Note from Pastor Robyn: This reflection was shared by Marcia Chapman during our August Last Sunday of the Month Service. At my request, she gave permission for us to share her reflection with our Spirit of Grace community.
I assume you have all heard the quote “it takes a village to raise a child” at one time or another. The origin of the phrase comes from Africa (specifically Igbo or Yoruba) to indicate that in those cultures, the children are raised by the entire community rather than just the birth parents.
I have observed our culture focusing more on what each individual family looks like than on the community as a whole. Parents focus heavily on what their individual family looks like and less on what the communities their children look like. The pressure this puts on parents and on families is enormous. Each individual family becomes responsible for the well-being of their child, without assistance from anyone else. What a loss for both the children and the adults!
The NIH has an entire paper on creating the village for raising children. Here’s a quote from that paper:
The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” originates from an African proverb and conveys the message that it takes many people (“the village”) to provide a safe, healthy environment for children, where children are given the security they need to develop and flourish, and to be able to realize their hopes and dreams. This requires an environment where children's voices are taken seriously (2) and where multiple people (the “villagers”), including parents, siblings, extended family members, neighbors, teachers, professionals, community members, and policy makers, care for a child. All these ‘villagers' may provide direct care to the children and/or support the parent in looking after their children. However, the village, in many countries today, is dissipated and fragmented, and individuals are increasingly isolated and are not eager to ask for or provide help to others. Family breakdown, economic pressures, long working hours, and increased mobility have all contributed to families feeling less connected to extended family members and others around them (3). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8964422/
Spirit of Grace is a village for our young people. Today, I want to talk to you about why it’s so important, what we are already doing, and what you can do to be “the village”.
I’m going to start with a story about my own daughter, Laura. In high school, she came out to us as bisexual. We had a lengthy conversation one Friday evening. We thought we were saying all the right things, but frankly, the conversation ended in tears. In particular, there was a group of kids at school that she really liked who told her they couldn’t support her if she dated a girl because they were Christians. This didn’t make any sense to Laura, and we weren’t able to make it make sense either. Thankfully, we belonged to a supportive church, so we told her to talk to Don, the youth pastor. The following Sunday, when we went back to the youth area to get the kids and head home, Laura said, “I’m going to lunch with Don.” Don looked at us for approval, which we readily gave. I’m not entirely sure what Don said to her that day, and it may not have been any different from what we said. What I do know is that Laura is a happy, well-adjusted woman. She attends an Episcopal church on the east side that is open and welcoming. She is in a loving relationship. I also know that Don wasn’t the only person at the church who supported her. There was Bea, who loved the kids fiercely and went on mission trips with them into her 80’s. There were my friends Holly and Nicole, who modeled for her what a family could look like with two mothers. There was June, who travelled with her to Detroit for the Presbyterian General Assembly so that Laura could testify on behalf of an amendment to allow for openly gay clergy to be called to churches. There was Jen, who showed her how a woman could pick herself up with respect after a difficult divorce.
I see all of you being the village here at Spirit of Grace. It might be the Dirt Siblings working with the children and youth to plant a special garden. It might be the men’s group taking the kids golfing. It might be Charles Cole volunteering his time at a youth retreat. It might be any one of our five storytellers meeting with the youth on Sunday. It might just be someone chatting with one of the kids in between services.
We are called to be the village for our kids. The passage from Psalm 127 reminds us of how precious our youth are and how blessed we are to have them here.
Let me tell you a bit about the intentional village work we do with our young people. For our younger children, we have traditional Sunday school with a program for our very little children and another program for our elementary-aged children. They attend in between services every Sunday except for Last Sunday. But today I want to focus on our confirmation youth.
Why is youth ministry so important?
If you look at how young people are raised today, there isn’t much opportunity for inter-generational relationships. Young people have their teachers, maybe their soccer coaches, and their parents. But many families are geographically spread so that young people don’t often see grandparents or others from older generations. The church is a place where they are around people of all ages.
The focus of schools is increasingly on academics, despite research showing how important mental well-being is to learning. At Spirit of Grace, we can teach our youth how to live in a way that makes the world a better place. We go beyond academics to faith, ethics, and justice.
Many children are raised without religious education. We know that so many people of the current generation of parents were either hurt by the church or raised by parents who were hurt by the church. At Spirit of Grace, we try to be a church that welcomes those who were hurt by the church in the past. We provide these children with moral grounding and a religious background for their future.
We can show our youth that they are welcome, as they are. We don’t ask our youth to be a certain person in order for us to love them. We accept and celebrate them as they are. This can be difficult sometimes. We all have expectations as to what a young person will be like. It is our job to lose those expectations and meet them where they are. This can be difficult. I know that I sometimes fall down. I make assumptions as to what will work well for a kid, and I can be wrong.
What is Spirit of Grace already doing?
The confirmation class, which is made up of middle school and now high school students, meets in Pastor Robyn’s office. Our Sundays start with a debrief of our prior week and end with prayer concerns. I can tell you from those prayer concerns that our kids are very attuned to the injustices in our world as well as to the needs of their friends and family. Our educational program is graciously developed by Mike Keys. It is a three-year program, which enables the kids to enter at any point and finish when they’ve been in for three years. We have multiple “storytellers” who lead the discussion, and I am there every week for consistency. Developing our own program allows us to tailor it to Spirit of Grace. For example, this fall we will spend time on womanist theology because of a question from one of our confirmation students. We are also able to give our confirmation classes perspectives from both the Catholic and the Lutheran traditions.
Through the efforts of parents and Katie Furgison, the confirmation class has performed service projects, including making care packages for the Blanchet House and performing maintenance around the church
In past years we have also sponsored one-night retreats here at the church which give us more time to connect. It is difficult in the structured 45-minutes on Sunday morning to have deep conversations. Those retreats are often attended by kids from other small churches.
For the past two years, I was privileged to take our confirmation kids to Camp Lutherwood, a five-day overnight camp with churches from all around Oregon and SW Washington. This experience gives our kids exposure to other churches and church leaders. It also gives me and other leaders from Spirit of Grace more time to build deep relationships. For example, this year one of our youth approached me during our time at Lutherwood and asked about the language used in the camp songs. That gave us the opportunity to talk about inclusive language, why it’s important to Spirit of Grace and what you will see at other churches (it also gave me a chance to talk to the camp director who is working to improve the inclusive language used in songs at Lutherwood).
It’s important to note that our weekly scheduled program is not the end of the village raising our children. It’s really just the beginning. The relationships that you build with our youth will guide them through the challenges of growing up in a confusing and complicated world. Recognizing that as adults right now we are navigating a complicated world, imagine how much more difficult that would be when you are also learning how to navigate who you are. They need us.
How can you show up for our kids?
There are so many ways.
The first and most important is merely seeing them. If you see one of our kids walking through the church, say good morning. You don’t even have to engage them in conversation, just acknowledge them. Attend social activities such as monthly games which has just been restarted and play games with people of all ages. I will often say to people who ask about my volunteering with the youth that if I teach nothing on a Sunday morning except that there is another adult who loves them, I have done my job.
Of course you can volunteer. There are many volunteer roles with our youth. Certainly, we would welcome you as storytellers on Sunday morning. But there are other, perhaps less intimidating roles. For example, the men’s group reached out and took some of our kids to Top Golf. The property team worked with the kids last year to fill potholes in the parking lot. The Dirt Siblings worked with the kids to plant a garden.
Our church will be partnering with the Westside Youth Collective, a multi-church youth group which will give our youth a larger youth group, along with an ecumenical lens on their faith. We hope to provide a few volunteers to the Westside Collective.
What we have is beautiful. We have young children who are comfortable at Spirit of Grace like they aren’t anywhere else. We have youth who know that when they are here, caring adults will listen to them and love them right where they are.
We are a multi-generational community. That is a precious commodity today, which gives our youth a very special resource. The vitality of our church is significantly enhanced by our young people. I am deeply grateful for what we have and the role each of you play.