Barefoot Training - Friday, January 28, 2011
Faith Development
Why should you care about understanding faith development?
One
of the key roles of a youth worker is to be a spiritual guide for youth
in their faith journeys. How can you guide if you don’t know the path?
The path of faith is not something we can know with absolute certainty,
like hiking a well-worn trail. But the journeys taken by others provide
us insight into some things to expect along the way. So you should care
about faith development if only for the sake of being aware of these
insights for shepherding your youth.
What is faith development?
There
are several ways to define faith and faith development for people. We
begin with the confession of the church that faith is a human response
to God made possible by grace. The three essential aspects of faith are a
person’s trust in God, loving attitude toward God, and loyal actions in
response to God. A simple way to put this is that faith includes a
loving response with our heads, hearts, and hands (the great
commandment). People grow in faith as they encounter God through God’s
story, their network of relationships (people, society, and creation),
and their churches’ ways of life. Thus, faith development is a person’s
growth in the trusting, loving, and loyal response to God through God’s
story, network of relationships, and faith communities’ ways of life.
A Narrative Faith Development Model
If
you have been to our training workshop, then you are familiar with the
model of faith formation we present. Here is a similar model that
incorporates developmental theory in order to expand our view as youth
workers to the reality that faith formation occurs throughout life.
This
model uses story, value, belief, and way of life to hold together
individual and community life in the unfolding narrative of faith. Thus,
like our training model, it is an expression of a narrative faith
development model.
Implications
First,
it is important to note that none of the developmental stages in this
model are independent. Each stage is connected, so the permeability of
the whole faith journey is subject to transformation by the work of God.
So youth workers should always hope in God’s ability to redeem and
restore people.
Second,
it seems that our curriculum for youth should flow out of their
searching for belief or doubt. We should offer learning environments
where teens can openly doubt their faith communities’ teachings and
personal beliefs. The role of the youth worker with this curriculum is
to guide teens in the search for belief in God that is faithful to the
story, coherent to the communities’ way of life, and pertinent to their
story.
Third,
youth workers should learn to discern the stories that teens have
learned to play in their early years. Some of those stories might be the
American dream, materialism, or therapeutic moralistic deism. This will
necessitate our engagement with youth’s families, friends, schools, and
communities.
Finally,
this faith development model implies that youth workers become aware of
the counter-formative practice of the Christian faith. If we are going
to invite teens to re-narrate their lives through the story of God, then
we will need to invite them into practices that embody that narrative.
The Christian practices of prayer, fasting, worship, hospitality, etc.,
are counter-formative practices that give expression to the story of
God.
Questions to Consider:
How does this faith development model inform your understanding of teen faith formation?
What are some other implications of this faith development model for teens?
By Paul Sheneman
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Barefoot Training - Thursday, January 27, 2011
Formation and Transformation
Formation
and transformation are not two polar opposites in the growth of
persons. In fact, formation and transformation are complimentary
dimensions of life. The two concepts of human development differ only
in the degree of change.
Formation
occurs to some degree whenever a person participates with others in any
domain of activity. So when a teen uses public transportation, they
are formed into the processes and etiquette of riding the bus or train.
Their identity is not meaningfully impacted by the practice but they do
acquire new knowledge, experience new emotions, and practice new
skills.
A
transformational example of formation can be observed in a teen
becoming a gamer. The teen is formed into a gamer as they participate
with their friends in playing video games. They acquire skills and
language that assist them in playing the game and interacting with a
group of gamers. The more they play the games the more they feel
connected to the identity of a gamer.
Finally,
a transformational moment may occur in a teens life. For example, a
teen learns of the realities of human trafficking. The horror of the
issue sends the teen searching for a solution. They find a potential
solution to the injustice and an aha moment occurs which transforms the
way they think, feel, and act. Finally, they move into practicing the
solution which either verifies their new perspective or sends them
searching again (The Transforming Moment).
Questions to Consider:
What stories do you have of the transformation of a teen's faith?
What is an example of formation and transformation in youth ministry?
By Paul Sheneman
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Barefoot Training - Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Engaging the Whole Family 3: What is the Family?
The
value of defining the family for our contemporary content is that it
gives us orientation in our engagement. If we can’t name the thing that
we encounter, how can we have a meaningful experience? We have a word
for God that has some meaning, and that concept seems a lot more complex
than family.
So
tell me, what is the family? I want to know because, for the life of
me, I can’t find one definition that does justice to the multiple
realities of family that I experience. For example, I’ve seen heads of
households be single, biological parents, biological grandparents with
single parents, two biological parents, two legal parents with no
biological relation, one legal parent with no biological relation, two
legal parents who are also the biological uncle and aunt, and the list
could go on. And then try to account for sibling relationships, and I
almost want to give up on ever finding a definition.
But what if we moved away from a sociological or structural definition? What if we tried a theological definition?
Here is my stab at it:
Family – a
supportive and formative group of people, connected through a common
biological lineage or covenant, who are meant to learn and practice the
worship of God through their relationships with God, each other, and the
world.
Does
that definition sound familiar? I hope so because the definition is
derived from a definition of the church. And here is my bias in favor of
this definition. I think the church is called to be the family of faith
for the world.
I
also think the definition helps youth and family ministers imagine that
the goal of families is to become “little churches,” in the words of
Jonathan Edwards. And the concept of families becoming little churches
corresponds to Diana Garland’s sociological research of more than 100
families. Her research revealed faith practices as an essential element
of family life. As a complement to that research, Marjorie Thompson’s
book argues that spiritual formation naturally happens in families in
both positive and negative ways. Therefore, we can conclude that
families are going to worship something. It is the role of the church to
be the family of faith that invite them into the worship of God.
Questions to Consider:
What is your definition of family?
What do you think about the above definition of family?
What do we do with this definition of family?
By: Paul Sheneman
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Barefoot Training - Thursday, December 09, 2010
Engaging the Whole Family
Reality TV is often an amusing form of entertainment. We sit back and are entertained by the shock factor of Wife Swap,
where contradictory family value systems collide in quite amusing ways.
Then there was the Osbourne family, who for a short period, appeased
the guilt of many families with their previously unimaginable level of
dysfunction. Finally there is the hard nosed quasi-Mary Poppins from
Great Britain, Jo Frost (a.k.a. Supernanny), that will put little kids
on the “naughty step” in order to right the wrongs of poor parenting in
the United States. And though laughter is what usually flows from these
shows, there is an eery feeling that these “reality” programs feel more
like a mirror of the North American family then a sensationalized
depiction.
In
the midst of such depictions of family in the entertainment media,youth
and family ministers are left wondering, “What is the family? What
happened to it? How can we engage the whole family in Christ-like
ways?”
I want to suggest three resources that can help you wrestle through these questions.
- David Elkind, Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance
- Diana Garland, Sacred Stories of Ordinary Families
- Marjorie J. Thompson, Family the Forming Center: A Vision of the Role of Family in Spiritual Formation
Over
the next two weeks we will engage some of the insights of each of these
works as we continue to seek meaningful ways to engage the whole family
as God’s story-formed people.
Questions to Consider:
How do you define the family?
What are the central challenges facing families today?
What resources have helped shape your engagement with families?
By: Paul Sheneman
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