How Do We Develop Our Faith and Beliefs?
James Fowler’s Developmental Stages of Faith provides us with a framework of the stages of faith development over our life span. It is interesting to read for anyone curious about spiritual growth.
Fowler states in the first stage of this development the child learns from their family and community what their faith is, what they believe in. At this stage they need to know that they are accepted and cared about and loved. What they learn is being “caught” from what’s around them. It’s what the people they trust and care about are doing so they do it too.
One way our church teaches our children and youth is each Sunday when they attend the beginning of our Worship Service. They get to know our religion learning about it by doing. All children and youth attend the first fifteen minutes of the Sunday morning services and also attend three to six intergenerational services in the course of the year.
When they attend services, young people learn our religious tradition through participating and doing: they sing and hear liberal religious music, they learn how to be in community with adults. They learn that sitting quietly is a form of spiritual practice. This is a way we use to intentionally deepen our children’s feeling of being a part of a community. Because we believe this is important for their growth and we want to prepare them to become Unitarian Universalist adults should they choose to become Unitarian Universalists when they are old enough to make their own decisions.
Joyce Faber, Acting DRE
805-644-3898
administrator@uuventura.org
