Taking our seat for a new season of ‘Around the Table’

LOUISVILLE — “Around the Table,” the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) podcast series designed to nourish faith formation, is now in its third season.

With the Rev. Michelle Thomas-Bush, associate pastor for youth and their families at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Rev. Cliff Haddox, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio, as hosts, “Around the Table” from the Office of Christian Formation has seen two new episodes drop this month. Access them on Spotify or Apple Podcasts here.

Around the Table is a Lilly Endowment Inc. funded initiative in the PC(USA) that engages faith communities, parents and caregivers in innovative practices of sharing stories that grow intergenerational communities to support household faith formation.

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The third season opens with the hosts talking with Gregory Rawn, the founder of Spirit & Truth Publishing. Asked what faith formation means to him, Rawn said the gift of faith is “God coming to us and creating a transformative relationship with us. It’s our response to that relationship. God starts it, and we respond.”

Faith formation “is human effort. It’s looking at the relationship God forms with us and informing our response with that understanding, that set of beliefs.” He defines faith as “every action, experience or relationship that nurtures a transformative relationship of trust with the triune God and shapes the way we see and interact with God’s world.”

Some of our experiences push us away from God; others toward God. “I think of faith like a plant. We didn’t create the seeds or cause the growth, and we don’t make the plant bear fruit.” But without action by the gardener, the plant won’t grow well, he pointed out.

He and his colleagues have learned that “as our understanding of how people learn changes and adapts, we find out what we’ve been doing doesn’t work as well, and not every person learns the same way. I love data, but not every person is like that. I don’t do well just listening, and so moving around and seeing is better for me. The experience I had learning is different from the one my kids are now having.”

Stories, including the vivid stories Jesus tells in parables, “can teach us in ways facts and figures can’t,” Rawn said.

Haddox said at his church he leads a Monday Bible study via Zoom that looks at the texts he plans to preach on that coming Sunday. “That invites them to ask any question about the text. Even if I don’t answer them in the moment, I’m making a note of them and they become part of the sermon later,” he said.

Engaging in worship

“The term ‘engaging in worship’ is one I love,” Rawn said. “Children don’t come preloaded with a theological and worship vocabulary. … If you’re able to increase that engagement, you will hit children, youth, adults and [church] newbies in different ways.”

Thomas-Bush quoted something she’d read on Rawn’s blog: “We cannot learn our way into faith.”

Faith communities have both inward and outward responsibilities, Rawn noted.

“Inside the congregation, the focus should be on faith formation. Everything we do should support that faith formation — even the [work of the] property committee, because if you don’t have functional property, it’ll affect people’s experiences,” Rawn said. “On the outward side, it’s mission and service — bringing God’s kingdom into the world. Different people understand that as different things — telling people about Jesus, bringing justice into the community, or all of the above. People who have been on mission trips — their faith has been formed on those actions. Christian education should be about preparing us for service.”

Threads Within

The next week, the hosts spoke with Brittany Sky, a contributor to GenOn Ministries' Christian parenting project called Threads Within.

Sky said faith formation “helps you become who God created you to be.”

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According to Sky, 631 families are currently using the Threads Within resources. “We have been lucky to hear from a good number of them about what they want for spiritual formation — what’s working and what’s not working,” Sky said. “So much of it comes back to belonging and identity” rather than having “answers and knowing. We are seeing this real shift from the head being the center of our faith practice to really experiencing it in our bodies.”

Of the caregivers who responded to a survey, nearly 9 in 10 reported working outside the home full-time or part-time. “They’re finding sacredness in their lives in some capacity,” she said, “but they’re buckling under the weight of the expectations we have for caregivers in our society.”

“When we ask them what they need, so much of it is, ‘I need friends. I need to be able to tell you honestly, sometimes I hate my life, and you’re going to say, I get it. How can I support you?”

Thomas-Bush has a friend who told her, “I just wish I could believe in Jesus so I could have a community I can go to.”

“I think that’s the longing of so many people,” Thomas-Bush said. “She says, ‘I look at what happens in church and I want that desperately.”

At its best, Sky said, a faith community “is this grace-filled place where you can show up as your real self and not have to perform in some capacity.”

“There’s this beauty in it,” Sky said, “this authenticity we are not able to experience in other spaces — sometimes even in our own homes.”

Despite being an employee of a church, Sky tells families that “sometimes the best thing you can do on a Sunday morning is stay at home in your pajamas and have some of that unstructured time together. … Those moments are just as important as you getting dressed and coming to church.”

Asked by Haddox about some of the innovations that the Threads Within churches have come up with, Sky said one has launched “a little library full of spiritual formative books” that families can read together. Another church is preparing for a parents’ night out this fall. They’re trying to decide if “creating safe care for their kids allows for some of that rest, or can they meet up with other caregivers to make some friends.”

The church where Sky works hosts a Saturday morning monthly meet-up for families. “It’s really wonderful to have a playground with a fence,” she told the hosts. “It has become a community thing. We have coffee together and we hang out. We are on the grounds of a sacred space, and so the conversations naturally flow, conversations that are both beautiful and hard.”

“I think we fall into a trap when we believe faith formation is structured around a Bible lesson or has to have a prayer in order for God to show up,” she said. “God shows up when we have two or more together.”

Even as a curriculum developer, Sky has learned to trust “that the work we’re doing that’s so informal is just as formative.”

“I remind myself that I am one of those people along the way, along that journey toward self-discovery, toward justice-building, the community caregiving,” she said. Young people especially “don’t want you to tell them the answer. They want you to be present and listen. I try to remind myself that my own experience in my faith formation journey so far has really been a lot of relationships.”

Feedback to date indicates a key faith formation value for families is having fun.

“Fun is godly. It’s connected to our joy,” Sky said. Children and youth “want to have fun with us grownups. … For that theme to keep coming up was very telling to me.”

“I believe creating spaces for us to connect through the joyful spirit of God is essential,” she said, “especially because it’s not happening in other spaces.”

She encouraged families to visit the project website here to sign up for resources. “We are in this project phase, and so we can share with a lot of people what we’re doing at no cost,” Sky said.

At the end of each podcast, Haddox had this benediction: “May our tables be places where we cultivate faith, build a rich faith vocabulary and nourish a deep and abiding love with our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.”