Category Archive

Continuing my Milwaukee presentation: I focused on why building and sustaining connected community is so important for family ministry.

Two things to consider from Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities, by the Commission on Children at Risk:

First, a great deal of evidence shows that we are hardwired for close attachments to other people, beginning with our parents and extended family, and then moving out to the broader community.

And…

Second, a less definitive but still significant body of evidence suggests that we are hardwired for meaning, born with a built-in capacity and drive to search for purpose and reflect on life’s ultimate ends.

The report offers a basic definition and then lists 10 components of a Connected (Authoritative) Community, which to mean sound remarkably like a healthy, vital, multigenerational congregation.

Authoritative communities are groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life.

Authoritative communities have 10 key characteristics. Based on careful analysis of both the new science of nurture and the existing child development literature, the Commission identified the following 10 principal characteristics of an ideal authoritative community:

• [Connected] communities include children and youth.
• They treat children as ends in themselves.
• They are warm and nurturing.
• They establish clear limits and expectations.
• Their core work is performed largely by nonspecialists.
• They are multigenerational.
• They have a long-term focus.
• They encourage spiritual and religious development.
• They reflect and transmit a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person.
• They are philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all people and to the principle of love of neighbor.

If congregations really want to attend to the needs of families, we must begin with the needs of children—and building connected communities is the best place to start. Now two of these 10 characteristics may cause some Unitarian Universalists some discomfort: clear limits and expectations, and a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person. So I offered the following interpretations of those concepts. The first is from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work around optimal experience (or flow) I’ve found to be very helpful. Here’s what he has to say about clear limits and expectations:

There is ample evidence to suggest that how parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on the kind of person that child grows up to be…. The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job [which is exactly the kind of parental pressure Madeline Levine talks about]. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.

I think all of these characteristics apply to the kind of connected community we’re talking about—especially the religious education programs within our congregations.

As far as a shared understanding of what it means to live a good life, I think the Lifespan Faith Development Vision Statement from the UUA gives us some direction here.

We envision children, youth, and adults who:

• know that they are lovable beings of infinite worth, imbued with powers of the soul, and obligated to use their gifts, talents, and potentials in the service of life;
• affirm that they are part of a Unitarian Universalist religious heritage and community of faith that has value and provides resources for living;
• accept that they are responsible for the stewardship and creative transformation of their religious heritage and community of faith;
• realize that they are moral agents, capable of making a difference in the lives of other people, challenging structures of social and political oppression, promoting the health and wellbeing of the planet, acting in the service of diversity, justice and compassion;
• recognize the need for community, affirming the importance of families, relationships and connections between and among the generations;
• appreciate the value of spiritual practice as a means of deepening faith and integrating beliefs and values with everyday life;
• experience hope, joy, mystery, healing, and personal transformation in the midst of life’s challenges.

I especially like the multigenerational quality of this statement. It refers to all of us–children, youth, and adults. And it points to the next part of my presentation: values. More on that tomorrow.

I’ve received a steady stream of inquiries over the last few month about the availability of Bill Doherty’s 2007 Fahs Lecture at General Assembly, “Home Grown Religion,” so I was happy to find a printed copy of it when I opened up the most recent packet of materials from LREDA (the Liberal Religious Educators Association). It’s a fantastic lecture, and it may well hold the key to the future of faith development in Unitarian Universalism, and perhaps even to the future of our faith itself. Here are some of my favorite parts of “Home Grown Religion.”

Religion is caught more than taught, and it’s caught most fully in the family. Church programming can supplement but not replace the home. Most parents and religious professionals agree would agree, but we know more about running organized programs in church buildings than we know about supporting faith formation in the home.

It’s a fantasy that getting out of our children’s way or teaching them a little about all religious traditions will release them to find their own path. The reality is that we hand our children over to the gravitational pulls of a me-first mainstream consumer culture that does not satisfy their spiritual needs or help them flourish—and that sometimes leads them to turn to a more authoritarian religious community.

My point is that because our children feel strong pulls from the culture of self-absorption and the culture of authority, our ambivalence about exerting our own gravitational pull towards Unitarian Universalism leaves them religiously abandoned. We either raise our children ourselves or others will raise them for us. If we want our children to grow up spiritually alive, free, and engaged with the world, we have to offer them citizenship papers in our Unitarian Universalist tradition.

The central venue for faith development is the home linked to an intentional UU community. The key active ingredient that makes this work is not what we spend most of our time on: Sunday school classes, worship services, and youth activities. Instead, the key active ingredient is the spiritual development of parents and other adults, and their grounding in both a local church community and the Unitarian Universalist tradition.

You can find a PDF version of the entire lecture at the LREDA website, or you can download a copy: Home Grown Religion.

The Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group of the UUA is looking for fieldtest congregations for next year. Here’s the scoop….

The UUA is pleased to introduce the first three online Tapestry of Faith programs for children. We are seeking a group of congregations diverse in size, location, and culture to test these curricula this winter and spring. These all-new, engaging programs in the Living Faith series each offer:

• 16 sessions to complete between January and June, 2008
• Informative introductory material to prepare teachers to lead effectively
• Core stories that teach UU values, principles and religious concepts
• Clear goals and learning objectives
• Engaging activities based on a variety of learning styles
• Parent resources and Taking It Home activities for families
• Session activity choices to help you tailor the session to your needs
• Faith in Action activities to engage the group in living our faith within or outside the
• congregation
• On-line format that is free, searchable, and adaptable.

The programs:

Creating Home: Grades K-1 by Jessica York and Christy Olson
“Creating Home” takes the concept of “home” that young children understand as a place where families gather, share love, and take care of one another and expands upon it to help children understand their “faith home” in Unitarian Universalism. This program develops a foundational sense of belonging, of trust, of loving community, as well as responsibility and stewardship, towards the faith community in which they will live out their lives. Learning about our faith ancestors, traditions and the blessings of family and friends are a few of the subjects that are explored.

Moral Tales: Grades 2-3 by Elisa Pearmain and Alice Anacheka Naseman
“Moral Tales” engages children in identifying and articulating their own sense of right and wrong. As they interact with a variety of stories from folk and faith traditions and share stories from their own lives, children are encouraged to articulate and apply their own “spiritual compass” to find moral direction. The children generate and sign a group behavior covenant, have opportunities to earn “gems of goodness” for behavior that reflects positive moral choices, and explore why it is not always easy to follow one’s inner voice and choose behaviors that are good and just.

Toolbox of Faith: Grades 4-5 by Kate Tweedie Erslev
“Toolbox of Faith” invites fourth and fifth grade participants to reflect on qualities of our Unitarian Universalist faith such as integrity, courage and love as tools they can use in living their own lives and building their own UU faith. Each of the 16 sessions uses an actual tool as a metaphor for a quality of our faith. These tools include, for example, a hammer (for justice), duct tape (for flexibility), and a mirror (for reflection).

For more information, and to apply to be a fieldtest congregation, contact: fieldtest@uua.org or Adrianne Ross at 617-948-4361

When I preached last Sunday in Manhattan, Kansas, I added something to my evolving sermon on the need to take our Principles and Purposes more seriously. It’s a quote from the cover story of the latest issue of Tikkun, an article called “Science and Spirit.” The article’s a recap of a round table conversation among some noted scientists (including George Lakoff) and some of the Tikkun staff, including Michael Lerner. The author, David Belden, is the managing editor of the magazine. Here’s the part that really struck me:

In my denomination, the Unitarian Universalists, we have seven guiding principles. The two that I think underlay the others are:

1) The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
7) Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

I wholeheartedly espouse those principles. Where do they come from? Not simply from a rational argument: rational arguments can be made for and against them and there is no proof. Some people appear to have no worth and dignity and I find good reasons every day for trashing the web of life for my personal gain (e.g., I don’t bother to approve or even know where much of my food comes from). Those principles come from a collective process of spiritual intuition and exchange engaged in by a whole denomination drawing on centuries of uninterrupted spiritual practice and development. They are among the most important things I know in my life and I hold them in common with many other people. I have spent years in a community that cohered around them, and around the daily practices of learning to live them together. They are provisional, in the sense that the process of drawing in more people, more experience, more honest sharing of spiritual intuition, in response to historical developments, may lead the denomination to change the wording or add another principle. How these principles are enacted in daily life is also subject to trial and error, group learning, prayer, meditation, heart–to–heart exchanges, small group process, exchanges with outsiders, and so on. Thus we build our spiritual knowledge.

Rarely have I seen the importance of the Principles and Purposes presented so powerfully in a non-UU publication. It’s rare to see them defended so well in a UU publication for that matter. Belden really gives voice to the way I’d like to see our Principles and Purposes used in our congregations!

Here’s what the UUA’s Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group offered at the LREDA Fall Conference regarding the Goals and Elements of the Spiritual Development strand of Tapestry of Faith. The outcomes for this strand are reflected in the first and the seventh elements of the LFD Vision Statement:

• Know that they are lovable beings of infinite worth, imbued with powers of the soul, and obligated to use their gifts, talents, and potentials in the service of life, and
• Appreciate the value of spiritual practice as a means of deepening faith and integrating beliefs and values with everyday life.

The Goals include:

• To nurture a deepening spiritual life and spiritual centeredness
• To cultivate individual and communal spiritual practices
• To develop an alertness to the wonder and mystery of existence
• To feel a connection to a larger reality, and
• To experience the sacred through worship, ritual, wisdom of faith traditions, and spiritual disciplines.

The Elements are:

• Spiritual awareness and centeredness
• Spiritual practices/disciplines
• Spiritual wisdom of other faith traditions
• God, ultimate, transcendence
• Sense of (being part of) something larger
• Connection, with other people, nature, universe
• Wonder, awe, mystery
• Beauty, truth, love, joy, and trust in the midst of life’s suffering, brokenness, loss
• Willingness and ability to engage with issues of ambiguity, good and evil, sin, forgiveness, redemption, atonement
• Worship, rites, rituals, sacred texts.

I have to say that I love the religious “favor” of these Goals and Elements. As persons of faith (and I believe we are), we all need to be able to use words like sin, forgiveness, redemption, and atonement if we’re are going to make our faith intelligible to those who think we’re some sort of cult or New Age group.

Rather than taking the third, I was preaching on the third last Sunday–in Rochester, Minnesota. About two weeks ago I got a call from Carol Hepokoski, the minister there (and a professor of mine when I was at Meadville Lombard). She wanted to know if I was free to preach on September 30. I was and more than happy to make the 90 minute trip from Saint Paul to spread the good word. Or good words. I titled the sermon “Acceptance and Encouragement,” and it was all about how we should be 1) using our principles as tools to assess how we’re doing in our spiritual journeys, and 2) using the third principle (acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth) as the number one principle for assessing what we’re doing together as a religious community. I mean, if we’re not accepting one another and encouraging each other in our spiritual journeys, then what are we doing?

At any rate, I mentioned a few resources during my sermon (mainly books from the UUA about the Principles and Purposes) and some folks asked that I post them on my blog. So here they are:

Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse: A Collection for Children and Adults
Kenneth W. Collier
Creative responses to the seven principles, each one illustrated with a story, a poem and a brief essay. For all ages, for worship and individual reading.

With Purpose and Principle: Essays About the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism
Edited by Edward Frost
A short history of the Principles and Purposes followed by essays from present-day UU leaders including John Buehrens, Marilyn Sewell, Earl Holt and Barbara Merritt. Excellent for use in new-member classes, as well as for those seeking insight into this essential piece of our living tradition.

Stories in Faith: Exploring Our UU Principles and Sources Through Wisdom Tales
Gail Forsyth-Vail
Stories in Faith is an invitation to begin a unique spiritual journey, one in which stories help us to develop our faith and make meaning in our lives. This is a distinctly Unitarian Universalist collection of wisdom tales. Nineteen in all, the stories are culled from many cultures and traditions and presented using the seven Principles and six Sources as a framework for reflection and further exploration. Forsyth-Vail offers thoughtful advice for respectfully approaching materials from a culture other than one’s own and encourages engagement with wisdom tales as an opportunity for lifelong inspiration and spiritual growth.

The Seven Principles in Word and Worship
Ellen Brandenburg, Editor
The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism continue to be plumbed for meaning, depth and inspiration. This elegant volume presents fresh perspectives from seven ministers who joined the ministry after the Principles took their current form. Here are essays, prayers, chalice lightings, litanies, meditations and worship readings on each Principle–helping us reflect on their significance and the ways they call us to ethical action and deeper spirituality.

All of these books should be in every congregation’s library. Heck, they should probably be in every UU’s library! At any rate, I don’t have an action shot from last Sunday, but I do have a picture of the Wanted Poster they had taped to the main entrance. (You can find more photos from my Rochester set here.)

I’m still finishing up with my notes from last month’s presentation in Dallas, Texas. I mentioned Dr. Ed Hallowell’s book Connect: 12 Vital Ties That Open Your Heart, Lengthen Your Life, and Deepen Your Soul during the presentation, and I wanted to give you a quick update on a resource I found that lists those twelve ties in an abbreviated–but useful–form. It’s from Dr. Hallowell’s website. The twelve ties are:

1. Your family of origin. Are you as emotionally close to your family of origin as you would like to be?
2. Your immediate family. Do you treat one another with love and respect?
3. Your friends and community. Do you see friends and neighbors on a regular basis?
4. Work and activities. Do you feel a sense of mission at work?
5. Appreciation of beauty. Do you make time to enjoy a favorite art form?
6. History. Do you feel the power of the past in your daily life?
7. Nature and special places. Are there special places that speak to you in ways no other place can?
8. Pets and other animals. Do you seek companionship from your pet or other animals?
9. Ideas and information. Do you feel that you know how to get the most out of your brain power?
10. Institutions and organizations. Do you take pride in group membership?
11. Greater truth or spiritual faith. Do you continue to seek the truth by whatever means make sense to you?
12. Yourself. Do you feel comfortable being who you are?

It’s a down-and-dirty list, but it clearly shows how one can make connecting a spiritual path. Which is something I think we need to do if we’re truly going to make our congregations the kind of connected communities our children and youth need.

I’ve got a few more things to post from my notes for the presentation I gave in Texas a couple of weeks ago. This one is about the fourth trait of a connected community: They establish clear limits and expectations. I think it may be one of the traits with which some Unitarian Universalist might have a hard time. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of UUs want a “hands off” approach toward themselves and their children, something like, “I left my previous church because they tried to tell me what to believe, and I not going to stick around here it there’s going to be a lot of do’s and don’ts!” But every community needs some grounds rules, and if a community is trying to be intentionally multigenerational (something I hope all of our congregations are trying to do), then there needs to be some ground rules for every generation. So here are some thoughts from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Optimal Experience and Flow) about the kind of context that helps children and youth thrive:

There is ample evidence to suggest that how parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on the kind of person that child grows up to be. . . . The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.

“Teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them.” I think the same is true of our congregations. Unless our children and youth know that we do have certain expectations of them, then they might start buying into the bad press about Unitarian Universalism: you can believe whatever you want to believe here, we’re an “anything goes” religion, etc. So I love these five “c’s”: clarity, centering, choice, commitment, and challenge. I think they provide a great heuristic (a replicable method or approach for directing one’s attention in learning, discovery, or problem-solving) for measuring the quality of our religious education and youth programs.

I just received an e-mail from the Institute on American Values, and it seems they’ve created a video version of the Hardwired to Connect report, and it’s free! Just go to click on this link and fill out the order form. Here’s the text of the e-mail:

New “Hardwired to Connect” DVD Now Available

WHY ARE LARGE AND GROWING numbers of U.S. children and young people suffering from depression, anxiety, attention deficit and conduct disorders, thoughts of suicide, and other serious mental and behavioral problems?

Several years ago the Institute for American Values together with the YMCA of the USA and Dartmouth Medical School answered this question in the 2003 report, Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities. Written by the Commission on Children at Risk, a panel of 33 leading children’s doctors, neuroscientists, research scholars and youth service professionals, Hardwired to Connect draws upon a large body of recent research showing that children are biologically primed (”hardwired”) for enduring connections to others and for moral and spiritual meaning.

Because of the enormous interest in the Commission’s findings and recommendations (Hardwired is now at the end of its 5th reprinting, with over 25,000 copies disseminated), the Institute has created a short, informational DVD that distills the most important aspects of the report.

Produced by Globalvision, the Hardwired to Connect DVD won the prestigious silver Telly Award this year in the category of non-broadcast video.

Through the generosity of several donors—including the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation—the Institute is able to make this DVD available to you free of charge while supplies last. To receive a copy, please complete this order form found on our Center for Marriage and Families’ website.

Copies of the full report, Hardwired to Connect, are available from the Institute for $7.00 each (volume discounts are available).

Copies of the Commission at Risk’s working papers will be published this fall by Springer in Authoritative Communities: The Scientific Case for Nurturing Children in Body, Mind and Spirit.

This is an amazing opportunity. Order your free copy of the Hardwired DVD today (you know I already have!).

Well, I’m back in Minnesota now, but I’ve got a couple of more posts about the information I shared during the teacher training in Dallas last Saturday. I talked a bit about the Hardwired to Connect report, using some passages from a sermon I gave last year. Here’s the gist of it:

According to Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities (a report by The Commission on Children at Risk), the “mental and behavioral health of U.S. children” is deteriorating.

We are witnessing high and rising rates of depression, anxiety, attention deficit/conduct disorders, thoughts of suicide, and other mental, emotional, and behavioral problems among U.S. children and adolescents.

According to the report, these “rising rates of mental and emotional problems among American young people raise a red flag about how well we are nurturing our kids.”

While many American young people are thriving, many more are not, and there are worrisome signs that as a society we are losing rather than gaining ground. Notwithstanding sustained increases in material well-being and important medical advances in the ability to treat depression and other mental disorders, the rate of serious mental and emotional disorders among American children and youth has been rising steadily. Eight percent of high school students have clinical depression, 20 percent report having seriously considered suicide during the past year, and, according to the Surgeon General, 21 percent of 9- to 17-year-olds have a diagnosable mental or addictive disorder that will cause at least minimum impairment. A recent study of mental health problems among college students at a large Midwestern university found that over the past 13 years, the number of students being seen for depression doubled, the number of suicidal students tripled, and the number of students seen after a sexual assault quadrupled.

“Numerous studies,” says Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, “show that privileged adolescents are experiencing epidemic rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse–rates that are higher than those of any other socioeconomic group of young people in this country.”

I’ll say more tomorrow about ways we can remedy this situation. But for now, here’s one of those “me in action” shots I’ve been promising…

I’m in Dallas, Texas this weekend to do a presentation at the North Area Texas UU Religious Educators teachers training (that was this morning), and to preach at the First Unitarian Church tomorrow. I really enjoyed the training this morning–a terrific group of teachers from around north Texas. They do this every August, I believe, and it’s something I’d like to see happening around Prairie Star. I’m sure the congregations in the Twin Cities area could support something like this, as well as the congregations in Iowa and Kansas. At any rate, I had a good time, got to see some old friends, and met some wonderful folks who are volunteering their time and energy to be a caring presence for the children and youth in the congregations here. I promised the participants that I would post some of the quotes read during the presentation, which I think I’ll do over a series of blogs this week. Here’s the first set–definitions of faith, spirituality, and religion. It’s from an essay called “A Neuropsychological Perspective on Spiritual Development,” by Andrew B. Newberg and Stephanie K. Newberg, and it can be found in the Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence.

Faith
A neuropsychological perspective posits that all human experience is ultimately processed by the brain. The brain therefore can only provide a “secondhand rendition” of external reality. If this is the case, then human beings always have to have faith in their interpretation of the external reality as it is processed by the brain. Faith, in some sense, is absolutely essential for the human brain to function properly so that it assumes that the world as it is perceived and interpreted represents a reasonable one-to-one correlation with what is actually “out there.”

Spirituality
The feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behaviors that arise from a search for the sacred. The term “search” refers to attempts to identify, articulate, maintain, or transform. The term “sacred” refers to a divine being or Ultimate Reality or Ultimate Truth, as perceived by the individual.

Religion
Religion and religiousness not only contained the preceding criteria, they also included a “search for non sacred goals (such as identity, belongingness, meaning, health, or wellness).” Religiousness also implies that the mean and methods of the search “receive validation and support from within an identifiable group.”

I gave these definitions this morning because I think they do a good job of putting faith and spirituality in the context of religion. Here’s the comment I made about them: “You can have faith and spirituality without a religion. However, if you have a religion, it encompasses those things as well. So when we talk about religious education, we’re talking first and foremost about the things that specifically deal with “religiousness.” But questions of faith and spirituality are part of it, too.” So we teach about Unitarian Universalism, our Principles and Purposes, World Religions, etc. but we are always dealing with issues of faith and spirituality no matter what the curriculum because faith and spirituality are part of any religion.

I followed up those definitions with another definition of religion from another essay in the Handbook called “The Relationship Between Moral and Spiritual Development,” by Lawrence J. Walker and Kevin S. Reimer: “Central to the teachings of all religious traditions are moral guidelines for living a good life and for interacting appropriately with others.”

More from the presentation (and some photos) later.

Okay, so it’s not the same as the Lakes District in England, where Unitarian writer Beatrix Potter lived, but it is lovely. I’m talking about my trip to the Iowa Lakes region last weekend–to Okoboji, specifically, where I preached at an emerging congregation there. I had a wonderful time, in spite of arriving just five minutes before the service began (I got lost in a cornfield somewhere in southern Minnesota…thanks, Google maps!). I was greeted at the door of the Arrowwood Resort and Conference Center by a member of the fellowship, and was made to feel right at home (I hope all visitors are greeted that way!). I’m sorry I missed the coffee hour, which takes place before the service, but I was pleased to be a guest of the congregation at a buffet that immediately followed the service. As I mentioned to one of my table mates, one of my favorite definitions of church is: gather the people, break the bread, share the stories. To that, I would add, and change the world. At any rate, you can see pictures of the trip on my Flickr page (here), and you can download a revised copy of the sermon I preached (Losing My Religion). I’ll be preaching this version in Dallas, Texas this coming Sunday. Whoo-hoo!

Check out “Midweek church nights build spirit” at the UU World. As the title suggests, it’s all about the trend toward midweek (usually Wednesday nights) programming in UU congregations. One of the congregations mentioned is Prairie Star’s own Unitarian Church of Davenport, Iowa. Here’s what the Rev. Roger Butts has to say about Davenport’s programming:

Programming in Davenport, Butts says, is all about faith development. Recent programs included a class called Living the Questions. “We try to make sure that everything we offer gives material for daily home reflection,” he says. “This reminds us that what we do is not just about our brains, it’s about growing our hearts.” On a recent Wednesday twenty-two children under 5 were in the nursery while their parents were attending workshops—and some of the children’s parents were community people drawn to the church by a program called Love and Logic for Parents.

You know I’m thrilled by the “Love and Logic for Parents” workshop, especially since it draws people from the wider community. Focus on faith development and family. Sounds like the way to go to me!

I’ve just received a preliminary report on the UUA’s Youth Summit (the culmination of the Ministry To and With Youth process) from my colleague in the Central Midwest District, Dori Davenport. The gist of Dori’s report is this: “At the end of our five day Summit, we came away with one overarching theme: We ask for a fundamental shift in Unitarian Universalism–a shift to a multigenerational, congregation-based youth ministry in which youth ministry is central to the articulated mission of the UUA.” To which I say, Whoo-hoo! This is good stuff, and I agree with it whole-heartedly. Multigenerational, congregation-based youth ministry–yes! Youth ministry central to our mission–yes! I’m going to be blogging more on this over the next few weeks, specifically about what I consider to be one of the more useful approaches to youth ministry these days. It’s an adaption of the Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project that I’m calling “Spirituality & Service: Youth Ministry for the Whole Congregation.” Stay tuned….

As the current church year winds down (all that’s really left is General Assembly), I’m beginning to think about the three big projects I’ve committed myself to work on next year. I plan on writing about each of them this summer to help clarify my thoughts, but right now the one that’s on my mind is creating a Youth Spirituality & Service Program for congregations to use in Prairie Star. It’s on my mind because I’ve started reading The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence (edited by Eugene C. Roehlkepartain and others) as part of my research for the project, and it seems that coming up with a working definition of “spirituality” will be crucial for success. Here’s a couple that I’ve found in the first chapter of the book:

Spirituality can be defined as a search for the sacred, a process through which people seek to discourse, hold onto and, when necessary, transform whatever they hold sacred in their lives [the sacred includes the concept of God, divinity, transcendence, and ultimate reality].

Spiritual development is the process of growing the intrinsic human capacity for self-transcendence, in which the self is embedded in something greater than the self, including the sacred. It is the developmental “engine” that propels the search for connectedness, meaning, purpose and contribution. It is shaped both within and outside of religious traditions, beliefs and practices.

I like these definitions because they leave room to go beyond God and divinity when talking about the sacred, and because they recognize that spiritual development can occur “both within and outside of religious traditions.” This embraces both seekers (those who remain ambivalent about committing to a particular religious tradition) and dwellers (those who are willing call themselves Unitarian Universalists). Our job, as I see it, is to create a program for dwellers that is also welcoming to seekers.

By the way, I’ve just discover a terrific new resource: The Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. Check it out!