ISBN 0-7879-5588-4Who, as a Christian parent, has not wondered how to speak openly about faith and belief in ways that will shape our children’s growth in faith and lead them to explore the possibilities of knowing God and responding to God’s call to be God’s own.
I recommend beginning at the end with the eight pages of questions for reflection on home and faith. Selections from these alone could stimulate rich conversation among a group of parents eager — even willing — to examine their own at-home practices and explore some new possibilities. For parents’ reading, the most fruitful chapters will be seven through nine. Ch. 7 offers an exploration of the relationships between homes and congregations, complete with some exercises to try alone or in a group. Ch. 8 contains a wealth of ideas about, and encouragement for, incorporating the spiritual practices of prayer, the reading of sacred texts, regular family meals, service, intentional conversation about God and heightened celebration of religious holidays and holy days, with an emphasis on the importance of spiritual practices to our sensing of the sacred among us. Ch. 9 could be fruitfully used to explore aspects of worship that can be practiced at home in broad ways that reflect congregational worship practices.
The early part of the book reminds us that learning is an important part of the spiritual life. Being grounded in a vision of what it means to be people of faith prepares us to adopt and adapt personally spiritual practices for ends that reflect God’s realm among us. Using the vivid images of home as dwelling place, Wigger leads us through the biblical story using the rubric of Place — Displacement — Home. Picture the place represented by creation, the displacement represented by the flood, and the home represented by Canaan as one illustration of this storyline. Allow your imagination to take you along from Canaan (place) to slavery in Egypt (displacement) to the establishment of the kingdom in Israel (home) as another graphic example within the biblical story.
Wigger extends the pattern all the way through Jesus (place) — crucifixion (displacement) — resurrection (home), and temple (place) — destruction (displacement) — new creation (home). Having explored the story of home in the largest imaginable perspective, Wigger takes us forward into an exploration of “… what it might mean for God to be at home in our own particular lives, for God to be at home in the lives of our children” (p. 59). The possibilities for comparing the Place — Displacement — Home rubric to what happens in the lives of the persons in our families, and the relationships within families, might be a rich use of Wigger’s interesting pattern.
After examining the deep meaning one can draw from the biblical story, Wigger lays out the things that can threaten that meaning, the things that can go wrong in our relationship with God, and the difference a caring community can make, both as the congregation of which we are a part and as the family that can be our “home” in the deepest sense of that word.
Pastors and educators will find this book to be a useful resource for their work with families, drawing upon its insights for teaching and for leading small groups. In a time when the church is tempted to be the primary religious educator of children, it refocuses us on the partnership between home and congregation that is essential for the growth and nurture of our children’s faith.
