By Pastor David Drebes, Prince of Peace, Basye.
This picture is one of my favorites from my time growing up in Resurrection Lutheran Church. It was taken in the summer of 2000 at a food pantry in Ohio as we travelled to the ELCA youth gathering in St. Louis. This is one of the least exciting pictures from any youth group activity, but it also captures something I continue to find meaningful in my own faith journey.
You see, when this picture was taken I was on vacation from my job as a bagger at Ukrop's Supermarket on Route 3. I had "escaped" from groceries only to find myself in a room of groceries waiting to be bagged. We were serving a community in need, but the work we were called to do was exactly the work I was trying to get away from!
But that's what the life of faith is like. There are no clean borders between who we are at work and who we are with our church. Instead, life is a series of intersections between our faith and the places in the world where we serve as parents, children, siblings, friends, students, teachers, office workers-and even grocery baggers.
This picture sums up both the fun side of the RLC youth group that I still remember fondly, and it also sums up how RLC slowly and subtly prepared me for those big questions of faith and life:
"What does an hour of worship on Sunday morning mean for my Wednesday afternoon?"
"I'm not a grocery bagger when I'm in school, but I am a Christian. What should that look like?"
"Instead of fitting faith into my life, how should I shape my life around my faith?"
I like that Bishop Robert Schnase uses the word "intentional" when discussing faith development. It's too easy to think that faith simply develops on its own. Faith is a gift from God, so in many ways it is out of our hands. But a friend of mine in seminary once summarized the teaching of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on faith this way: "I can't control how strong or weak my faith is, but I can control if I'll wake up and go to church this morning."
The point my friend (thanks to Bonhoeffer) was making was that we all make choices that have an impact on the development of our faith. A weak faith needs nourishment and attention. A strong faith drives us to seek that nourishment and opportunities for service. Sometimes, we stop those faith development practices thinking we should wait "until we feel like it," but that's precisely when we need to attend worship, receive the sacraments, hear the Word, and share prayers with one another.
Intentional faith development means budgeting time and resources-setting them aside in a routine week for gathering with other Christians the same way we shape our weeks around sports, clubs, grocery shopping, and lawn-mowing.
An early role model for me wasn't just one person, but the congregation of RLC. My church, as I grew up, set aside its resources for an intentional ministry with its youth. The money, time, and energy involved with our youth program was both a service and an example. We are all called to set aside our gifts and use them to serve others and in nourishment of our shared faith in Jesus Christ.
For me, in one case, that even meant bagging groceries while on vacation.
