Why is our annual Parent Orientation important?
We have our FINAL PARENT ORIENTATION
meeting for our summer program coming up next week, Monday, June 15th at 7PM. Even though I’m relatively new to this job, there
are some patterns I’m noticing. Each
time we hold one of these “Orientations” I get one or two parents who express
some frustration about having to attend this meeting every year in order to
register their child for our faith formation program. I would like to briefly share why we think
this meeting is important….
First, what this meeting is NOT. It is not our effort to make your life more
difficult. It is not just another hoop
to jump through. I have three kids and I
get it…life is busy. Our intent is not
to coerce or frustrate but rather to have at least one opportunity (about one-hour
in length) each year to meet with parents face-to-face to discuss the faith
development of our little ones because, YOU, the parents are BY FAR the primary
catechists of your children.
Coming from 16 years of University
Ministry, I can tell you there was not one single college student who was
involved who didn’t have at least one prayerful parent who talked with them
about his/her own personal faith life…NOT…ONE.
In short, everything we do here in our Faith Formation program is a
waste of time without the foundation already being set at home.
At our last orientation meeting I
invited parents to share with one another who taught them to pray. Afterwards I asked for a show of hands “Who
in this room was taught to pray by a parent?”
Virtually every hand went up…
So, we think of ourselves in the Office
of Family Ministry as your “Support Staff.”
We are here to support you, the parents, in your challenging work of appropriating
our faith to your children. Our goal is
to “tool you up” so that even in the blur of our daily lives we manage to fit
in a little discussion about Jesus.
If you spend just 5-minutes a day
fostering your child’s spiritual life in some way (dinner & bedtime prayer pretty
much cover it), you exceed our annual 30 hours of formal catechesis by a long
shot AND you will be more infinitely more effective than we could ever be. A strong faith community is of course
essential in forming our children in the faith, but we have no doubt that the
parents are the captains of this team.
This year our theme is: Prayer & Parables. Our goal is two-fold: to further develop our children’s prayer life
and encourage them to ponder some of Jesus’ most profound teachings from
Scripture; the Parables.
Our presupposition is that even the
youngest of our little ones have a prayer life; a connection and awareness of
God in their lives. God is present to
them in their deepest being and they are capable of developing both a conscious
and intimate relationship with God. Our
hope is to provide materials and lessons that nurture this relationship with
God, deepen the prayer life that they already have and build on their understanding
of God’s dream for our world by introducing (or pondering anew for our older
kids) the Parables that Jesus told us.
This year, to assist our working
parents we are partnering with a couple local childcare centers to offer
aftercare for our kids. PLEASE INVITE YOUR FRIENDS AND
NEIGHBORS! Our summer program is not
restricted in any way to just Catholics and/or CTR folks. Quite the opposite! It’s a fantastic way to invite new families to
our parish!
For a great article on passing on the
faith to our kids visit: http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201301/show-me-way-how-can-parents-pass-faith-26739. Send
your "Crazy Catholic Questions" to dre@ctredeemer.org or read past
columns at: http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com
-
Lisa Brown
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