Yesterday morning the youth of the congregation led worship. That is always a moving experience for me: listening to high school seniors tell how they have seen that the Spirit has been active in their maturation, and sharing ideas about the work that God might be calling them to do as adults. This service becomes more moving to me, the longer I am here -- because I remember when these youth were entirely unable to think in such terms. I remember when they were young children.

Yesterday, both Katie and Matthew thanked the congregation for the role we had played over the years!

That is how the faith is formed: in community, through the practices of the faith.

Our foundational practice is worship. And, yesterday, I watched how it happens. The high school youth were leading the service. But, during the Hymn of Praise, a young mother was singing the words into the ear of her three-year old daughter she was holding, so that the child would learn the hymn. A few pews away, a nine-year old was singing the words to the hymn herself.

How had the nine-year old come to know the Hymn of Praise by heart? How had the high school youth come to see the movement of the Spirit? It's because their parents bring them to worship, to the commuity's foundational formation event. The result of that foundation, and of follow-up conversation in classes and youth events, is that the teenagers are making the transition from what they thought about God in childhood. They are coming to understand the stories in the Bible in a more sophisticated way. They are understanding the necessary role of mentors in the faith community who support them and provoke them in their growth. In other words, the Spirit is leading them on the journey to conceive of who the God of compassion is, revealed in the compassion of Jesus; a faith that can serve them well in the joys and tragedies of adulthood.

How else can human beings come to be formed in love and compassion, in forgiveness and the joy that comes from that, in the hunger for justice, without the formation that takes place in the community of faith? Certainly, these are values counter to the culture we live in.

Certainly, the Spirit is much more able to form people in faith when parents and sponsors and congregation members do what they say they will do at the baptismal font. The most important of those promises is to see that children grow into teenagers and then into adults, in the context of the weekly formative experience of worship.