 Thank you, Karen. Karen probably doesn't know this, but it is really, I don't want to say fault because that means it's not necessarily a good thing, but it is kind of started with Karen Zeal that I actually ended up in Cleveland. Several years ago when Ken Ostermiller was retiring and they decided to do that big research, faith formation research study, they were looking for someone to do that, kind of a temporary year, two year position and Karen sent me an email with the job descriptions and she said in that email, I really don't know of anybody else who could do this job. Well, I didn't get that job. That ultimately went to Christina Lizardi-Hodgeby, but the job that I currently have is the faith formation team leader at the national setting grew out of the report that Christina ultimately did. So again, I don't want to say fault because that sounds like it's a bad thing and it's not, but I ultimately thank Karen because she was sort of the impetus for my even sort of pursuing something like that. So I appreciate that. It's great to be in Connecticut. I don't know how many of you know, but I am a Connecticut native born in Middletown, Connecticut, grew up in Guilford, Connecticut. I was not, I did not grow up in the United Church of Christ, but my family has long ties to both the church in Guilford and the church in North Guilford with my paternal grandmother's parents, my great grandparents, I believe are buried as well as some other relatives in the North Guilford cemetery. And my great grandfather and grandfather did lots of cabinetry work on the church in Guilford. It's so much so that it was either my grandfather, my great grandfather, my father tells this story that my great grandfather decided to mess with the clock apparently on the the the steeple of the congregational church and had it chiming the wrong hours and for a while and got everybody sort of in Guilford kind of like, what time is it really? The congregational church is off. But anyway, I will come back to Connecticut anytime because this is home and it's delightful to be here with all of you and to have this opportunity to talk with you about what I really see as the future of faith formation in not just the United Church of Christ, but I think just in church circles in general. What I hope to do, we have about a little under an hour and a half and trust me, I'm probably not going to talk for an hour and a half, but I hope that we also have the opportunity to have a little bit of discussion around some of the things I talk about as well before we move into the business meeting and lunch and so on. And then you'll also have some opportunity this afternoon to ask me some questions about what we talked about or whatever you'd like to ask. So let's begin. Several years ago I had the privilege of speaking at a children's ministry conference sponsored by a large church in the Midwest. This was probably about six or seven years ago. And it was lunchtime and the conferees were streaming into the large common area where the lunches were being served. I'd positioned myself on a staircase overlooking the space and I watched many of the thousand or so participants stream into that space. And the thought occurred to me that with all of these people, all of these people were in children's ministry in churches, all of these people plus how many thousands more across the country who couldn't come to this conference with all of these people dedicating their lives and careers to the spiritual nurture of children in churches. How come we weren't seeing amazing changes for the good in both the church and the world with all of this energy going into the faith formation of children? Where was the discernible difference in our world because of the hard work? And trust me, you all know it's hard work, the hard work that these people were doing. So I had that thought and sort of kept it in the back of my mind. And then a couple years later, the studies started to come out. The Pew research studies on how millennials viewed the church and why millennials and young adults who were leaving the church or millennials who were nominally churched had no interest in it. The Pew research, the Christian Smith from UNC and Notre Dame, all of his research from soul searching, even the Barna research on the more conservative evangelical side of things was saying the same things about young adults, the same things about the millennial generation. And these were the kids that were really the beneficiaries of all this largesse in children's ministry. So what happened? There were all this energy, conferences and resources, particularly more on sort of the conservative end of the church, but also I think on the mainline at all of these resources went into children's ministry and all of a sudden that generation seemed not big picture wise, not everyone, but big picture wise seemed to have no interest in church and seemed to have no interest, not necessarily no interest in faith, but no interest in sort of being part of the church organizations as we knew it and thinking about churches we know it. So if you looked at all that research and believe it and buy into it as I tend to do these young adults seem to be leaving the church in droves and it seems to be more so from progressive mainline churches, but don't be fooled conservative mainline churches are having the same issues as well. Maybe not at the same rate, but continuing to have the same issues with the 18 to 34 year old age group. And so all this research has sort of looked into okay, why are the millennials? Why are the millennials thinking this way about faith and church and so on? And I just want to share with you this morning is kind of a way of setting up our discussion. Some of the things that this research has said about what this age group, the millennials, and when I talk about millennials, I'm talking about the age group that's now the oldest end of the millennials is about 32 and the youngest and at least the way that I kind of, the way I sort of look at them, the youngest is probably around 16, 17 years old. What is it that they're saying about sort of their church experience and why they may not be all that interested in being a part of a church? And so they say things like that more and more young adults are expressing doubts about God's existence. These young adults are less likely than older people to say that prayer is an important part of their lives. They are overall far less religious than any preceding generation. They're much less likely to identify with the denomination and for those of us who work in a denominational national headquarters, that's not good news. Much less likely to identify with the denomination, a religious tradition, or even a particular faith. And I was saying this about millennials a long time ago. Postmodern Children's Ministry, which Karen referenced, I talk a lot about because it was written when the millennials were still children. And I said, you know, they're going to be kind of a pick and mix kind of faith group. They might ultimately, you know, identify as Christian, but they're going to say, you know, there's a certain Buddhist practice that I really like, and I'm going to incorporate that into my faith. Or, you know, I have some good friends or Hindus or pagans, and I kind of like the way they think about the world in this way. And I'm going to incorporate that. So this was not at all a surprise to me to see that they were not even so likely to identify with a particular faith. Their church experience of Christianity, they say, has been shallow. They say it's been boring, not relevant. And that God seems to be missing from their church experience. And this is across the board. This isn't just a certain kind of church. This is kind of across the board. They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity. Again, that kind of goes back to that pick and mix sort of faith idea. They find church can be unfriendly to those who doubt. And when I've talked about this at other places, I thought, I wonder if that's more those millennials that are coming out of a more conservative tradition. Because gosh, on our progressive mainline, you know, we let people doubt all the time. But then interestingly, I read a blog post this week by a young woman who wants to identify as Christian, but has found that, you know, the kinds of Christian churches that she was in didn't allow for her doubts. So she's began to sort of go to pagan gatherings. And because she was the pay she had was once the pagan editor of the pathios blog page, which is all sorts of sort of iterations of faith blogs about all sorts of faith traditions. And what she said in this blog was that even the pagans weren't going to let her doubt like if she wanted to doubt that there weren't several gods, they didn't like that. But when she went to her Methodist church and she wanted to doubt there was only one God, they didn't like that. So she couldn't find any place that would really let her have her doubts. So I kind of look at that go, oh, maybe it's everybody doesn't like doubting that we really all want certainty. And then, and this comes out of if you've read the Christian Smith research, a researcher at Notre Dame, who did the soul searching, which came out about probably eight years ago, but then followed this cohort into young adulthood, where he took looked at I think it was 3000 church, church teenagers at the time at the beginning of the study and asked them all sorts of questions about faith and so on and so forth. And the big piece of that came out of that research that everybody talked about, which I'm sure you've heard of. And if you've read Formational Children's Ministry, I talk about it there is moral therapeutic deism, that that for those, for those millennials who tend to hold onto faith, moral therapeutic deism tends to be what the content of their faith. And basically, in a nutshell, moral therapeutic deism basically means that the good news, the gospel, is all about living a good life so that one can get get to heaven and all about living a good life so that one can be happy. And about the only time that you need to call on God, because God really doesn't come and in break into our lives, God is really out there somewhere. The only reason we need to call on God is that when somebody, when you encounter a sticky thorny problem, and then God will sort of shoot down and help you with it and then go back out there somewhere. And this is from kids who grew up in the church. Christian Smith wasn't asking kids about faith, you know, who had never entered the, never entered the church doors. This is these, this was from kids who had gone to Sunday school and church school and youth group and summer camp and all the things that our kids do as far as faith formation goes. So what happened? What, what was the deal here? But I wanted to zero in with some stay on sort of the Christian Smith topic. Because when his books came out, again, they were the hot topic, there were articles about these books in like the Christian century and in Christianity today and on blogs and all those kinds of things with this research. But I was putting together another day long sort of event that I did with the Wisconsin conference. And I was sort of googling around, trying to find out what people were saying about mainline, you know, teens and young adults leaving the church and or not wanting to come back after they had gone to college or whatever. And I found an article that had been done with Christian Smith, the researcher at Notre Dame, where he talks specifically about what he thinks has happened in the mainline. And he says, and this is a, this is like a verbatim verbal interview. So the quote is, isn't like perfect English here. So he said, when asked the question, what's going on in the mainline, what specifically is it about mainline progressive churches that cause them to lose their young adults when they even get past confirmation? And Christian Smith Smith said this, he says, in a lot of mainline Protestant churches, the emphasis seems to fall on being a good citizen and being a nice person. In some ways, mainline Protestantism almost seems to inoculate its young people against itself. As children, they like it. But as they grow older and get into their twenties, they don't see much need for it, meaning church anymore. A lot of it probably comes back to parents, of course. Parents are always central. A lot of mainline Protestant parents, and I would say this happens in our churches as well. A lot of mainline Protestant parents actively teach their kids that you have to decide for yourself. Whatever you think is fine. We don't want to force you into anything. Each person's faith has to be their own decision. So sometimes their children get the message that faith doesn't really matter and anything you think or believe or not believing is fine. They are not invested in it. So I think what Christian Smith is saying here is not that it's not okay to let kids decide for themselves, because ultimately kids are going to decide for themselves anyway when they get in that developmental stage where they're doing identity differentiation and begin to differentiate themselves from their families and their parents and become their own people. Sort of making your parents' faith or your church's faith or your youth pastor's faith, your own is all part of that. So that's just a part of how we develop as humans. But I think what Smith is saying is that somehow in our desire to say, you know what, we want you to make your own decisions and beginning to tell them this from the very beginning of their sort of thinking about faith and the beginning of our faith formation is somehow we've sent them a hidden message that we haven't meant to, that we've sent them a message that says faith really isn't that important. We've not told them how what we believe, particularly in the United Church of Christ, about justice and peace and caring for the other. And what was it? Was it Amy who did the meditation? Was that her name? Did the meditation this morning talked about? We talk a lot about in the things we believe in about loving neighbor. But we don't necessarily make the connection about how that loving neighbor relates to loving God. Or make that connection about how that loving neighbor is part of how somebody lives. This is what someone does who lives in the way of Jesus, that it's a natural outpouring. That Jesus stood for pretty much everything or probably everything that the United Church of Christ stands for, which is one of the reasons that I like the United Church of Christ and one of the reasons that I want to be part of it. But I'm not sure we're always really good at making that connection with our kids. And then they go to their, sometimes our kids go to with their friends to the larger youth group down the street and maybe the more conservative church. And we have no way, we have never told them how our way of thinking about God and our way of thinking about faith is better, is a better way of walking in the way of Jesus than perhaps the way that church walks in the way of Jesus. Not to put that church down, but just to say, you know, this is why we choose to walk in the way of Jesus this way and to make it important for them. So I found that quote really interesting. And I continue to sort of play with it in my head and think about what that means for how we think about faith formation, both in our churches and how we help our parents think about faith formations in their own homes. So that's one aspect of, okay, what does all this mean, this research, et cetera? Where does it leave us now? But I think that this research about sort of millennials thinking about faith in the church, et cetera, tells us a few other things about maybe some things we've done that we need to change, that we need to look at doing differently for this new upcoming generation, the Generation Z or, you know, whatever the plurals, which I think is kind of the name that's beginning to stick with them, the generation that's now about seven, eight, nine, 10, getting into middle school, but yet some of them haven't even been born yet. So I think some of the things that maybe we need to think about changing is that we've put, since probably the early 20th century, churches of all kinds have really sort of put faith formation and schooling as equal, that if we send kids to school, church school, Sunday school, we will form Christians. And I don't think that's right. I don't think that we think our way into following Jesus. I think we've used Bible stories to teach moral lessons to give definitive answers. It's what I call in postmodern children's ministry, the esophabilization of the Bible. You know, if God wanted the Bible just to be a book of moral lessons, if God wanted us to just, you know, sort of have a list of lessons of this is how, here are rules of how you should live. God didn't need to give us the Bible. God could have just given us a really short little book and it would have been a lot easier to understand and we wouldn't argue about it so much. But that's not really what God chose to do. God chose to give us a book of stories. So I think there's something more about how those stories are transformative than just as a way to sort of pull a moral lesson out of them, which tends to be what we do in school. I think that we've made some mistakes in the faith formation of our children when we've mirrored culture by separating the generations. We live in a very age stratified culture. We live in a culture where people are afraid to get old. And so people, so there's a lot of ageism out there, but the generations themselves, you know, older people don't necessarily want to be with preschoolers. You know, we've just, we've done a lot of age stratification in our culture. And I think that rather than our church speaking to, our church is speaking to culture about that, we've mirrored culture instead. I think we've made some mistakes in the faith formation of our children by pulling our children out of corporate worship. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more specifically in the workshop this afternoon. I think we sort of have lost the whole idea of, I mean, I think people have began to pick up on it now, but the whole idea of training parents to be the spiritual nurturers of their children. I remember back in the late 80s and the early 90s, I was the children's pastor at a very, very large mega church in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area. And it never occurred to me that this should, this was something that I should have been about. It never occurred to me that I should be, you know, talking to parents about how they should nurture their children. Now maybe that was just a big gap in my thinking, but I don't remember, you know, a whole lot about that when I went to seminary and did a master's of religious education degree. It was all about sort of having good school. And that's what I was. I was the administrator of a very large school that happened on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. And that's where all my energy went, very little into thinking about how parents could be the spiritual nurturers of their children. I think we've not done a good job of giving children the language of faith or a way to identify what it is when God breaks into our lives, when God's spirit works in our lives. That was another thing that came out of the Christian Smith research and soul searching that he discovered that the kids he interviewed, the high schoolers he interviewed, who had grown again, grown up in church, really weren't able to talk about their faith in that they did not have language for faith. They did not have language for God. They did not know what it meant to, when someone said to them, you know, the good news, the gospel that Jesus brought us, they could not talk about what that was. Hence, we ended up with something like moral therapeutic deism. So that's where I think we've sort of made some mistakes. And I'm not, you know, I don't say this to say, oh my gosh, we've done everything wrong, you know, oh, we've got, you know, just have to forsake a generation and go on to another one. No, there were many, many good things that happened while millennials were growing up. But I do think these are some things that happened in our churches and churches started doing or continued to do in the late half of the 20th century and continued a little bit on to the 21st century, where we put a lot of energy into children's ministry and somehow it didn't turn out quite the way we expected. So perhaps here are some things that we ought to think about, that we ought to be doing instead. As those plurals, this new generation comes up through our churches. And you know, if some of you have read my books, a lot of this is not necessarily going to be new things, but I think they're worth reiterating. First of all, I think that we need to talk about when we think about our children's ministries, to think about the whole idea of having a formational model of children's ministry and youth ministry rather than a schooling model. Now, when I first wrote Postmodern Children's Ministry and I started going around the country and doing speaking and talking about these kinds of things, people would come up to me and say, okay, you know, I like what you're saying, but what does a formational model of children's ministry look like? And I had no idea. So I was, I just said, well, you know, guess I'll have to think about that more. And that's kind of where the second book, Formational Children's Ministry, grew out of. And that it was not, it doesn't necessarily mean that you give up your model of, you know, kind of the models that you have of children's ministry, although you might, it doesn't mean you have to get rid of Sunday School. Some of you may have seen that I've done some work with the Center for Progressive Renewal. And one of my webinars is called Let's Ditch Sunday School Curriculum. And the other one, my longer children's ministry, one is called Let's Ditch Sunday School. I didn't, I didn't name those. But, you know, they got a lot of response. I'm not necessarily an advocate of ditching Sunday School. More of an advocate of ditching Sunday School curriculum. I do have to say that, but I'm not necessarily an advocate of ditching Sunday School. I think we need to think more creatively and differently, maybe about what we do with those times that we have our children with us on Sundays or midweek or other times that we do children's programming. But I don't think we need to get rid of it all. I think ultimately it has to do with what we do during that time. And I think we need to think about doing things that are more formational than things that are more like school, which is why I'm more interested in maybe ditching Sunday School curriculum in the form that we know it than I am in ditching actual church school or Sunday School or whatever. So I think we need to think about some of those kinds of things. I also think when it comes to the Bible that we need to allow our children to engage with the Bible while resisting the urge to tell them what it all means. That we need to give them a chance to allow them to figure it out for themselves. That doesn't mean that at times we don't say, well, I think that God, for me, I think that God is trying to tell me this through this story. But I'd love to hear how God is, what God is saying to you through this story. And it doesn't mean you don't offer correctives if they sort of go off on some sort of flights of fancy that you're pretty sure that probably isn't what the whole, that's probably not maybe the Holy Spirit is talking about in giving the children this idea. But I do think we do need to get away from the application piece of the lesson plan and that every Bible story is about this piece and give children the opportunity to figure out what Bible stories mean for themselves and give them the opportunity to play with the Bible story, engage with the Bible story and to ask them questions that help them to think for themselves about it. Because I think what happens sometimes, particularly for kids who are very churched, is that they go through Sunday school and they go through these lessons and they learn about Moses and they get told that this story about Moses means this and this story about Moses means that and then they learn about Jesus and that Jesus feeding the 5,000, well, this is what we learn from this story. And then when they get to be 15, 16, 17, 18, they think that they know all the answers and they think that they know everything that God has to tell them and that the Bible has to tell them and they're not all interested in it anymore because they've masked, they think they've mastered it all. When in reality, God, this is a UCC thing, God is still speaking, okay? God continues to have more and more to teach us through this ancient, crazy, hard-to-understand book of stories. And I think if we can just help our kids to begin to understand that by giving them the opportunity to play with it and engage in it and think about those stories for themselves, that's going to help us capture their imaginations for what the Bible has to offer us. So it doesn't seem like this sort of staid book that now I just have to keep it on a shelf or wasn't that nice, I got one when I was in third grade and I got one when I graduated from high school, but now what do I do with it? I'm working with Scripture Union in the UK around this video game they're developing for spiritual formation, which I'm still a little skeptical about, but it's really interesting what they're doing. And so I was privy to some research that they did with families in the UK around church attendance and faith formation in the home and so on. And one of the things that they asked these families, these parents, was about how they used the Bible in the home or how as adults they thought about the Bible. And I shouldn't have been surprised at this, but I was. I mean they got answers like, well, we have one in the house and I always tell my child, my children, if they pick it up to be very careful with it, it's a very special book, but we don't know much about what's in it. It's a book that can help us, but we don't look at it very often. We don't talk about it in our house. And so it was very much all about kind of the book, the actual physical book and not about how God uses the stories therein to speak to us, to mold us, to tell us more about how we should live in this world. And so I mean, oh my gosh, I'm like, okay, if that's how they think in the UK, they perhaps probably how they think about the Bible here as well. And so I think we need to start very young and disabuse children of the idea that it's this book and maybe, you know, that the physical object, maybe the digital Bibles will help with that because it won't necessarily be an actual book. But I think that we have to show them that it's a living, breathing, ever-changing book as far as the things that God has to teach us through those transformational stories. I think we also need to think creatively about pulling the generations together in our churches rather than pulling them apart. We need to stop mirroring culture. And this is not an easy thing to do because you can put different generations in a room together, but that's not going to make them speak to each other. And sometimes you can't even get them in the same room together. So we need to begin to think creatively about that so our children and youth and adults can have the benefit of these intergenerational relationships, which can be transformational. We need to help parents become the primary spiritual nurturers of their children. We need to give them the tools to do this, to help them create family rituals, help them to think thoughtfully about the values of a family that loves God and tries to live in the way of Jesus. We need to create, and again we're going to talk about this this afternoon, create more what I like to call pangenerational worship experiences. We need to help our children speak the language of faith and to identify the inbreaking of God's spirit into their lives. I once did a little bit of an experiment with my fourth and fifth graders, and I wanted to help them with this language to help them be able to begin to identify how God might be breaking into their lives to let them to help them to see it. And so I got them in a room and I put out a bunch of art activity kinds of things, and I also got a couple of laptop computers for kids who maybe weren't all that interested in doing an art project. And I gave them a list of questions because I realized that if I put these fourth and fifth graders in a circle and said, okay, I want you to tell me about the times that you've really felt close to God's spirit, or tell me about times when God's spirit has broken into your life. They might just sort of look at me like I was speaking a foreign language. So instead, I gave them questions like, think of a time when God answered a prayer. Think of a time when you felt like, think of a specific time when you felt like God was really close to you. Think of a time when someone in your family, when you felt like God helped someone in your family. And they could pick one or two of these questions, and then they were sent off to either do a sort of create an art piece that sort of illustrated that, or they could go to the laptops and just write up the experience, write up the experience on the laptop. And then after a certain amount of time, I brought them all together in a circle and asked them to share either the story they had written or the picture. And they all had the opportunity to pass if they didn't want to do that. And so we went around the circle and I was just amazed at the stories these kids told. Stories about, I fell out of a tree and I really believe God saved my life because it could have been so much worse. I wasn't injured. My grandmother was sick and she wasn't supposed to get better and she got better. Just all sorts of things like that. And as we talked about it, I tried to sort of help them make the connection between, think about this is the way God works in our lives always, and that God's spirit is always trying to be a part of our lives and to sort of be aware and think about that. So I think we need to find ways to sort of give children the language of faith and help them identify this breaking in of God's spirit into their lives. And as I said earlier around the Christian Smith quote, I think that we need to make the connection between the Christian faith, between faith and working for justice, between faith and being advocates and allies for those who are discriminated against or less fortunate in our culture and in our world. To talk about, you know, okay, you know, as a family, say as a family you're going to write a letter to your congressman about something about gun control or about some legislation or something. And you talk about it with your kids and talk about why you're going to do this. And when you're talking about why you're going to do this, you say, you know, one of the reasons we feel like this legislation is important is because you know what, people who follow Jesus think this kind of thing is important. And as a family who is trying to live in the way of Jesus, then these are the kinds of things that we do. So I think we need to continually in our families and in our churches make those connections for kids. So in our children's ministries, in our youth ministries, in our sort of our age specific faith formation ministries as well as sort of the whole church, I think that these are some changes we need to make, some things we need to think creatively about and how we can sort of be more formational in the way we approach these kinds of ministries for these, this generation that's coming up, Generation Z for the plurals. But I also think that we need to think about the kinds of faith communities that we are because the faith formation of the children and youth in your churches doesn't just fall on your shoulders, nor does it just fall on the shoulders of the parents. It falls on the entire faith community, the kind of church that you are, the kind of faith community that you are, influences the positive or spiritual faith formation of your children and youth. I do a whole workshop, again Center for Progressive Renewal gave it a better name than I give it, they call it is your faith community a hot house for faith formation. I usually call it like the five characteristics, so they're better with the more provocative titles. And I do, I talk about what community, how to be a faith community that is conducive to the positive faith formation of your members and I talk about five characteristics, but I'm not going to talk about those five characteristics this morning, I'm going to talk about something else that I think is important for your faith community to be. And that's I think that our faith communities need to practice and need to work on being hopeful places. I think that many of our churches and perhaps our families, but many of our churches are not necessarily hopeful places. Kendah Dean, youth ministry professor at Princeton Theological Seminary talks about this and she talks about it in a book called The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry. And she says that this is a quote, when we don't believe that Jesus promised to secure the future, meaning that the reign of God is at hand, is true, we live as people fearful of our own prospects, protecting ourselves instead of allowing the Holy Spirit to use us as Jesus witnesses. And then our churches become anxious places. And I think overall, maybe not specifically your church, but I think overall the mainline progressive side of the church is an anxious place these days. You know, Cleveland is an anxious place these days. I say to my team, which has gotten smaller because of one of the reasons we're anxious. But I say to my team, you know, we live into an uncertain future. And there's no question that living into an uncertain future can make us anxious. But you know, Jesus has said all through the, you know, all it's actually it's all through the Old Testament, but you know, all through the New Testament, you know, do not be afraid. The Apostle Paul talks about not being afraid. But when we become anxious places, when we have this inability to believe that, you know, the promises that Jesus has given us, when we have lost the ability to practice hope, lost that what Kennedy calls that eschatological imagination, then we tend to focus in simply on self preservation. And we when we focus in on self preservation, and just sort of close in, then it's hard for us to be creative. It's hard for us to think to think more broadly. It's hard for us to reach out, because it's all about how can we preserve what we have, rather than how can we look toward the future. And in reality, what that makes us liberal progressive mainliners, and makes us conservatives, when we are an anxious presence. A couple of years ago, I spoke about this absence of hope at what was then the Children and Youth, a new kind of ministry conference, which is now faith forward, happening this year in Chicago, the end of April. I'll put a plug in there. But I spoke about this in a plenary address. And I just want to give you a little bit of what I said there about this, about this absence of hope, and about what happens when we have an absence of hope, is that we don't help our children and youth to be hopeful about Jesus promises. I said, we have failed to offer them, our children and youth, an alternate reality to what they encounter every day in the world, an alternate reality to that anxious presence in the world. We have not given them the ability to vision an alternative to their current personal, social and cultural situation. We have failed to offer them Jesus vision of good Samaritans, prodigal welcoming fathers, amazing elaborate parties offered to the poorest of the poor, and of tiny mustard seeds that grow into mighty trees. And we have failed to offer them a vision of hope for the future. We have failed to give them a kingdom vision of Shalom, helping them to see life with God and God's people as it was meant to be. Jesus said, the kingdom is here. British theologian NT Wright puts it this way, suppose the world's way of empire is all wrong, suppose there's a different way, and suppose that Jesus in his life, death and resurrection has brought it about. We seem not to have asked this question of our children and youth in any meaningful and lasting way. So my premise is this, that in the big picture, the first world Christian church is losing its children and youth. And I believe this is so because we, and I include me in this, have lacked the imagination to offer them an alternative vision of reality, where God's people live unselfishly in the joy of the already present kingdom of God. So what I think we need to do to be hopeful communities is that we need to demonstrate this hope to our emerging generations. You know, if we believe we know how the story ends, you know, Rob Bell's book love wins, well love wins, the story ends, God wins. It's hard to believe that some days, but that's that's how the story ends. God wins. This needs to affect how we live now in front of our children and youth. We need to live like we believe that God wins. We need to imagine the world as God intended it to be. I think I say this in children's ministry in the way of Jesus in one of the chapters I wrote, you know, say to our kids, you know, can you imagine a world where no one ever dies of gun violence? Well, Jesus could. Can you imagine a world where everyone can read? Well, Jesus could. Can you imagine a world where everyone has enough food to eat? Well, Jesus could. And that's another great way to sort of make that connection. When we demonstrate this eschatological hope, it makes our Christian communities an unanxious presence in an anxious world. And unanxiousness is very attractive to people and very attractive to our children and very attractive to our youth. Now, we also need to remember that hope, Christian hope, does not equal easy optimism. What it means is that we can stare down anxiety, that we can remember the words of the angels, fear not, or the words of the apostle Paul. Don't worry. Or the words of Jesus, God takes care of the sparrows. Of course, God is going to take care of you. Walter Brugerman, one of my absolute favorite writers theologians, as well, everything he says makes so much sense, says that faith communities can do this, that faith communities can be hopeful presences through consistent practice of four Christian ideals, ideals that speak truth to culture, rather than mirroring our culture. And when I read these, I thought, okay, well, this suits the United Church of Christ, if we could only live up to them. The first ideal he talks about is forgiveness. He says, we can offer forgiveness that gives people the ability to start again in a society that never forgives and keeps score forever, one ideal we can have. The second ideal he talks about is that we can be generous and offer a generosity that overwhelms our lack in a society based on scarcity and in getting more for ourselves. And I would guess this last election sort of shows that. So we can be a generous people and model that for our children and youth, the forgiving people, a generous people. Then he talks about hospitality. And he says that we can have a kind of hospitality, extravagant welcome, hospitality that welcomes us, welcomes others in a world, in a culture, in a society that is inhospitable to all but our own kind. And lastly, he says we can have the Christian ideal of justice that protects the vulnerable in a social system that is deathly in its injustice. Sounds like the United Church of Christ to me. We are positioned to be a hopeful place, to be hopeful churches. Candidine says that young Christians find radical faith irresistible but find it hard to come by. She tells parents and she tells churches. She says go out and do something radical, radical as far as the status quo is concerned. You want your kids to follow Jesus? Go out and do something radical and then tell your kids you are doing it because this is what people who follow Jesus do. In your churches, you want your children and youth to follow Jesus, speak truth to culture and tell them that's why you're doing it. You're doing it because this is what people who follow Jesus do. One of my favorite social psychologists is Eric Erickson. And I think it's in childhood and identity and I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but this quote has always stuck with me. He says something like if we have adults who do not fear death, then those adults will produce children who do not fear life. And Christian philosopher and my French isn't very good, Taelhard du Chardin said, and I'm going to end with this quote. He says, the future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. So we do have about, I don't know, give you guys a little break, 20 minutes or so, if you wanted to ask some questions or make comments. I'd love to give you the opportunity to do that. Throughout your conversation about all of these wonderful ideas and thoughts, I am struck very strongly by the fact that very little of it in my mind is limited to children and youth. I think it's our entire congregations are part of this whole package. I did a piece of this with the Minnesota Conference a couple of, about a month ago. And one of the young men who was a children and children's and youth pastor in his church raised his hand and he said, well, I think that what you're talking about is just what church is supposed to be. Yes, exactly. But we've lost it, I think. Not, I mean, don't hear me say, sometimes I would say when I, you know, like, oh, every church is awful. No, no, no, there's, trust me, I don't know how many of you've read the, read the still speaking blog that we do. And, and the last one I wrote was about, you know, one of the perks of this job is I get to go around and see all the wonderful faith formation things that churches are doing. So there's these little wonderful sparks out there. There's no question, but you're exactly right. Yeah, it's what church ought to be. Yeah, bars, Mary. Yeah, I'm always struggling with the same thing. And I'm not sure I'm going to be able to present this correctly. So if you can resonate with what I'm saying, please help me out here. But at one point I was thinking, the reason parents don't tell their children that they do, this is what they do because it's what you do in the way of Jesus is they don't, they don't want to connect it that way for themselves. And I feel this, especially, and I see it in my church. Oh, God, forgive me, my church is wonderful. But we do have this struggle with the UCC. For instance, a lot of people are struggling because they don't want to buy into peace and justice. Well, I don't know if you have, yeah, let me, let me, let me, let me unpack that a little bit. When I was applying for this job, I never thought that I pointed Karen again, because it's her fault. But I was flabbergasted that I got it. Because truthfully, okay, I am not politically correct enough to work in Cleveland. And I know this is on tape, so now I'll probably lose my job. You know, I mean, there's a whole spectrum, as you well know, there's a whole spectrum. But I think that on a whole, most, you know, sort of overarchingly, at least sort of the staffs of most UCC churches are more sort of on the more peace and justice side of things than not. And I realize that congregations are not, that all the congregations are not necessarily with them. I mean, New Canaan, New Canaan, Connecticut, come on. You know, everybody works on Wall Street. But I think that gives you, I think that gives you two things. I think it's one, even New Canaan, okay, is further ahead on some of these social issues and justice issues than maybe a more sort of conservative evangelical church in New Canaan would be. So there's still ways that, you know, there's still things that they do that you can still make the connection with, even though it's not, you know, as far left as maybe some people in your local churches might think that the UCC is and probably is. You know, for example, you know, New Canaan, okay, they do, you know, they do the dove tree. They do a thing where, you know, you buy grocery, you buy Christmas dinner for families and, you know, you pick the thing off the tree and go shopping and wrap the big box. They do a big turkey project every year that the whole church is involved in, you know, where you, somebody donates the turkeys and, you know, all your churches do those kinds of things. You can still use that to make the connection. Sometimes we don't even make the connection with those kinds of things that, you know, why are we doing the turkey project? Because this is what people follow Jesus do. So I would, you know, in New Canaan, I would, you know, have a little gathering time after the boxes, after the kids and families had packed the boxes. I'd gather everybody together and I'd talk about that because I could not be certain that the kids would go home and that the parents would have a conversation, you know, about why they did it. So the parents were involved in this conversation as well. So they were hearing, oh yeah, we, we packed turkeys because we're a church and churches try to follow Jesus and Jesus said it was good to feed hungry people. So I think even if you're not, this is right, even if you're not left, you know, as left as perhaps people perceive the United Church of Christ to be, you are still probably doing things that are justice oriented and you can still make the connection. So I think you just have to figure out where your church is. I'm not saying that you have to go out and be the far left, you know, crusader in your church because I'm not, I'm not as far left as a lot of people, you know, maybe again, I'm, I may be moving back to Connecticut, but I don't know Rose, does that help? Is that kind of what you were getting at? Yeah, yeah, I mean Greenwich, Greenwich is New Canaan, you know, it's the same, yeah. We can model this, we can use words ourselves and help people to see that they're... And it's gotta grow out of the ethos of all of this, everything I talk about, you know, as far as whether it's intergenerational worship or bringing the generations together or formational aspects of, you know, your church school or whatever, it, and I talk about this in postmodern Children's Ministry, everything's kind of, it's gotta grow out of the ethos of who your church is. So, you know, you have to think about, you know, your identity as a church and then what you do grows out of that, that you then take these concepts and say, okay, how do these mesh together? And so you're, now, there may be things about your church that will ultimately have to change in order to be a really positive, formational place for children, youth, and adults, but that's, you know, that's down the road for your church to figure out, that chain. I'm just also building on what Rosemary was saying. I think part of what parents don't talk about this is, is the loss, the lack of language. And it just dawned on me as you used that wonderful phrase, because this is what followers of Jesus do, that we ought to actually have people saying that in worship, you know, like a response to a, you know, offering prayer or a call to worship or whatever, and get that, get people actually saying the phrase repeatedly so that it might actually occur to them to say it and sort of be more comfortable to say it in another context. Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the early church, they referred to their faith as the way and, you know, perhaps we need to reclaim that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. Yes. I'm actually in the midst of finishing a completing of Christian history class, and it's striking to me when I hear, read these things or hear things like you just said, how close all of this is to what folks did in the early centuries of Christianity. I mean, the four, those four ideals, I mean, in early Christians, that was imperative to their living and breathing lives. You know, it was, it was life or death to be forgiving and hospitable and, and, you know, and all of that. So it's, it's right. They were different. And it stood out. You know, people knew they were different and they weren't afraid. Well, I don't know, maybe they were afraid to be different, but they were, you know, and I think that's, you know, and I'm not just saying, you know, I think the church, I think one of the reasons that churches losing young people, not just mainline, not just the United Church of Christ, but just across the board is churches don't look a whole lot different from culture. And on the mainline side, it's like if a, if a young person, you know, sort of has value, has sort of the more sort of liberal progressive, you know, social values or whatever. And we haven't made that connection to, you know, that, well, Jesus fed the hung, Jesus said it was good to feed the hungry Jesus spent a lot of time with the poor Jesus, so on and so forth. If we had that made the connection in our churches, what do they need church for anyway? You know, they don't need church to do those kinds of things to, because there's lots of organizations, they can go volunteer for help or whatever to do those kinds of things. That's not church. I think it can be hard for parents also because we've been raised to be politically correct. And I, for instance, live in a very Jewish community. And I try and tell my children, you know, this is what Jesus taught us to do. But they go to school and they're like, I don't know, Jesus is not important. It turns out that's what everybody else around said. Jesus was a figure in history, but I mean, not that their conversations are that, you know, advanced at this point, but I can tell that this is the direction it's going. And it's, you know, I think it does begin at home and at church in making these connections because it is, you're sort of taking a stand, you know, in saying that whatever general culture is telling you, this is what I believe. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think another piece of it is, I think this is perhaps where hope comes in is it's, I think it's our job to make the connections. But we can't ultimately, you know, I mean, I'm not, this is not a quid pro quo, you know, you make the connections and everybody's going to be this great follower of Jesus. I think it's our job to make the connections to do those kinds of things, but it's ultimately, you know, we don't know what's going to happen, you know, I mean, it's ultimately your child's choice. And we just have to sort of leave it out there and be hopeful around, around those kinds of things. I guess what I'm talking about is sort of laying the foundation, laying, laying a foundation that is conducive to the positive faith formation of the children and youth in your midst. And then ultimately, if we really believe the good news, if we really believe what God has promised us, we have to ultimately sort of leave it, leave it there as well and see what happens. I have a friend, a psychologist up in Washington State, and he had three children. And one point when his daughter was in, one of his daughters was in high school, he got a phone call from his wife that said his daughter was at the police station. And, you know, and these were kids who grew up in church and the whole shebang, that his daughter was at the police station and she'd been arrested for having an open container of alcohol in her trunk. And so he immediately went home and, you know, or went to the police station where his wife was with his daughter. And his first response was to grab his daughter, even though he was very angry with his daughter, his first response was to grab his wife and his daughter into a bear hug. And he said to them both, out of his anger, but also out of his compassion and out of his faith, what he said to them, well, now we're going to find out if the gospel is really true. You know, where does the good, how does the good news, where does that place us in this situation? So I think that's, you know, I mean, that's part of, I think, I love that story because of how it illustrates this sort of, these real situations. What does it really mean? There was a, somebody had a hand over there and then, yeah. It was more like just a comment that, you know, I personally, myself have, for me, I have to remember not to cave to the popular, especially in the church. I mean, because we've gotten to such a place, specifically, I remember in my former church, you know, being with the youth group and my youth advisor and the youth were talking about this girl in a class and sort of a struggle they were having with some other kids and saying stuff to this girl and they were trying to navigate their way around this and I'm like, well, you know, we're in the church, you know, you were Christians. What would Jesus do? How do you think, you know, how does that inform, and immediately it was like, it was like I asked them to chop off their hand, you know, and show it to me. And the youth advisor was like, oh, please, don't, and I'm like, wait, you know, and instead of being like, wait a minute, this is what we're supposed to see, you know, I was just like, you know, I came to them. So it was just like, you know, I don't want to cause this, you know, this turmoil, but you're in the church, we're Christians, this is what we're supposed to be doing and why is it turmoil? Sometimes I'm an advocate of just saying to kids, particularly older kids or, you know, whatever, say, okay, you know, just find a situation, you know, that you're dealing with, and try doing, you know, what we talk about in that situation and come back and report. And, you know, and I think that could open it, you know, okay, in that particular situation, what would Jesus do? You don't particularly think you want to do it, try it, see what happens. And the thing is, we have to be prepared for them to come back and say, oh, it was, you know, it's, it's not like, you know, everything's going to be, oh, we're going to do what Jesus does. I mean, remember what happened to Jesus? So, yeah. I think one of the elements of space is in the early church, everyone was upon this. Everyone was coming into a living relationship with Christ, and Christ and our focus is on that, and having, and so the church was all learning together, what does it mean to be the church, and they had their struggle with that. The difficulty is, coming out of a whole period of time when the civil church was, everyone belonged to the church, whether they were believers or not, everyone participated. And so we just assumed that everyone was Christian. And so what happened is, we talk about parents being examples for their children, when the parents themselves may not be people of faith or people of faith. They may not have a well-developed journey of Christ. And so what happens is everything is watered down with the least common denominator, and it looks like everything else. And so what happens is, I think one of the struggles we have with the problem of children and youth is, maybe we need to step back again and say, what would we be if we're the early church? And how do we say, how do we as a church grow in this relationship when sometimes people, I get frustrated with clergy, when we get together and we don't talk about God. If we don't talk about God, we won't be talking about God, then how in the church should we talk about God? And so sometimes I feel like what we've done is, we want to be certain that our God. Yeah, yeah. There are many organizations out there forming together that are forming churches. Yes, exactly. I think in some sense, if a church wants to truly claim that we want to raise our children in faith, then it's on us to start living that. And in reality, this is not about children, it's about us living in faith. What kind of a church do we really want to be? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Now there were a lot of, there've been a lot of hands going up while you were speaking and I'm not sure who was first, so let's go back. What I want to say, I think that's off of what the gentleman has said. It's just a simple thing that more is caught and taught. So if we aren't modeling for our children this behavior, then how could they possibly, you know, mirror it back even if we're saying, you know, we should do this thing, but if we aren't doing that thing, you know, they're catching the behavior more than they're catching the teaching. Yeah, yeah, they see the behavior, the behavior speaks volumes more than anything you say. Yeah, there's no, absolutely no question about that. Yeah. You know, we really try to incorporate faith practices into, you know, into our church schools, but faith practices sometimes involve more than even the words. And just yesterday, a friend who's Christian, but of Roman Catholic rather than Protestant, shared with me a time in her life when she absolutely could not forgive someone. And she went to her priest and said, no matter, you know, I can say the words or whatever, but, you know, I can't, I just can't forgive this person. And the priest's advice to her, which I thought was wonderful, and I kind of put that in my backpack so I can remember that, because forgiveness is a big deal everywhere, you know. He simply asked her to try this and he asked her to pray every day that God blesses that person. And she said, well, I'll do it, but you know, I'm not going to forgive that person. But she said, she did do that. And she said after a week, she noticed a difference. But she said after a couple of weeks, she felt a lightness and she had really let go of that those negative feelings that were, you know, that really were weighing her down. You know, she was able to be in a new place. But that faith practice of praying, but there's other faith practices that, you know, we can kind of weave into what we do for the children and families. Spiritual practices, yeah. I mean, you know, there are a lot of things that you can do with kids. And I think sometimes when I talk about a formational, Formational Children's Minister, whatever I do talk about, you know, sort of incorporating faith practices and intentionality, you know, this doesn't just happen, you know, with ourselves or with the people that we, in our churches that we work with there, there has to be a certain amount of intentionality around sort of our relationship with God, our relationship with others and, and faith practices, spiritual disciplines, I think can help us with those intentionalities and children can do those. No question about that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great example. And there was a, was there a handover? Oh, right here. That's right. I knew it was up here somewhere. I've been struggling since for about a year now with a new church that I've come to work for. And the issue is they're stuck on tradition. We give the children adult bibles at the end of the year so that the third graders are ready for using them. One of the things I said to them was the font is size seven. I need glasses to see it. I don't know about the children. Second thing is it's written in these and vows. And I understand that that's, you know, good enough for the apostle Paul. My kids need to see and understand in their own language. So I finally, after a year, have gotten them to let me get a children's Bible so the kids can see and, you know, play with it and look at it in a more colorful way because it is very colorful and stuff. New adventure Bible. And they love it. But they're not touching the black one. I've got compliments from that are now my teachers who are saying, oh yeah, that one that's sitting on my shelf in my, you know, because I can't read it. It doesn't make any sense to me. And finding that they're so stuck and stubborn on traditions and not like, I mean, I did, I called Karen this last year. I went to the church and we did a cellist, the Christmas donkey. Two weeks before Christmas, one of the pillars of the church calls me and says, is Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the pageant? And I said, yeah, why? Well, you're doing it from the donkey's perspective. I thought it was just animals. And I had given it out to the committee and said, here, read this so you can understand what it's about. They said it was the best pageant they ever had this year. I have no problems. But fighting that constant fighting with them is exhausting. Yeah, you know, I think we want to we want to have tradition. We want to have ritual. We want to have those things that we do over and over again, because those are how we bind a community together. And those are how we bind ourselves to the sacred object around which the we have the tradition or the ritual. But I think with those kinds of things, you know, they probably all started out as good traditions and good rituals. And it seems to me like you've done what you've done is you've sort of tried to keep the essence of what's important to people, but yet sort of changed the trappings and that it's been it's been a, you know, it's not been easy. But I think that's I mean, I think you've gone about it the right way. You haven't tried to get rid of the ultimate thing that's important. The yeah, the Bible. Well, there you go. Sometimes you have to do it. The church that I and maybe some of your churches are like this as well. Okay, the church that I've been attending in Ohio. Obviously, when the New Century hymnal came out, I know there's a whole, but you know, that's been 15 years now. Let's not we don't need to fight about it anymore. But anyway, they have they still have the Pilgrim hymnal and the New Century hymnal like most of you do in a church. And so in the bulletin, it's always, you know, the song black hymnal, red hymnal 15 years people. But anyway, you know, I mean, so maybe some of you got to give two Bibles. And then gradually, you know, you move it. And I think, you know, yeah, the tradition is important, but you can't get caught in the the actual sort of minutia of the tradition. You got to think about what's the big concept that you're trying to do. And I think you're sort of, you're sort of pushing, pushing on that, you're going about it the right way, I think. So, Jane, go. Okay, one, was it anybody else? One more? Ivy, this was very rich. And I know that there's yet another opportunity, even if you haven't signed up for her workshop, to ask Ivy anything. That was her name for this, that wasn't catchy name. So I'm sure there'll be more questions to raise then.