Raising Faith-Filled Kids:: 3
How will they know
if you never go?

I increasingly find that many of us younger-ish parents desire for our children to have some sort of exposure to spiritual things in view of fostering or encouraging their personal spirituality. Yet often nothing is done. I find myself asking how will your kids ever know about faith or spirituality if they never go and experience it. Now that affirms my context as a follower of Jesus who confirms that spirituality is a personal or individual thing and also believes that it might even be more of a communal or public thing.

I want my children to participate in a faith community, to connect with other people - of different ages, diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, in order to experience what faith is from different viewpoints. I want my daughters to be part of a community, an extended family of faith as they grow up. The African saying "it takes a village to raise a child" is often quoted in our Bay Area. Yet if children aren't in a village how can that happen?

Here's an illustration. I'm not really hyper-excited about the whole Santa thing. I've told (maybe a mistake) our oldest daughter that Santa is a myth, a story that invites us to share with each other, that her gifts come from all those people in her life that love and treasure her. She now likes to tell other kids that Santa doesn't exist. Yet she does find an ironic joy in encountering Santa, in that glimpse of a dream that maybe the whole myth is real. We were at a family Christmas party this past weekend. Santa came to distribute gifts to over 40 of my cousins and second cousins. Here's how my daughter responded to Santa