Real Kids,Real Faith

Real Kids, Real Faith: Practices for Nurturing Children’s Spiritual Lives
by Karen Marie Yust
(Jossey-Bass, 2004)

Once or twice a year, I teach a class for parents on some aspect of raising children in the faith. This fall, we tackled the most challenging age group—those pre-verbal and newly verbal preschoolers whose faith experiences come primarily through the pores of their skin, what they see, and what they hear, not through words.

Few writers even deal with this subject, but Karen Marie Yust, a pastor, mother of three, and professor at Union Seminary/PSCE in Richmond, really focuses on how to provide children the experiences that can nurture faith. Included are topics such as “Creating a Spiritual World for Children to Inhabit”, “Praying with Children”, and “Acting Out our Spirituality with Children.” As the title suggests, she focuses on faith practices (which parents can learn along with their children, if need be), including silence, various forms of prayer, open-ended story-telling, singing, and much more.

She points out that introducing children to the Christian faith today involves helping them learn to be “bi-lingual”, fully at home in both the world of faith and the secular world that surrounds us. Although the focus is very much on things parents can do with their own kids, she is very clear that one essential part of nurturing faith is finding a community where they can see, hear, and feel others practicing their faith. This book is both theologically sound and eminently practical. Highly recommended.

--The Rev. Andrew MacBeth, Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis

Dearly Beloved

Dearly Beloved
By the Reverend Andrew MacBeth
(Church Publishing, 2007)

I have to confess that I read Andy MacBeth’s new book as a student pastor who has already learned to be apprehensive about weddings. Please don’t get me wrong. The liturgy for Christian Marriage is some of the truest and most beautiful liturgy that the church offers. But I have learned that few people who come to be married in the church notice – or even care. What most want has far more to do with expectations and fantasies that have been formed by popular culture and family pressures than with a rich and beautiful vision of how marriage can and should embody the good news of Jesus.

With thoughtful explanations of the wedding service woven throughout, MacBeth’s book gently urges us to let the liturgy shape our expectations. Liturgy at its best is a communal performance of praise and thanksgiving which reorients our lives by immersing us in the presence of the living God. Like any good and wise pastor, he wants us to give the church’s liturgy a chance to do what it does best – and to receive it as a gift.

At the same time practical and thoughtful, this little book is refreshingly easy to read – like sitting in a cozy study sipping tea while having a conversation with a good pastor. As easy as this book is, though, MacBeth does not avoid controversial subjects like same-sex unions and weddings for those who have been divorced. But no matter where you turn in this book, you sense that every word flows from a pastor’s heart.

Lurking beneath the surface of the book is a persistent question for those who want to be married in the church (and for their families and friends): Why not trust the church and its liturgy, its pastors and other servants, to do what we do best? That seems to me to be a very good question. And Dearly Beloved poses that question with grace, honesty and good humor.

I gladly recommend this book.

The Reverend Steve Ingram, Hampton Court United Methodist Church
For the Episcopal Bookshop,September 13, 2007

Our Book Club guest for October is local author Geoffrey Wood. Read about his book here....

Leaper
By Geoffrey Wood
(WaterBrook Press,2007)

James suddenly finds he can leap through space. He has been chosen, given a great gift. Like the prophets, he passes through confusion and fear, denial and rejection-- “Not me, God” -- until ultimately, he trusts and embraces his calling. It gets him into all kinds of trouble, most of it funny. But along the way, he understands something very serious. Just as we see with Harry Potter (or Spiderman for that matter), it’s not so much magic (or a super power) that triumphs in the end, but character. So it is with James, who learns that his capacity for doing good deeds depends upon his ability to get outside himself, to leap out of his own preoccupations, worries and suspicions. He meets ordinary people––a priest, a co-worker at the coffee shop–who show him exactly what doing this looks like. They do it in simple, every day ways. At his worst moment, when he utterly fails as a super hero, James recognizes his real failing and it’s simple; he’s been too busy, too self-absorbed to listen. How does that adage go? “The urgent things are seldom important, and the important things are seldom urgent.”

James is thoroughly modern: divorced, over-caffeinated, talking fast and rushing everywhere. His verbal exchanges are a constant flow of snappy one-liners. He tolerates the off-beat. But he’s also a throwback. He thinks a lot about the serious consequences of divorce. He believes in God. He ponders the meaning of Jesus’s death on a cross. In many respects, James is the quintessential modern Memphian.

More a soliloquy than a novel, this book is meant to be read aloud. And, there couldn’t be anyone better to read it out loud and discuss it with you than the author himself. He is a member of Voices of the South, a local acting company, and his one-person story telling performances are a real treat. Please join us Wednesday, October 31, at 12:15.

Elizabeth Wirls

Welcome, readers!

Think of ebook recommends as an online book club for the Episcopal Bookshop community. Visit us for recommendations, reviews, discussions and comments on spiritual reading new and old, fiction and non-fiction, traditional and contemporary, Christian and of other faith traditions. We look forward to sharing with friends from Memphis and beyond.