On the parish side, we have quite a bit to show for our efforts as well. The Sunday School grew tremendously under the leadership of Lyndy Eddy and Robin Schepf, and continues to grow and try innovative new things such as the intergenerational Sunday School events under Gina Howard's direction. I hope you will take the time to thank our many wonderful Sunday School teachers for the service they provided over this past year. In the June newsletter, Gina mentions nearly fifty people who helped make this past year a success for our hundreds of Sunday School age children.

In my own department, so to speak, our Regional Youth Group has been a tremendous success, meeting twice monthly on Sundays from four to six in the evening. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard the youth of the parish tell me they wanted youth group every week! And while we won't be doing exactly that next year, plans are in the works to do something very like that, which I will elaborate on in a few moments.

But beyond academy and parish programs, we find the front lines of Christian Education- literally the "home front." For even at their very best, everything we do at Saint James can only be a support, not a replacement, for the family. As with everything else meaningful in life, learning how to be a child of God begins at home. Our first lesson from the Book of Deuteronomy underscores this point in no uncertain terms: "You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied…"

The people of Israel, to whom these words were originally directed, have always taken these injunctions seriously, even literally. In addition to sending their children to Hebrew School and preparing their boys and girls for bat and bas mitzvot (the rites of passage most nearly akin to the Christian practice of confirmation), to this day, traditional religious Jews demonstrate their faithfulness to this passage of scripture by wearing tephillin, or "phylacteries," and by afixing mezuzot to their gateposts and doorways. You may have seen orthodox Jews at prayer wearing tephillin, which "consist of two small square cases of leather, one of which is worn on the forehead, the other on the upper left arm…They contain narrow strips of parchment on which are copied [passages from] Exodus…and Deuteronomy,"¹ including the one we read this morning. And you've probably also seen a mezuzah if you've visited an observant Jewish home; it's a small rectangular case, about the size of an electric doorbell, which is found on the right doorpost as one enters, about shoulder high. The cases are often enameled or otherwise decorated, and like the tephillin, inside a mezuzah is a scroll of parchment inscribed with two passages, the one we just heard this morning, and one that is known as the "Shema Yisrael": "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might…"

All this is to say that within the Judeo-Christian tradition, bringing our children up in the faith of our fathers and mothers has always been a sacred duty that begins at home. The work of churches and synagogues in nurturing children as they become faithful adults is only truly effective when parents and grandparents, and indeed, the entire community of faith, talks about what it means to love God "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might…" When we talk about our faith at home and away, when we lie down and when we rise, we become together what no school or program can be on its own; we become what MIT systems change guru Dr. Peter Senge calls in his book The Fifth Discipline a "learning organization" of visionary people who have ownership in a common vision and look at all of the parts all of the time. We started down that road when we decided to become "a place for children." We are now poised to become a place for youth and young adults as well.

This past academic year, a Confirmation Review Team, consisting of myself, Nancy Dewlin, Lisa Fitzhugh, Larry Haislip, and Alan Wright, met several times and did many hours of research into how Saint James could best implement a confirmation program that would continue to build upon the strengths we already have.

We really began to make headway when Charlie passed on to me an advertisement from Faith Inkubators (a.k.a. the "FINKs"), a Christian Education think tank in Minnesota started out of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, or ELCA. The Episcopal Church, as you may know, came into full communion with the ELCA in the year 2000 with the adoption of "Called to Common Mission," a covenant committing our churches to working together for the building up of the Body of Christ. Charlie had gotten the Faith Inkubators material from Heyward. Ever the agent of change and growth, Heyward had spotted this group's unique approach to confirmation, an approach that meshed well with what Saint James is already doing on many different fronts.

Faith Inkubators has spent the last nine years developing and testing their "Head to the Heart" confirmation program in congregations throughout the country, including a half dozen Episcopal parishes. They also have a variety of other Christian Ed. programs. In their "Head to the Heart" program, The Rev. Rich Melheim, the FINKs' executive director, likes to draw out the implications of envisioning the church, as St. Paul does, as the Body of Christ. He sees confirmation as the process of "injecting the DNA of Jesus into the nucleus of every cell," the cells being, of course, our youth. Instead of viewing confirmation day as a graduation day from the church, he sees it as "the day the living cell is ordained into its chosen ministry in the life of the church." Does that last phrase remind you of anything recent at Saint James? When I was ordained a priest less than a month ago, we did just that by confirming nine of our youth at the same time, thus affirming that we are all of us ministers in Christ's Body.

As you may have read in the May issue of the Saint James Newsletter, Charlie and I gathered eight people from this parish to attend in April a workshop called FinkThink at St. John's Lutheran Church on Sweet Air Road. I told the FINKs about what we were doing at Saint James with the combined ordination and confirmation liturgy, and they were incredibly impressed. In fact, at that workshop, their executive director issued an initial invitation to me to begin working with him to develop materials specific to the Episcopal Church. Since then, he has made some additional proposals, including asking me to help his think tank design an entire unit on Episcopal/Anglican identity. It remains for Heyward and the Vestry to work out the most appropriate ways in which I might be involved in this work, but I think that when the organization that's helping you put together a new and exciting confirmation program asks you to give direct input into how to design it to fit the specific needs of your community, that says something pretty impressive about their approach to Christian Education.

I came away from the FinkThink workshop with two main conclusions. The first was a deep sense of how incredibly blessed Saint James already is. The second was a serious excitement about how far we could go by building on what we have. As to the first, a conviction of how well we're doing compared to a lot of other places, the FINKs' executive director provided us with ample evidence. Did you know that according to their research, "most churches lament the fact that 3/4 of their youth don'' come back after confirmation"? Rich Melheim has written that "most churches are popping their buttons if 25% of their juniors and seniors are regularly active in worship, service and fellowship. That's another way of saying we're pleased if we only lose 3/4 of our kids. There is something wrong with this picture. If any company in the country had a one to three year training program and, after finishing the course, 75% of the graduates quit and never came back, they would fire the managers, cancel the program and try something else. Or they'd go out of business." He jokes that "if any church in the country had the same problem, they'd keep it, do it over and over again and call it confirmation." I am here today to report back to you that we, thank God, are not one of those churches.

Still, for those who are, Melheim asks "So, what does this mean for the future of the church?" He goes on, "The bulk of our children are 'graduating' from mainline confirmation knowing very little and believing even less. Year after year these precious young people stand before an altar after having completed our required courses. We tell them it's not graduation, then… parade them in front of the church to make their promises of faithfulness. We…talk about 'adult responsibilities' in the life of the church. Then they walk out and the bulk of them don't return."

What is unfortunately very sobering news for others, however, led to my second conclusion, that we are poised at Saint James to build on our already-existing strengths. The Confirmation Review Team shared my excitement, and decided that the way to make a big difference in the life of our community was to commit to a big goal. Our vision is that every middle schooler in the parish will become intimately involved in doing ministry, and to do this, we are going to start at the heart of our identity as Episcopalians: worship. Beginning this fall, the youth will plan and carry out a monthly youth liturgy at Worship Nine. At nine a.m. nine times this next year (if note more), you will see faith in action, a practicum in Anglican identity. The only roles not taken by youth at the nine o'clock will be those specifically reserved to the priest. And since Heyward is so youthful looking without his beard, it will look like the place has been taken over! But that's exactly what we want: we want the youth of this place to take ownership of their faith, for they are not the future of the church, they are the church! For all who have been baptized into Christ's Body have been ordained as ministers in the Baptismal Covenant.

And we're going to take this vision one step further, reaching out to our high schoolers who've already been confirmed. We've already begun doing that in our Regional Youth Group. David Pitts and Elliott Buck, for instance, have done marvelous work with the group, earning community service hours while having fun at the same time. Working with the Faith Inkubators model, we will begin in the fall to offer a completely different way of doing confirmation preparation. No longer will our middle schoolers be required to attend a class during the 10:15 liturgy. Instead, we hope they will use that time to be with their families in worship, take leadership roles regularly as acolytes and lectors, or help out as assistants in the cribbery and lower grades of the Sunday School. Complementing our already successful Regional Youth Group, we will gather on the second and fourth Sundays from four to six in the afternoon to learn, play, and plan the Youth Liturgies. I wish I had ten more minutes to go on, and I'm sure you do, too, but I hope I've whet your appetite to come hear more about the exciting happenings with our youth next Sunday at the Haislips', and how we're already working with other groups in the community, particularly the sports leagues, to see whether some of the pressures parents are already under on Sunday afternoons can be alleviated by coordinated planning.

Finally, I want to make sure that you know that what we're doing isn't just for parents or even just for parents and grandparents; it's for every one of us, for we are all called to put these words of [God] in our hearts and souls." As Rich Melheim, writes, "What do we want to retain on confirmation day? A few facts in a kid's head? The kid? If we are going to retain both information and the teen, we've got to shift from a focus on information to a focus on faith formation and from teaching classes to building communities of faith. It's time we head to the heart." To that, I say, Amen.