I have
written before about what it means to live in an ecumenical and interfaith family, but I stumbled across the following short essay that I wrote before I
created this blog and realized that I have never shared here the story of our
son’s baptism and the nuances of that decision for not just our nuclear family
but our extended families and our church families as well.
Here it is...
A few years ago my husband and I took one of the youth from
my congregation out to lunch. She had questions, and we were appropriately
deemed experts she could turn to in her struggle as she engaged in a yearlong
inquiry into leaving the Presbyterian Church to become an Anabaptist.
My husband and I are experts because, as we like to joke, I
am an ethnic Presbyterian and he is an ethnic Mennonite, both of us having
decidedly chosen as adults to remain in our respective traditions of origin,
each of us serving as pastors in those traditions as well.
We came to this lunch armed with all of the historic and
modern conflicts between our traditions, ready to entertain and inform her with
a friendly point counter-point.
