Each week we celebrate that this community is an intergenerational one. We celebrate that no matter how old or young we are, we all have something to learn and grow in together. This time is our chapel for children of all ages.
This morning, we’re talking about faith formation. Oftentimes, when people talk about faith formation, they mean classes that help you grow and become a more thoughtful & caring person. You may also hear people call this religious education or even Sunday School – since that’s when it happens for many Unitarian Universalists, and most Christians too. And those are good names for it, because a lot of this learning happens in classes. But it also happens outside of classrooms and Sundays. It can also happen when you’re spending time with your friends and family, when you’re reading or watching TV. It can happen anywhere, anytime. But what do you mean by that? you might ask. So I’ll tell you.
Let’s look at those two words, faith & formation. Faith is when you believe something, even if you can’t tell someone why. Faith might be something you believe in that’s so big you can’t get your arms around it. One example of this might be our First Principle. The First Principle says we believe everyone, everywhere has worth and dignity – they deserve to be treated well. You might believe that, but you might not be able to tell someone why you believe that or how you know that’s true off the top of your head. You just know it in your gut. That’s what we mean by faith.
Now formation is another tricky word – and it might seem like a mouthful to some of you. But the most important part of this word is form. That’s a big clue to what this word means. When you form something, you’re shaping it or molding it – like a piece of clay or playdo. So formation is just a word that says you’re doing that over and over and over again. You’re forming something, shaping and pinching and rolling it out and crumpling it back up.
When we put these two words together, faith & formation, it says a lot about us as Unitarian Universalists. We take our faith – the big things we believe in – and we’re always forming it. If our faith is a piece of playdo, then we’re always turning it out, rolling it over, pinching it up. We do this with the things we believe in by asking lots of questions about it, and trying hard to find answers.
As Unitarian Universalists, we’re doing this all the time, not just in church, and not just in class. And we can’t do it alone either. Our friends, families, and teachers all help us. So I’m glad that you came here today, so we can continue forming our faith together. Thank you for being here!
Almost a month ago, I began this position as First Unitarian’s Faith Formation and Congregational Life Coordinator – with a mouthful of a title and almost as big of a task ahead of me. Coming back to congregational life in person, and after several months with no program coordinators on staff means there is a lot of work ahead of us, and I am really honored to be doing this work with all of you. This morning, I’m putting on one of my hats to talk about something we’ve called by many names, which we currently call Faith Formation. I don’t believe these are the best possible words we can ever come up with to talk about this process of learning and growing together, but I do think they illustrate something meaningful about our tradition. In our children’s chapel earlier this morning, I talked a little bit about this, and in this sermon, I will dig further into what it means for us to form our faith, and why it’s important.
We form our faith on at least two levels – the personal & the collective. When we talk about forming our faith, we talk about forming our own sense of the world as individuals and what we value. Here, we can also talk about supporting each other in this work. At this point however, we can also begin to look into another level of forming our faith. We begin to talk of forming our living tradition, Unitarian Universalism itself, shaping and molding its present & future.
That’s the challenge and the great opportunity our tradition offers us: the chance to build it ourselves. No one hands us this faith as though handing over a box of answers for us to sift through and incorporate into our lives. Instead, this tradition meets us with an open palm full of possibility. It hands us the freedom and the responsibility to find our own answers to life’s questions. This is what I think appeals to many newcomers in our tradition. It’s certainly been appealing to me.
Looking back, my own childhood faith-formation was very different, full of answers only loosely tied to questions. When I look at my experience in confirmation, I remember our teacher presenting us with a very meat-and-potatoes, plain-Jane vision of what it meant to be a Catholic adult. It was a presentation on what Catholics do, what Catholics believe, without even much of an explanation as to why we do or should believe these things. There was little talk about what’s beautiful or nourishing, or even any warning about what would happen if we didn’t do or believe what we were supposed to. Instead, our teacher and community expected that we would be Catholic because our parents were Catholic, and grandparents, and so many generations before us were Catholic. What else could we possibly do or become? And why would we want anything else?
At this point in my life, I had questions these answers didn’t satisfy. I was already questioning my commitments to Christianity and its god, and had found my answers in Paganism. But I didn’t find answers to all of my questions – namely, where am I going to grow in the company of others? Which is what led me here. I remember standing here, in this very church, browsing through our brochure rack as a teenager after a music recital. I was reading about the home people of different faith backgrounds had found in Unitarian Universalism. I was incredibly impressed by the portrait this little brochure painted of our tradition. It said, this is where question-askers of all kinds of backgrounds come together to help each other find answers.
That thread running through our tradition is ultimately why I’m a Unitarian Universalist. I have found something deeply nourishing about the process of forming our individual & collective faith in the company of peers. In a place where it seems like no one and everyone is an expert and an answer-holder. No one has all the answers, and everyone has some answers. And everyone has an abundance of questions. My first real encounter with this was in my college congregation’s young adult group, where we gathered every Sunday over lunch, and spent time sharing and learning from each other’s viewpoints and experiences. Outside of a few deeper conversations with my childhood friends, I had never encountered a place where we could just be, learning from one another.
My appreciation for how our tradition forms faith continued to deepen when I mentored a youth in that congregation’s Coming of Age program. Through Coming of Age, our tradition asks What does it mean to be an adult in this community? And answers that question by telling our youth Find out for yourself. It was so moving to be a young adult companioning the young people, the future adults, of our tradition as they find their own answers to life’s Big Questions. Questions like: Is there something bigger and deeper in the Universe than us humans? Does something happen to us after we die? What does it mean to be a good person, and why is that important? It has been so moving to see the promise of our tradition in action. In this tradition, we form our faith, our sense of the world and our values, with the support and guidance of one another.
This is the personal, or interpersonal, dimension of faith-formation. It stands on its own as something valuable and important. We have to have our own frameworks and foundations before we turn to building something bigger together. And when we continue developing these foundations for long enough, this process leads us to the collective sense of forming our faith. We form this faith, this tradition, Unitarian Universalism, together through all our own development. It is the sum of all our questions and answers. And I see this most clearly in the faith-formation programming we offer our children & youth. This is the programming we offer so that the future adults of our world will love to ask questions and seek answers as much as we do. That they will not be content to have answers handed out to them without reason or question.
I have heard many people call the children and their families in our community the future of our community. These young ones [here among us today] will be the future leaders of our world – and with all our care and support, they will grow up to be the leaders of our tradition as well. If they are the future of Unitarian Universalism, it is because we expect that they will stick around for it as adults. As the adults of our present tradition, we have to do what we can to encourage that, here and now. We can’t just assume that our children and youth will grow up and remain in our tradition without our guidance and support. If we are to believe that these children & families among us are our future, we have to show them how much we care about that future. We need to be here for them.
A couple days ago, I was talking with one of our teachers, someone I and many of us look up to as an expert educator in this congregation. And with heavy hearts we realized that we would not have the support we need to offer our congregation’s sex education program for middle-schoolers this year. After weeks of asking the people in our congregation who are certified to teach this class, we don’t have enough teachers available to facilitate it. Instead, we will spend this year regrouping and planning to offer it again in 2023. Meanwhile, we will continue looking for teachers to work with our other age-groups.
I tell you this to highlight the urgency of our situation, and to invite us all to live into our values. We find ourselves at a juncture in our congregation’s life, shaken by change and encouraged by the possibilities ahead of us. It’s time to tend to those possibilities now. If you’ve felt anxious about the future of this congregation, you or someone next to you may have said We need more kids in this congregation. And if you’ve said we need more kids in the congregation, and don’t have kids in classes, or aren’t teaching already, this is your call. This is your call to care for the future of our congregation, right now. We don’t need adults who are perfect, or who have advanced degrees in education or child psychology. We don’t even need adults with a spotless, empty plate – because really, who is that among any of us? More than anything, we need adults that care. About our children. Our families. Our future. This is also what it means to form our faith: to nurture its future and all its possibilities.