August
20
2015

Yale ISM 2015 Seminar: Introduction (Photos)

2015 Theme | From Generation to Generation

"... The Christian educator John Westerhoff once asked a question that still resonates: “Will Our Children Have Faith?”   He urged congregations to become vibrant, formative communities of worship where the generation of memory and the generation of vision could teach and inspire one another.  A few years later, the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann deepened Westerhoff’s question by turning it around: “Will our Faith Have Children?” he asked.  Will our worship, our discipleship, and our witness in the world embody a faith that is generative, and affirmative of the life of creation?  Will we nurture a faith that is not tribally limited by kinship or age group—a faith that proclaims God’s grace and reaches out toward God’s new creation?

Every vital Christian congregation asks both of these questions in one way or another.  Will our children have faith?  Will our faith have children?  Both questions are urgent.  Vital congregations forge living responses to these questions in worship and ministries where memory and vision intersect, and where rising generations are invited into faith in a way that engages their struggles and hopes.

Your congregations live these questions and bear wisdom about how to respond to them. 

One team comes from a United Methodist congregation where older immigrants who speak little English and younger ones to whom old-country forms of piety and worship seem irrelevant gather weekly around the tables of Word and Meal.  This involves some creative adaptation of Methodist worship traditions—and a deep sense of Eucharistic connection to one another and to the wider church over time..."

See more at: http://ismcongregations.yale.edu/news/2015-seminar-introduction#sthash.Q8CLV9HV.dpuf (Yale Institute of Sacred Music)

« Back