saying grace” in faith-building potential. The key for both is making them a natural outgrowth of a family’s liberal religious faith.

 

In “New Family Traditions: Creating Rituals with and for Children," an article published in the July/August 2003 issue of the UU World, Meg Cox offers a variety of ways to incorporate ritual into your family’s life, from “a bedtime ritual called ‘gratefuls and grumbles,’ where the children have to come up with one of each, but end with the positive note of something for which they are grateful,” to this ritual intended to “help our children grow up knowing the principles the way Christians know the Lord’s Prayer”:

There are seven principles and seven days in a week, so one option is for parents to concentrate on one principle each day, talking about it briefly at dinnertime or bedtime, perhaps mentioning a related item in the news. For example, when an Evangelical minister stands up and denounces Islam as “an evil religion,” ask the kids, “Would a Unitarian say this? And if not, why not?”

Other ways to make Unitarian Universalism part of a family’s bedtime ritual is to toss some specifically UU stories into the bedtime reading mix. The UUA Bookstore is offering a Storybook Set of four Skinner House books for children: What If Nobody Forgave? and Other Stories of Principle, edited by Colleen M. McDonald; UU & Me Collected Stories, edited by Betsy Hill Williams; Hide-and-Seek with God, by Mary Ann Moore; and A Lamp in Every Corner, by Janeen K. Grohsmeyer. Who knows? One of stories found in these books could become a UU kid’s favorite!

I’m in Boston right now for the annual retreat of the UUA’s Family Matters Task Force. Pat Hoertdoerfer, director of Children, Family and Intergenerational Programs at the UUA and co-convener of the FMTF, has asked me to do the opening meditation for this year’s retreat, and I’d like to offer it here as well.

 

“Faith,” wrote religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe.” I appreciate this sentiment because I believe our Unitarian Universalist tradition is all about feeling at home—not only in the universe, but in one’s community of faith and in one’s family as well.

 

David S. Blanchard, in a meditation called “No Place Like Home” (published in the Skinner House Book A Temporary State of Grace), connects both home and religious community this way:

I hope this home will be a place of shelter, a refuge from the tumult of life’s disappointments and defeats, a place of consolation and encouragement.

 

I hope this home will be a place of challenge, not complacency, a space where we are helped to mature and take on a wider sense of responsibility for ourselves and others.

 

I hope this home will be a place where we can be ourselves, unencumbered by judgments or ridicule, where we are accepted as we are, where we are, and for whom we are.

 

I hope this home will be a place we might take some risks, knowing that there will be arms to catch us if we fall.

 

I hope we will know this home as a place of love, where life is made whole, where we may become engaged at the deepest levels of being alive.

 

If we give these hopes life among us in the community that is found at church, then there will be no place quite like it, and we will know that we are home.

To that I would add that if these hopes live in our hearts, our homes, and in our communities of faith, then feeling at home in the universe will be possible for us all—children, youth, and adults.