1. Caring Conversation—Christian values and faith are passed on to the next generation through supportive conversation. Listening and responding to the daily concerns of our children makes it easier to have meaningful conversations regarding the love of God and is itself a way to express God's love to others.
2. Family Devotions—To pass on the Christian faith to children and youth, adults need to learn the Christian message and biblical story as their own story. Christianity shapes the whole of one's life and therefore involves a lifetime of Christian study, reflection, and prayer.
3. Family Service—Children, youth, and adults are more likely to be influenced by those who "walk the talk." The Christian talk is expressed in the Good Samaritan story, the care of others, and especially the care of those in need. Service projects are best done with family members and other intergenerational groups.
4. Family Rituals and Traditions—Daily routines, celebrations, and other ways families choose to identify who they are and tell their family stories, speak volumes about what the family values, believes, and promotes.

Part I: Caring Conversations

• Make time for these conversations. Most find it is easier to build them into the routine of the day—before dinner, during dinner, before doing homework, before bedtime, whenever works best for your family.
• Listen with both ears (there is a reason we have two ears and only one mouth!).
• Stop what you are doing so you can be present with the other.
• Listen as much as possible without judgment or criticism.
• Convey interest.
• Encourage expression of feelings.
• General questions as opposed to specific questions convey an openness that allows the other person to share what she or he wishes.
• Try to view the situation through the eyes of the other.
• Be mutual, share of your day, your life, your hopes, dreams, and struggles.

• Friday night "nacho" suppers
• Going to church on Sunday morning
• Holding hands when you say grace
• A bath, a bedtime story and prayers
• Gathering at the family cottage each Thanksgiving as an extended family, to close up the cottage for the season and enjoy a dinner together
• Greeting each morning with "good morning, morning" and ending each night with "good night, night"
• Brunch on Sunday
  Placing a crèche each year to celebrate the Advent and Christmas seasons
• Being awakened each morning with the rhyme, "Good morning, good morning, how do you do. Good morning, good morning, I love you."
• Making an Advent wreath

• Help serve food at a shelter.
• Make a food, clothing, or toy hamper for a family in need.
• Think of a group that provides a service to the community—like fire fighters or police officers—and surprise them with a basket of goodies to say thanks for the work they do in making the community safe.
• Volunteer at a food bank.
• Support the Mission and Service Fund and use the special M&S Mandate magazine to adopt a ministry. Write to find out more about this ministry.
• Make a welcome card to be presented to each person who is baptized in your church.
• Adopt and clean up a park.
• Give someone a ride.

As I said, we brainstormed some UU specific approaches to these keys, and I'll share some of what we came up with in future posts. In the meantime, please let me know the ways you and your congregation are helping UU families strengthen their faith!
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Spiritual progressives focus on the nurturant aspects of religion and spirituality. Service, compassion, and community, connects spiritual progressives to other people and the world, and are central to their spiritual practice.

 

Nurturant spirituality comes in many forms: for Christians, a nurturant God transmits nurturant values through grace and love; for Jews, Tikkun olam, a duty to heal the world; for Buddhists, a vow of compassion for all beings.

 

For spiritual progressives, empathy is the paramount value and responsibility is central to the spirtual practice of maintaining communities and service to others. Spiritual progressives, of course, seek meaningful fulfillment in life for themselves and others.(George Lakoff: Creating a Progressive Values Movement)

 

Faith, then, is a quality of human living. At its best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service: a quiet confidence and joy  which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and  is stable no matter what may happen to oneself at the level of immediate event. Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive; and face others with cheerful charity. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith, quoted in James Fowler's Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development)

 

Persons who commit themselves to attempt to be family for one another... [who] (a) meet their needs for belonging and attachment, (b) meet those needs in  others, and (c) share life purposes, help, and resources (Diana Garland: "Family Ministry: Defining Perspectives")

Maturational Growth: This is growth in stature and religious maturity of each member and growth in the ability to nurture and be nurtured. A healthy, growing congregation empowers members to contribute their unique talents and gifts for the well-being of the whole. (From Loren Mead's More Than Numbers, quoted in the UUA's "Planning for Growth" workshop)

 

Big Idea 1. Surrounding kids with a richly nurturing environment from birth through adolescence is critical to promoting their healthy physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual development. If this is true, then why are so many of our current youth strategies and programs focused on trying to put the pieces back together after kids are already in crisis rather than on providing the early and continuing nurture that will keep them healthy and whole?

 

Big Idea 2. Positive social, moral, and spiritual development is integral to the healthy overall development of children and youth, and, in turn, fundamentally depends on kids receiving consistent and effective nurture from committed and caring adults. If this is true, then why as a nation have we become so single-mindedly focused on promoting academic competence and, relatively speaking, committed so little time, effort, and money to supporting our children’s social, moral, and spiritual development? Wouldn’t a more balanced strategy, and more balanced investment, yield a significantly higher return?

 

Big Idea 3. The work of providing this nonacademic nurture is done largely by families, neighborhoods, community groups, and religious organizations (what the Commission calls “authoritative communities.”). Taken as a whole, these institutions have been growing weaker when we need them to be much stronger. If this is true, shouldn’t all of us as be working harder to strengthen the authoritative communities that are, or could be, part of our lives? Given the central role of the family, shouldn’t strengthening families be a much higher and more explicit national priority? And shouldn’t government and private funders be doing more to make sure that the community and faith-based groups on the front lines of nurturing our kids have the resources they need to do their jobs? ("Hardwired to Connect")

 

Nurturant Morality: In the Nurturant Parent family, the highest moral values are Empathy and Responsibility. Effective nurturing requires empathy, which is feeling what someone else feels—parents have to figure out what all their baby's cries mean in order to take care of him or her. Responsibility is critical, since being a good nurturer means being responsible not only for looking after the well-being of others, but also being responsible to ourselves so that we can take care of others. Nurturant parents raise children to be empathetic toward others, responsible to themselves, and responsible to others who are or will be in their care. Empathy connects us to other people in our families, our neighborhoods, and in the larger world. Being responsible to others and oneself requires cooperation. In society, nurturant morality is expressed as social responsibility. This requires cooperation rather than competition, and a recognition of interdependence. (Lakoff: "The Nurturant Parent Family Model")

We hardly think about or recognize community until it is changed, or we leave. Upon return after a long absence, the sights, smells, and greetings from familiar people may flood us with emotion. All these point to the familiar niche that community is. It consists of people, organizations, and physical environment that keep us from depending solely on the persons within our family to meet all our personal, social, physical, and spiritual needs, and who communicate, “This is your place; you belong here.” (Diana Garland: "Community: The Goal of Family Ministry")

 

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:

1. Authoritative communities include children and youth.
2. They treat children as ends in themselves.
3. They are warm and nurturing.
4. They establish clear limits and expectations.
5. The core of their work is performed largely by nonspecialists.
6. They are multigenerational.
7. They have a long-term focus.
8. They encourage spiritual and religious development.
9. They reflect and transmit a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person.
10. They are philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all people and to the  principle of love of neighbor.(Hardwired to Connect)

We agree that the Commission’s ten characteristics are the minimum necessary to create communities in which children have opportunities to flourish. We commit ourselves to using our best efforts through the Mothers’ Council to spread the word and contribute to the revitalization and creation of such communities across the nation.

 

But we think “connected communities” is a better term than authoritative communities. It is, in our view, a more user-friendly term and fully consistent with the spirit of the Commission’s findings on the importance for children of sustained bonds with parents and communities. (The Mother's Council Task Force: "Gather Around the Children: A Response to 'Hardwired to Connect'")

The African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" became a political slogan pointing to the importance of community for children, but it does not quite go far enough. All persons, both children and adults, need community. Because children are dependent on others for their survival, their vulnerability in the absence of community is more apparent. As James Garbarino has pointed out, children are like the canaries miners used to take with them into mine shafts. Canaries are particularly sensitive to poisonous gasses, and if they succumbed, the miners knew the environment was dangerous (Garbarino, 1995). Like canaries in mine shafts without adequate fresh air, children "succumb" without adequate communities of nurture and support. Adults, too, however, need to live in community. Some seem to need community more than others, but even self-sufficient adults seek the company of others and need a community when they become in, injured, or threatened. (Garland: Community)

 

“I think the issue to bring progressives together should be this most central of all issues—raising children to become responsible, empathetic adults.” (Lakoff: Moral Politics)

 

A recent poll conducted for PBS’s Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly surveyed 1,130 adults about faith and family. Anna Greenberg, vice president of the polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc., told Sojourners that “progressive religious groups [need to] make sure they are offering services on the ground for children”—something she said conservative evangelicals often do well. Greenberg saw this as important to the long-term survival of progressive religious traditions. ("Progressive Family Values," Sojourners Magazine)

 

One of the most striking findings of Hardwired to Connect is that the longer the children of immigrants live in the United States, the more they “tend to be less healthy and to report increases in risk behaviors. By the third and later generations, rates of most of these behaviors approach or exceed those of U.S.- born white adolescents.”

 

The inevitable conclusion: our culture is harmful to children’s mental and emotional health; we must make radical changes or our children will continue to suffer.

 

According to Hardwired, the ecology of childhood in the United States is “at best anemic, in the sense of weak and inadequate to foster full human flourishing, and at worst toxic, inadvertently depressing health and engendering emotional distress and mental illness.” (Mothers’ Council Task Force)

While Nurturing Children and Youth focuses primarily on individual development within the context of families, Embracing Parents: How Your Congregation Can Strengthen Families focuses more squarely on families and faith development within the context of congregations and the broader community. Written by Jolene and Eugene Roehlkepartain, Embracing Parents reports the results of a 2002 poll of over a thousand parents in the United States conducted by the Search Institute in Minneapolis and the YMCA of the USA. The poll revealed these five key findings:

• Most parents surveyed are going it alone.
• Many parents interviewed lack a strong relationship with a spouse or partner.
• A majority of parents surveyed feel successful as parents most of the time.
• Most parents face ongoing challenges.
• Many things parents say would help them as parents are easy things to do.

• Our children are hardwired to connect to other people and to moral meaning.
• The children and youth in our society are in crisis due to the weakening of connectedness present in their environments.
• Our young people need “authoritative communities,” defined as those groups of people who demonstrate their commitment to one another and what it means to be a good person living a good life.

1. It is a social institution that includes children and youth.
2. It treats children as ends in themselves.
3. It is warm and nurturing.
4. It establishes clear limits and expectations.
5. The core of its work is performed largely by nonspecialists.
6. It is multi-generational.
7. It has a long-term focus.
8. It reflects and transmits a shared under standing of what it means to be a good person.
9. It encourages spiritual and religious development.
10. It is philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all persons and to the principle of love of neighbor.

The Lifespan Faith Development Council (LFDC) will be the group that holds the responsibility for scheduling and planning trainings and workshops for religious educators, youth advisors, and lay people. They will also plan and monitor the budget of all activities and programs associated with Lifespan Faith Development. Most importantly, in my mind, the LFDC will be responsible for keeping the channels of communication open among everyone around the district involved in faith development—ministers, religious educators and lay people. The LFDC will be in charge of envisioning ways to provide programming and offer support and instruction in Lifespan Faith Development to our congregations. The LFDC will also coordinate and make available resources and consultants to individual congregations. This group will continue to be responsible for the District Resource Library and will have a presence at the PSD Annual Meetings.