Horizons magazine is published by Presbyterian Women (PW) the national women’s organization of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Issue link: http://horizons.epubxp.com/i/521232
48 N early 12 years ago, I was trained to teach Sunday school to three-, four- and five-year-olds. The curriculum—taken from a book called Young Children and Worship by Sonja Steward and Jerome Berryman (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1989)—focuses on creating a classroom environment that allows children to experience the reverence and rituals of worship in a small and safe environment. One of the hallmarks of this curriculum is the telling of a Bible story during each class. The stories are told with basic wood and felt props, and at the end of each story the teacher/storyteller invites the children to wonder. For example, after telling the story of the good shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep in search of the one lost sheep, the storyteller might say, "I wonder how the 99 sheep felt when the shepherd left? I wonder where the shepherd went to look for the one missing sheep? I wonder how the lost sheep felt when the shepherd found her? I wonder . . . ." At this point, the hope is that the children will chime in with some wondering of their own. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes their wondering seems completely unrelated to the story. But this curriculum taps into children's innate spirituality and offers them an opportunity to talk and think theologically. We parents and caregivers often struggle to talk to our children about faith and the specifics of religion. We want to set them on the path of a lifelong journey of faith. At the same time, we want to give them independence, recognizing that the most meaningful insights and beliefs are likely to be the ones they make for themselves. I ran into a college acquaintance recently, and when she found out my profession, she began to tell me about the challenges she and her husband have faced talking to their five-year- old son about religion. "I'm just afraid to say too much about what I think or believe," she confessed to me, "because I want him to have the freedom to figure it out for himself." In our increasingly pluralistic world, where many of us know— either casually or intimately—people who espouse religious beliefs different from our own, we want to acknowledge the validity of other religions. Personally, I am grateful for this and think that Christianity has much to learn from other religions and will ultimately be enriched by them. But when it comes to raising spiritually-aware children, the danger is that in our desire for them to be open-minded, we resist sharing with them the importance of our own beliefs and our own faith journeys. Yet, as rabbi and author Sandy Eisenberg Sasso has said, the religious tradition we grow up with is akin to our native language, our mother tongue.* By learning about our family's faith and traditions, our children become comfortable thinking and speaking theologically. They learn the value of religious rituals and something about what it means to live in a community of other believers. Providing these things for our children gives them a spiritual context in which to understand and grapple with the nuances of religions different from their own. May we find the courage to share our language with our children and awaken in them the capacity to wonder. Amy Starr Redwine is pastor of the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, Ohio. She lives with her husband and three children. Notes *Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, "The Spirituality of Parenting," an episode in On Being (a radio show and podcast hosted by Krista Tippett), June 17, 2014; transcript at www.onbeing.org/program /spirituality-parenting/transcript/4424 f a i t h f u l p a r e n t i n g I Wonder . . . . t t t B Y AMY STARR REDWINE