Time Traveling

In the summer of 2013, our family moved to Cairo, Egypt to serve as Mission Co-Workers for the Presbyterian Church (USA) living and working with the 150-year-old Presbyterian seminary there. Because of the sensitivity of our work and the moment in the life of Egypt, we didn’t share much online of our work and experiences while we were there. 

Now we are living and working back in the United States and are still trying to process all that we experienced those two years: church life, politics, culture, and of course the hundreds of windows we walked through into another time. 

Part of our calling to Egypt came in the form of our then eight-year-old son’s obsession with all things Egyptian. You can read more about that here. He was ready to spend lazy afternoons regularly wandering through the Egyptian Antiquities Museum off Tahrir Square. He assumed that trips to the Pyramids would be as regular as trips to the grocery store. He planned for Egyptian tchotchkes to fill his new Egyptian bedroom. 

Of course, none of those things exactly happened. He did collect many different trinkets throughout our stay, which now decorate his new bedroom in Pennsylvania. He did get to the point where taking a book on a visit to the Pyramids was a good idea since big stones are really only impressive the first time you see them. He did spend enough time in the Egyptian museum that we no longer needed a guide to appreciate what we were seeing. But life in modern Egypt often gets in the way of immersing oneself in the ancient. 

There were moments, though, that were nothing short of magical. Moments when I felt the impulse to pinch myself - or maybe him - just to make sure we all knew it was real. 

Now that we are living thousands miles and thousands of years away from all of the spectacular things we saw and did over the course of two years, I am finally able to wrap my head around what made it so magical. 

First there is something to be said for the scale of the ancient world - both the immensity and the minuteness. We walked through temples towering with columns covered in hieroglyphs…row after row - spaces built not just for worship but to hold a god in all its glory. We stood next to monuments so large that it is hard to imagine they were built by mere mortals, let alone by people who lived thousands of years before modern industry. We were in the presence of some of the most intricate and precise art I have ever seen made by human hands. The devotion it took to create such beauty and grandeur is hard to fathom. I suspect that when my son walks into our new church here in the US - grand in many of the same ways - that he remembers - as I do - what it was like to walk through some of the greatest temples of this world. 

On top of all the remains of ancient Egyptian culture and monuments (literally) are layer upon layer of other ancient cultures that came and went as the greatest powers of the world ebbed and flowed through northern Africa. Layers of Greek tombs and remnants of amphitheaters, ancient cave libraries, Roman baths and roads fill the city of Alexandria. There is no better place to be in order to grasp the cosmopolitan nature of the ancient world. 

Stepping back in time again and again brought reminders of how much of the Old Testament is rooted in ancient Egypt. Though there weren’t biblical sites in particular to be visited, we walked through mud brick storehouses likely similar to those described in the stories of Joseph as he led the Egyptians through a season of famine. We saw depictions carved in stone of women dancing, tambourine in hand, just as Miriam did after the Israelites made their way through the Red Sea. And as we wonder what it really meant for the people of Israel to be enslaved in Egypt, we could see ancient straw encased in mud brick reminding us of the cruelty of the Egyptian task masters.

But to my own amazement, our son wound up being most fascinated by the ancient Christian relics and remnants that are also all over the country. At one point in time, Egypt was the most Christian nation in the world, and throughout one can find places where pagan temples were converted into Christian places of worship, or even where Christian temples were built nearby in hopes of calling upon the longstanding sacredness of the place. Hieroglyphs are defaced so that Coptic crosses could sanctify temples. And deep in the desert, one can walk in the footsteps of the earliest Christian monks, whose devotees still live, work and pray in those same places.  

We lived in Egypt in the midst of some of the most pressing events of the modern Middle East, and yet time and again we glimpsed memories and moments of the past. I continue to ponder how our son will will be impacted by those years living in a different place (and will write more about that soon), but I especially hope he will carry with him the memory of stepping into a different time as well. 

More to come...

Images (top to bottom and right to left)

• The Pyramids of Giza
• An uncompleted colossus of Ramses II unearthed in the city of Memphis
• Capitals in the Ramesseum, on the west bank of Luxor
• Roman capitals in Alexandria
• Statue of Alexander the Great given to the Egyptian people on the reopening of the modern library of Alexandria
• Roman forum in Alexandria
• Mud-brick storehouses behind the Ramesseum, on the west bank of Luxor
• Mud-brick from a mortuary temple next to the Bent Pyramid, south of Memphis
• Hieroglyphs at the Temple of Edfu
• Mosaic of the Holy Family in Coptic Cairo
• Remnant of a Christian temple next to Dandera
• Outside the cave of St. Anthony in the desert near the Red Sea 

Planting the Seed

During the past two years, as our family has lived overseas working on behalf of Presbyterian World Mission, we attended a small congregation with very few children. You can read about our choice to join that church here. 

There were many great benefits to being a part of this diverse and eclectic community of faith - and the only drawback was that there was no Sunday school for our son to attend. He was in Egypt for his 3rd and 4th grade years - formative years when children in thoughtfully designed Christian education programs are exposed to some of the great stories of the Bible. 

Of course, he was not leaving worship to attend Sunday school, and this meant that during our time in Egypt he likely heard over 150 readings from scripture (both the Old and New Testaments) as well as close to 80 sermons on those texts which in many other congregations he would have missed because of our collective tendency to remove children from worship about halfway through.  It means he recited the Apostles’ Creed the same number of times, watched me put our family offering in the plate the same number of times, and prayed the Lord’s Prayer just as many times.

It also meant that for the first time I felt a personal obligation to be his primary Christian educator. Granted, in our previous congregation I was his pastor and helped to shape the curriculum that was used in his Sunday school classes, but with the hectic schedule of a pastor on any given Sunday morning, I relied heavily on my colleagues and the volunteers in our classrooms to mentor my child in the faith. 

Sour Grapes

One of the things that I pride myself on as a pastor/parent is that I take the time to prepare my son for worship - pointing out to him changes or additions in the sanctuary that indicate something new or different will be happening in worship, making sure that he has his own bulletin and hymnal so that he can fully participate in worship with his father and I, even pointing out to him things that I think are strange or weird in worship, helping him recognize our worship habits or by noticing when we stray from them.

Preparing children for special worship and for the sacraments is something that I have written about before, and I have an especially favorite and popular post encouraging parents to prepare their children to participate in Ash Wednesday worship services. But sometimes I worry that my selective sharing of the benefits of worshipping with children, and my thoughtful essays on children in worship, might give the impression that our worship life as a family is full of success and only the rare frustration. 

This is not the case. at. all. 

How Can I Keep From Singing: Five Hymns from "Glory to God" to Use with Children

When I was a young child, I was part of a very small choir at our church called the Seraph choir. Four little girls with older siblings who were a part of the regular children and youth choir. Both choirs met on Saturday mornings (those were the days), and we would learn new music and generally work on our music skills. 

At one point our choir director (the assistant organist at our church) told us that she noticed on Sunday mornings, as she processed into the sanctuary with the choir, that we (us four little girls) were not singing along with the congregational hymns.

To encourage us to sing with the congregation, she started teaching us every Saturday morning the hymns that we would sing the next morning in worship. I am pretty sure that this one simple addition to our very simple children’s choir experience deeply affected my life. It developed my love not just for hymns but for congregational singing. It exposed me to some of the classic melodies of the Christian tradition as well as some of the most essential theological vocabulary of the faith. All starting at 6 years old. 

Attachment Worshiping: sharing the pew with one another

It has been two years now since I left my work in congregational ministry— which means that for the past two years I have been able to consistently worship with my family instead of sitting in the “pastor’s” seat in the sanctuary. We have gotten into a particular habit lately, where my son sits in between my husband and I in the historic and weathered pews of our small congregation.

Frequently during worship I will feel my son grab my hand and wrap my arm around his shoulders. He is still about a head shorter than me, so often during the standing portions of the service he will slip in front of me with his back resting on my front so we can share a bulletin. Regularly he needs a simple reminder in the form of a firm squeeze on his knee to help him be still so as to not distract the kind people who worship behind us every week.

I have not gotten too caught up in the attachment parenting pros and cons as a variety of people debate the benefits of baby-wearing, bed-sharing and other attachment practices. 

Broadening the Sunday School Canon: Ten Texts for Teenagers

Much of the time and energy I spent this past year working on my forthcoming book was devoted to revisiting the items I had chosen to be on my list of 100 things a student should know before Confirmation class. 

Most of my choices for the list were inspired by years of teaching Confirmation classes and working closely with Sunday school curriculum curricula. But the final list came together one snowy winter night during our 2011/2012 holiday vacation. In that moment the list was one part brainstorming, one part venting, and one part pipe-dreaming. 

Even though I spent two years blogging through this list, I didn't sit down to look at it as a whole until I started working on the book. With each chapter I wrote, I struggled with all of the things that were not included in the list:

Why am I including all three parables from the 15th chapter of Luke (the lost sheep, coin, and son) instead of including the parable of the Unforgiving Servant?

Do I include the story of Zacchaeus instead of the raising of Jairus’ daughter? An iconic passage from Isaiah, but not one of my favorites from Micah?

How do we put limits on what we read or know or explore in the Bible?

Nothing is Lost

Several weeks ago our friend and pastor lost her first pregnancy to a miscarriage. It had been a difficult pregnancy up to that point already, and so the entire community was walking closely with her and her husband expectantly towards the birth of their son. 

It obviously continues to be incredibly sad for them and their family as they grieve not just for the life of the child, but for all of the potential and promise that the child held within him. 

When I told my son what had happened, he was sad and yet relieved when he found out that Kirsten was okay. He told me that he was actually thankful when I explained what had happened, since he knew that sometimes when bad things happen to babies the mother also dies. Of course, it is his pastor whom he has the relationship with, and so she was his greatest concern. Even though he had been excited to welcome this new baby (who was potentially going to share his birthday), it was never really all that real for him. 

After a few weeks, Kirsten and her husband Justin decided to hold a simple memorial service for their son - Joseph Michael - so that they could recognize his very brief life and God’s love and care for him in his death. 

Counting the Children

Several years ago I remember very off-handedly asking one of the ushers in my congregation how, if they take the attendance count when they are collecting the offering, do they count the children who have left before the sermon?

The answer was simple. “We don’t count the children.”

I gently suggested that the ushers might try to find a way to change the point in the service at which they take the count, so that the children could be included in the numbers.

This time the answer was a little different in a big way: “The children don’t count.”

I asked for him to explain to me why the children shouldn’t count in the statistics that we keep about how many people were in worship on any given Sunday. 

“They are not members.”

I explained to him that they actually are what in our tradition we call “baptized” members of the congregation, even if they are not “adult” members. Then I asked him if when counting adults they are careful not to count any visiting or guest adults who could also be given the label of not a member. Of course he counts them...but it did make him pause.

We actually talked quite a while about it, with him repeating to me that same phrase, “the children don’t count,” far too often for my comfort. 

After a few more conversations together, we did start including children in that worship count.

The Life of the Early Church: The Final 5 Things (out of 100) That Your Child Should Know Before Confirmation Class

After two years of blogging through this list of the 100 Things That Your Child Should Know BEFORE Confirmation Class, I find myself here at the end with the topics that I always cover at the very beginning of this year of preparation for students choosing to become adult members of the church.

While an important part of being Confirmed is making a declaration of faith in Jesus Christ, just as important is making a choice to live out that faith in the context of a particular Christian community. 

Two weeks ago, I shared some of the questions that students are asked to answer in my Presbyterian tradition related to their declaration of faith. Here is the final question they are asked:

Will you be a faithful member of this congregation, share in its worship and ministry through your prayers and gifts, your study and service and so fulfill your calling to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?

While it may sound heretical, this question is just as important to me as all of the others. 

The Christian experience is rooted in community from its very start. To be a Christian outside of community means losing an essential part of how the Bible models faith expression and the practices of faith. 

12 Developmental Steps for Children & Youth in the Life of a Congregation

I usually write about the things that our children and youth should know and how we can teach it to them at home and at church. But I have been thinking more recently about all of the things that we need to teach our children to be able to do as they grow in maturity as a member of a community of faith. 

So I thought through the ways that children develop in their capabilities as members of the community and came up with twelve markers (based on age and area of competency) to help us all think about how we are nurturing and encouraging children in their role as members of the church. 

This is not intended as a critique of children who have not yet taken these steps, but as an aid to examining how we share our expectations with children and youth and the opportunities we give them to meet or exceed those expectations.

In my experience, children and youth are ready for many of these things much earlier than we would think. They are simply waiting to be asked to rise to the occasion. 

The Last Temptation of Christ or Why Church is Sometimes All Joy and No Fun

Every first week of Lent, as we hear the story of Jesus’ temptation for 40 days in the wilderness, I can’t help but recall the way that Martin Scorsese depicted this scene in his controversial interpretation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ.

As Jesus prepares himself for this time of trial, he draws a circle in the sand out of which he will not move. Scorsese films it from above, and from the arial vantage point we can see that it is not just any circle but rather a perfect circle which could never be drawn by a human hand, only by the divine. That always impressed teenagers when I showed the scene in class.

The controversy surrounding the film, of course, was not the depiction of Jesus’ temptation in the desert but rather a final temptation offered to him as he hangs on the cross. I remember as a child hearing adults around me talk about the movie and the people who were planning to protest showings of it around the country. Many too easily criticized the film because it it shows Jesus having intimate relations with a woman (or rather, a few women). Sex, then, is what we think the film is about--this is the “last temptation” that Jesus has to face. 

Kazantzakis’s book, though, is not really about sex at all. He uses the story of Jesus of Nazareth to explore the theme of the flesh verses the spirit. His Jesus wrestles with this nagging sense of divinity that is growing within him, with the pain that will come with submitting to its call, and with the apartness that it makes him feel from his fellow human beings. 

When Jesus succumbs to this last temptation, it is about being normal again, about having a family, about lifting the burden of so many expectations from his shoulders. 

To be honest, the movie ruined Willem Dafoe for me forever. His Jesus is just so angst-ridden, so troubled by his inner struggle, so frustrated by the misunderstandings of those around him. Dafoe’s (Scorsese’s/Kazantzakis’) Jesus may find divine joy in life, but he is not having any human fun in the living. This is his final temptation. 

The Sound of My Child’s Voice: Choosing Our New Church Home

A few months ago I wrote about our family’s task of finding a new worshiping community for the next couple of years. While many families struggle for months or even years to find a church where they feel comfortable, spiritually fed/challenged, and at home, it didn’t take us nearly that long, for the sole reason that in the community in which we live we really only had two options to choose from. 

That means that we have been able to bounce back and forth over more than one Sunday (because every church has an “off” Sunday once in a while) to get a real feel for the life of the community and the worship style of each.

Both are lovely churches. If only one of these had been available to us, we would have been satisfied with our new church community. Picking one over the other doesn’t mean that one was bad and one was good. In the end it was about where we felt the most comfortable, where we felt the most fed and challenged, and where we felt the most at home. 

Let me describe each briefly...

5 Ways That Your Child’s Sunday School and Elementary School are Both the Same AND Different

I worked in Christian Education for just a couple of years before I had a child of my own. It was remarkable to me how different my work began to look once I was a parent and could better understand the needs and perspective of parents and families within my congregation. 

But it wasn’t until my son was old enough to attend school that I started to understand the behavior of parents and families, especially in relationship to the “formal” education that we offered as a church. 

I spent many Sunday mornings wishing that families would consider the classes we provided at church to have the same importance as the classes at school their child attended Monday through Friday, while at the same time wishing that they would acknowledge and value the differences between the two institutions.

Christian Denominations: 5 (out of 100) Things Your Child Should Know Before Confirmation Class

Because I am Presbyterian and my husband is Mennonite people always assume that we have a lot of disagreements about religion, that we have phenomenally interesting conversations over the dinner table, and that there must be a lot of tension in our family. I am never quite sure why people think that, because the people who make these assumptions usually don’t know much about the differences between Mennonites and Presbyterians to begin with.

I am pretty sure that they are not referring to the horrible period of time during the Reformation when Anabaptists were martyred for their refusal to baptize their children, sometimes by those who would eventually call themselves Presbyterians. (I am also pretty sure that they don’t know too many Mennonites, who for the most part tend to be the least confrontational people you will ever happen to meet.)

These days, when we talk about our Presbyterian and Mennonite differences it is usually because we are trying to teach our son about what it means to identify as both at the same time. Not an easy feat.

Finding a Church Home for Your Family -OR - The Dreaded Church Shopping

When I served as a pastor in a congregation, there was no greater prize on a Sunday morning than the arrival of a new “young” couple with children. Church members would jump over pews to welcome them, take them on tours of the building, introduce them to the staff, and regale them with the positive attributes of our congregation. We would get their contact information, send them newsletters, and put them on lists to get information about programs for their children. And then...nothing.

In many instances families would become a part of our community and the church family. But it was also pretty frequent that these potential new families just didn’t click with the church. Sometimes we would hear the reasons. Sometimes I think we were given bogus reasons. Sometimes the reasons stung just a little - sometimes a lot.

Prayer for My Son on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

About two years ago, when our son was in Kindergarten, I remember lying in bed with him one night talking about celebrating Martin Luther King Day. We talked about who Dr. King was and how he wanted to make sure that all people were treated fairly. It seemed like we were on track for a good, Kindergarten-appropriate conversation.

My son’s class had studied Dr. King that week, and my son had learned that King had been a pastor. His teachers, knowing that I am a pastor, gave him the opportunity to share with the other students what a pastor is. I think my son was a little shocked to have learned of the great importance of this man, and then to have found out that his mother did the same job. He made sure to let me know that he was probably going to hold me to a higher standard than he had before; he started by asking me what I had done to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. “I went to work at church,” I told him. He was less than satisfied.

A Good Goodbye

This past week I have shifted into a new phase of ministry, which has necessitated saying goodbye to the congregation that I have served with joy over the past ten years. I was sad to leave, but excited for new possibilities

I was especially good at holding my emotions together over the entire transition, and though I am notorious for “losing it” in worship at the first sign of sentimentality, I held it together through all of my lasts - until it came to the last moment I would be at the church with my now eight year old son.

This was the place where he was born, baptized and raised. While I have always been pretty clear that in my Presbyterian tradition and as a pastor that this was not my church home, it has become more and more clear over the past few weeks that this was HIS church home for sure.

Advent in Two Minutes

The three Saturdays of Advent, I will share with you a video that hopefully will help with a better understanding of the season of Advent, a reflection on the holiday season, and even a multimedia way to help teach your children about the Season of Advent.

Here is one of my favorites from Busted Halo. A two minute summary on Advent - what it is and what it isn't. Enjoy.

Grandma, Partner, Friend

From the book "Change the World for Ten Bucks," By the UK
organization We are What We Do.

As we move into this season of Thanksgiving, today I pause to give thanks for the sheer number of adults in the church I serve who have formed loving and generous friendships with my son, from young adults who send him care packages from college, to empty nesters getting ready for their own grandchildren, to church grandmothers who send him handmade birthday cards and give hugs each Sunday morning.

There is one couple in our congregation whom he grew up calling “grandma” and “grandpa” just as easily as he refers to his actual grandparents. One Sunday on our way home from church when I asked him something about Grandma Jean he asked, “How come I call her grandma when she is not actually my grandmother?”

Women of Valor: Finding each other

A Review of Rachel Held Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood

Before I finished college, but after I had decided to answer the call to professional ordained ministry, I wanted to find one last internship. This one would not be about getting ahead or securing a future job, but instead would be one that represented my values – ironically, the same motivation that led me to ministry.

I spent five months as an intern at the National Organization for Women in the spring of 1998. It was one of the most formative experiences of my college career. While there were many highlights, the most pivotal low point and educational moment came when the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski scandal broke just weeks after I started in January. I was beyond impressed with the ways that NOW leadership were able to speak on this issue recognizing both that the President had been a fierce advocate for women’s rights on the one hand, and such a creep on the other.