September 2, 2022
“Archeology” and “nursery” aren’t two words that you think would naturally go together. But the sign above my office door gives evidence that they intersect—at least in this sign.
As you may know we have a team of young parents who are taking the care and maintenance of our nursery very seriously. This is a real gift to our church as we have a number of children who use our nursery, with more on the way. We should be equally excited by and appreciative of the work they are doing. But there are other benefits it seems. Allan Waite, while doing the hard work of clearing out the space and all of its nooks and crannies, found the sign that is now found above my office door. It reads, “If you don’t know everything in the bible, you need Sunday School; if you do, we need you! Sunday School Committee.” This sign was the fruit of Allan’s “excavation” in the nursery. A “fossil” from a previous era.
Although this sign is an artifact of the past, it speaks volumes about the future. The nursery, after all, is the starting place of Christian nurture in our church building by our church family. In their preverbal stage of life, we communicate God’s love to infants in our nursery in the most concrete way possible, that is by physically caring for their needs. At the same time this is a way of ministering to our young parents, communicating to them that they and their children are important to us. But it is more than this, as it points to the need for communicating the love of God to all people at all stages of development. In an intergenerational church such as ours, we should value and care for people of all ages and abilities.
I would like to reflect in the next few weeks about what we now call Christian (or Faith) Formation, and why we call it that now, how we can do that now, and why it is an essential part of the DNA of a Covenant Church. I will start with this last item: why faith formation is an essential part of our Covenant tradition, both its past and. Its present.
The Covenant Church is part of a movement known as “pietism.” As the Covenant Church is rooted in the Swedish Lutheran Church, we are part of the Lutheran Pietist movement. When I was a seminary student, we often rooted Lutheran Pietism in the life, ministry, and writings of Philip Jakob Spener, a German Lutheran pastor, who was concerned that people understood the faith, but didn’t have a living faith. But we saw Spener preserving qualities of Luther’s understanding of church, not changing it. Many Lutherans did not agree with us. Now, however, Finnish Lutheran scholars have invited Lutherans to rethink Luther’s place in the formation of pietism in the Lutheran tradition. And so they have. In many ways the broader Lutheran world is now seeing more continuity than discontinuity between Luther and pietism, something I was taught, and later taught, at North Park Seminary. It is nice to know others are catching up to us.
One of the challenges to this discussion is how one defines pietism. My contribution to that conversation is my understanding that pietism of all types has one very central characteristic. That is, pietists understand faith to be an organic process within a sacramental or graceful understanding of God. “Organic” is a term which means that it is living and growing. The opposite of organic is a “juridical” or legal faith. A juridical faith asks only if you met the requirement: in other words, have you been baptized, or prayed the “sinners prayer,” etc.? This is very different from the question the early Covenanters (often called “mission friends”) asked, “How is it today with you and the Lord?” Like Jesus proclaimed in Luke’s gospel, following Jesus is a day in day out decision. (Luke 9:23) In other words, we never stop growing; we never stop choosing to follow Christ.
The second part of what I observed is pietists are sacramental. “Sacrament” comes from the Latin word which translated the Greek word for “mystery.” And that word for mystery was used to describe the presence of God. It speaks of a God who comes to us mysteriously, unexpectedly, because we do not deserve it. It comes as grace. Our growth is a response to the grace of God we have received. It is not our effort to be more spiritual or godly; it is the openness we have to allow God to work in us through the Spirit, through our sisters and brothers in Christ, and through spiritual practices which we offer to God to make ourselves available to God’s offer of growth. Our worship services would be an example of such a spiritual practice.
There have been pietists across the many eras of Christianity, and around the world. For example, the Wesleys and the Methodist movement they started were Anglican pietists. It is not surprising that John Wesley had his “aha” moment about a living faith at a meeting of Moravians, a pietist group that has roots going back before Luther.
So why is this important? Pietism is more than historical and theological trivia. Pietism is how we at First Covenant Church understand the Christian faith. It is a living and growing faith; it will have its peaks and valleys. Still, we hope the overall trajectory of growth would be upward, demonstrating vitality and growth. Our faith is rooted in grace as found in scriptures, relationships, and God’s own nature to nurture, correct, and encourage. It should last from cradle to grave, which means it begins in the nursery. Pietism is not a dusty historical artifact, but a faith that speaks of new life and on-going growth.
~ Pastor Todd