Faith in Progress

September 27, 2009 Esther At Shrine Mont (which is not only where we go for our parish retreats, but where youth in the Diocese can go for summer camp), every night the campers in each cabin gather in a circle to share their day’s highs, lows and God-moments.  Several of our teenagers at St. Aidan’s have been formed by Shrine Mont, and so when we started our youth group back up for the year last week, they wanted to include that tradition in our weekly meeting.   We’d barely begun to go around the circle when it became clear that the non-Shrine Mont campers weren’t sure what a God moment was and didn’t feel like they could pinpoint any such moments in their lives.  I was about to jump in and offer a religious definition — God moments as times when you felt sure God was with you, or saw God at work in the world.  But, in what was actually something of a God moment for me , the camper youths began defining it first.  Their way of talking about God moments was not so explicitly

September 13, 2015 Mark 8:27-38 My mind has been on  Godly Play a lot this week.  That is St. Aidan's Sunday School program for the pre-k through 3rd graders.  W e hosted an all day teacher training yesterday and I’ve been organizing the schedule and preparing my story for our first gathering this morning. If you’ve been here long, you know that I love Godly Play - the generous and open theology, the beauty and simplicity of the materials, the structure of the sessions that follows what we do in here in such a comfortable and welcoming way.  But I think what I love most about Godly Play is its invitation to children to claim the stories and faith for themselves. After we gather and get ourselves ready to listen, the storyteller tells the story for the day and then the circle of children wonders about the story.  For most stories, there are four questions at the end: I wonder what is your favorite part of this story? I wonder what is the most important part of this sto