Inviting the Great Cloud of Witnesses Over for Dinner

Before I begin, I want to put in a plug for a six-week adult Sunday school class/book study that I’m going to lead here at First Presbyterian Church in Washington Court House, Ohio during the season of Lent, which is Sunday, February 17 through Sunday, March 24. The study and the book it is based on are called Faith Begins at Home. It is targeted at parents but any adult who is interested can attend. There will be a sign up sheet at the Hinde Street Entrance so that I can get an idea of how many books I need to order. I’m so excited for it and I hope that many of you will find value in it. I have really found a passion when it comes to discipling my own kids and resourcing parents to fulfill our responsibilities in doing everything within our power, and asking for God's power to do the ultimate work, to pass the Christian faith onto our kids. So within that passion (I promise I won’t write on this forever) I have another idea to help out.

In addition to the many ways to help our kids grow in faith that I have mentioned in the past several weeks, something else you can do, which should never replace worship and Bible study but can accompany and supplement those essentials, is to educate them about faithful Christians who have come before. I think that very often we operate in our own faith and pass the faith on to our kids in a way that kind of skips from the Bible to us. What about all those faithful folks in the 2,000 years in between? I have recently ordered the book The Church History ABCs by Stephen J. Nichols and Ned Bustard

and I can't wait for it to show up. It seems like a great starting place. And this isn’t just something we should do with our kids. Those of us who are adult Christians can be built up by reading of the lives of those brothers and sisters in Christ who have come before us and by learning from their examples. In 1 Corinthians 4, the Apostle Paul writes, “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me.” I don’t think Paul was trying to be conceited. Just by reading his letters you know the man had a firm grasp on his own sinfulness and shortcomings. But he also knew that Christian leaders are supposed to set an example for others. And while we must begin by reading of Jesus’ sinless life, it sure helps to see what it looks like when sinful people like us really give the Christian life a go. Just look at Hebrews chapters 11 and 12, which talks about the “great cloud of witnesses” that surround us and from whom we can gain courage to run our own race of faith. In the Apostles' Creed this is what we refer as the “communion of the saints.” This is what the 16th Century document called The Second Helvetic Confession (which is in our PCUSA Book of Confessions) says about what Protestants often call “heroes of the faith”:

“We do not adore, worship, or pray to the saints in heaven… [yet] we do not despise the saints or think basely of them. For we acknowledge them to be living members of Christ and friends of God who have gloriously overcome the flesh and the world. Hence we love them as brothers [and sisters], and also honor them…We also imitate them. For with ardent longings and supplications we earnestly desire to be imitators of their faith and virtues, to share eternal salvation with them, to dwell with them in the presence of God, and to rejoice with them in Christ.”

Although most of us in Protestant churches don’t agree with the level of veneration offered to saints by our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ, I think we have a great deal to learn from these family members and how they look to those who have gone before to find helpful examples of faithfulness. We can do the same, just in a Protestant way.

Now before starting to share the lives of Christian heroes with our kids, I think there are a few concerns that every Christian needs to consider. These three concerns also fall within the major emphases within our particular Presbyterian Church (USA) branch of the Christian family tree. These three concerns are Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and looking at Church history through rose colored glasses.

Eurocentrism means viewing everything from the perspective of Europeans and peoples of European descent and working out of the premise that European cultures are automatically superior to non-European cultures. What I mean is that pretty much every resource I can find for sharing with kids the examples of “Christian heroes” is a book about white people taking the gospel to people of color. Some reasons that this occurs is that, truthfully, Europe was the center of Christian faith for much of Christian history, although there are now more Christians in the Southeran Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere. Also, it was white people who were writing the history. And we live in a culture which has been for much of its history Eurocentric. That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that we should share faithful examples with our kids no matter where they come from, regardless of the shade of our own skin. If the vast majority of the resources deal with white people preaching to people of color then I’m still willing to use those resources but I'm going to have to do some additional intentional research to supplement. I will talk to my kids about it and I will do whatever I can to find more diverse examples to share with my kids. In fact, I just found a great book on Amazon that

I plan to order called Heroes in Black History: True Stories from the Lives of Christian Heroes. It looks great! As I mentioned last week, Wyatt and I are learning about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. right now and I am making sure that Wyatt knows that Dr. King’s faith was a driving force behind his fight for Civil Rights. Now Wyatt wants to learn about Rosa Parks, who was a woman of strong Christian faith and a member of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. Her faith gave her the conviction that she was made in the image of God just as much as anyone else and her faith got her through the very tough times. Connected to this, I try (whenever possible) to find Bible story books that portray Jesus as he surely was—a black haired, olive skinned, Middle Eastern Jewish man who was out in the sun all the time. I don’t want my kids to think that Jesus looked like an Olympic skier from Norway and I don't want them to think that Christianity is merely a white person’s faith. Actually there are more Christians of color in the world than white Christians by far. I want Josselyn and Wyatt to learn about Samuel Morris and other Christians of non-European descent. But again, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to teach them about John Calvin or Amy Carmichael or Billy Graham.

The second concern is called “androcentrism,” which is defined as “the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history.” I am not interested at this point in getting into a debate with my more conservative brothers and sisters in Christ about women in the pulpit. That’s not the main issue here. Regardless of which particular roles a denomination feels that men and women should play within the life of the church, it must not be denied that there are as many Christian women who we should be imitating as there are Christian men. So when I just ordered several children’s books for Wyatt to read about Christian heroes I made sure that I ordered about as many books about Christian women as I did about Christian men. In "A Brief Statement of Faith of the PC(USA)," which is in our Book of Confessions, we read, “We trust in God the Holy Spirit…the same Spirit who inspired the prophets and apostles…and calls women and men to all ministries of the Church.” I don’t believe this because it is in the Brief Statement of Faith, but because I believe the Brief Statement of Faith is a proper interpretation of Scripture. Again, I’m not interested in a debate at this time. You’re reading the blog of a PC(USA) pastor so you’re going to get the perspective of a PC(USA) pastor. All that being said, I think we all need to include both female and male heroes of the faith in both the instruction of our kids and in our own study. I want my kids to learn about Perpetua and Anne Bradstreet just as much as I want them to know about St. Augustine and John Wesley.

The final concern here is the painful and embarrassing reality that the Christian church has been used by many evil people to do evil things. With older kids (maybe 5th grade and up) I think it is important to talk with them about the ways that sinful human beings and sinful systems have used the Church to harm and destroy others, about how the church has tried her best to sell her soul to the devil. When Wyatt and Josselyn are older we will talk about the evils of Christian anti-Semitism, the misuse of the Bible to support slavery, the Spanish inquisition, the role the church played in the destruction of Native American cultures, and other tragic sins of the Church. When my kids are old enough to handle it, I don’t want my kids to have a cleaned-up version of Church history. I want them to know that our sinfulness is so pervasive that we can even use Christ’s church as a tool for evil, and to warn them against this and to help them identify it when it is happening (i.e. Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS). Also, when our kids are in high school and especially when they go to college, they are going to be confronted with the Church’s sometimes tragic and oppressive history. Trust me, we don’t want that to be the first time our kids hear of it. They need to already have been given the tools to confront that dark history from within the context of faith instead of being introduced to it in a way that is antagonistic toward the Christian faith.

Also, although our culture these days only seems to want to look at the negatives of Church history, I want my kids to know that very often it was Christians who fought against these same injustices. For instance, while the Bible was used by some to defend slavery, the abolitionist movement was spearheaded by Christians who used the Bible to fight against slavery. Just think of William Wilberforce in England. Also, while Spanish conquistadors were destroying Native cultures and murdering their people all under the guise of Christianity, there were a few (very few) Christians like Bartolome de las Casas who actually saw it firsthand, was horrified by it, and became known as the “Protector of the Indians.” While Belgium, a supposedly Christian nation under King Leopold II, was severing the hands of Congolese children when they did not harvest enough rubber, it was a British Baptist missionary named Alice Harris who photographed the atrocities and had them published throughout the world to bring righteous outrage against the horrors. Not just our kids, but all of us Christians, need to know these stories in order to have a mature faith. When my kids are older I promise you that they will know.

There are all sorts of fellow Christians to learn about. Have a teenager who is really into science? Learn about Francis Collins, who was the director of the world changing Human Genome Project and then share that with your kids. In

opposition to the vast majority of scientists, Francis Collins is a faithful Christian as well as being one of the world's top scientists. Or you could learn about John Polkinghorne, the British physicist who became an Anglican priest. You could learn about Galileo's troubles with the Church. Galileo was a devout Christian, even though he was at odds with the Church hierarchy. Have a musical kid? Learn about the faith of J.S. Bach or the story of Handel's Messiah. There's so much out there to learn! And it will help us to pass the faith on to our kids.

One great resource is the online archives of the now defunct Christian History magazine. This is an amazing resource. You can learn all kinds of cool stuff here: Christian History

So I hope you will consider, along with the rest of your family, exploring the lives of the "great cloud of witnesses" of the men and women of Christian faith who have walked the path before us. It can only serve to build us up in our faith. Please check out the link below that is filled with more than 80 resources I've put on an Amazon wishlist to give you ideas.

Here is a link to a 4 Page list I made of resources about heroes of the faith.

Blessings on your week in the name of Christ Jesus our Lord!
Pastor Everett