Thanks to everyone who fed back about the new format for E-News. Overwhelmingly, the feedback is favorable. However, no one format can hit all the buttons for everyone, and it’s a factor of weighing up between scrolling down through info you may not be interested in against moving between links connecting you to different pages on the St Martin’s website. All in all, the important thing seems to be to try something different.
The focus of my musing this week concerns the subject of formation. Education often suggests imparting information for the mind, whereas formation envisages the shaping of our personal and social development as whole persons integrating body, mind, and spirit.
Every Sunday we have a time slot following the main service for adult formation. We don’t always use it, but it’s good to have this earmarked slot. We have this regular slot because formation is not limited to a particular phase of life but is, rather, a process of life-long learning. One of our failings as a church has been to associate formation or Christian education with something only the young do.
Faith formation as something that happens only to children is the best way to ensure that
growing-up
inevitably means
growing-out
of church.
We inadvertently confirm this message when as parents we take our children to church like we take them to sports or other extracurricular activity. Sports or music lessons are all about our kids’ formation. But faith formation has to be a whole family affair to avoid giving the young the message that formation is only for them and not a life-long process in which they see us as parents and other adults enjoying as well as struggling with our own faith related questions.
What do we actually know about Christianity, and particularly the Anglican tradition of Christianity which is what attracts us to the Episcopal Church in the first place? When we neglect our own formation, we not only shortchange ourselves but as I have already noted we send a signal to our children that Christian formation is only for kids
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