Hello my friends,

As my family leave continues, I'm honored to share a piece from my friend Meredith Miller. She is not only a gifted thinker and writer, but she provides excellent resources especially for those of us who are parenting children in our world today.

Resources to Consider

On top of her excellent book, she creates a Bible story podcast for kids called Ask Away as well as the Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough, which is a weekly resource to help adults feel more equipped to explore Scripture with the kids in their lives, one story at a time.

Outside of resources she personally produces, she also recommends Parenting After Deconstruction, which is a 4-week cohort led by Sarah Swartzendruber. It is a great space to process and learn with peers.

Other books she recommends is The Bible for Everyone by NT Wright and John Goldingay as well as the Lost World series, by John Walton, which often helps adults revisit scripture for themselves in really good ways, because, as Meredith puts it, "sometimes the challenge is having to be sorting things out ourselves while being face to face with kiddos in real time. We wish there was a pause button."

You can follow Meredith's work here on her Linktree!​

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Lastly, I wanted to tell you about my new podcast: Many of you have asked if I've ever considered starting a podcast. Well, I'm planning to do just that at the end of May! My goal for this podcast is to produce an audio sermon every week for those who want to navigate scripture together in our current social and political environment. This will create another opportunity to meaningfully engage the Bible and our faith together. I also hope it could provide an opportunity to have intentional interviews and conversations with others down the road. This could be a really positive free resource, especially for those who currently do not have a church community, but still want a weekly sermon. Several of you have also generously asked if there is a way to help get this podcast off the ground, which is so incredibly kind of you! The reality is, I need several pieces of tech to produce this podcast to my standards. For example, I need a mic, cables, and some other gear, and my laptop is over a decade old and is in desperate need of replacing if I hope to continue to create this kind of content. So, if you feel like you want to help me launch this podcast, you can do so through the link below with any amount that feels right for you. A sincere thanks to all those who have given so far! I'm excited to bring this project to life! Be sure to watch for updates in the weeks ahead! ​ $5.00 Into The Gray: Podcast The goal of this podcast is to bring a sermon every week for those who want to navigate scripture together in our... Read more Get it now! ​

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And without further ado, here is this week's piece by Meredith Miller.

Faith Is A Spider's Web

My grandma was a pastor, director of the youth choir, skilled musician, and also a collector of many things. Custom bears, for instance. Her pink depression glass was passed down to me, and it’s a delight.

She introduced my parents, approaching my dad at a summer camp where he (also a youth pastor) had brought his students the same week she’d brought hers. “I have a daughter you should meet,” she told him.

My dad was a pastor for about 40 years, 32 of them in one church. He collected books, mainly, but hardly any were passed down to me (for which I’m grateful).

It is true for me, in the case of my family, to say that faith has been passed down to me. But I think we are often given the impression that faith is passed along like depression glass, custom bears, and books. As if it’s an intact Thing that is given by one generation to the next.

Adults have it. Adults pass it on to kids, hoping they’ll hold onto it.

Faith is an heirloom.

This makes it hard for an adult who is reimagining faith, who fears their doubt has cracked the glass, their questions have worn holes in the fabric, their changes have torn out the pages.

What will they pass on to their children now? Surely they must dedicate themselves to Figuring It All Out for the sake of the next generation, they must hand down something whole and perfect.

But faith is not an heirloom.

It is not some fragile thing we must fret over, lest our children not receive something valuable from us. It’s not an object, gifted, intact and unchanging to the generation behind us, so they can have it just as it’s always been.

Faith is a spider’s web.

I trust you have, at some point in your life, looked closely at a spider’s web. It’s fascinatingly intricate, seemingly so fragile, and yet, it’s a spider’s home, its source of nourishment, its protection. A web is a spider’s way of adapting to the endlessly complex, maddeningly unpredictable, frighteningly unstable world in which it lives.

And that’s what makes it such a helpful image for our faith.

Before going further into why this image can be so rich, let’s explore just one other metaphor born especially from the era of Modern Philosophy (dates for this sort of thing get fuzzy, so let’s say roughly from the 1600’s to the 1900’s). In that time, the dominant image for how a person comes to know things was a wall.

A person lays a sturdy foundation of knowledge and facts, and then can build on top of that layer with another layer of knowledge, and then another. Each layer follows from and rests upon the layer before. (This is, notably, not quite the same way the Bible talks about Jesus as our firm foundation–that’s about attaching our trust to a person. And as you’ll see in a second, a web is a great companion to that idea in a way that the modern ‘knowledge wall’ is not.)

If my faith is a wall, then I begin by selecting foundation stones, traits of God’s upon which I build my beliefs. And then I build another layer of beliefs on top of the foundational beliefs, and then another layer on top of that one. But then, because our God is complex and we are always getting to know God more, one of those beliefs may get exposed as not being true, or I may come to learn something new about the Bible or theology.

What now?

If my faith is a wall, there are two options: I can explain away the new information that doesn’t fit in the wall I’ve built, or I can take out a stone. And what happens to a wall when a stone gets removed? The whole thing topples over.

But faith is not a wall.

Faith is a spider’s web.

For a web, the source of strength are anchor threads, attached to something solid (like that corner of my living room I can’t reach.) Each thread is upheld by tension and expects to be stretched. Meanwhile, its shape, texture, complexity, and beauty come from the internal threads. Anchor threads and internal threads combine to create something incredibly resilient.

Perhaps our faith works in a similar fashion. Anchor threads affix to who God is, including the attributes that live in mysterious, dynamic tension with one another. Internal threads – habits; less essential, but still important beliefs; faith practices; life rhythms – give our faith its unique shape.

As we discover more of who God is, adjust our faith practices to continually create space for God in the midst of each season of life, learn new things from and about the Bible, we let our web be stretched. Just as, according to our friends at MIT, “a spider web gets its strength from silk strands working together and their ability to stretch when stressed,” so it is with our faith.

For any of us who get to have kids in our lives, this means we can see our task as one of introducing them to God, giving them time, space, and experiences that help them get to know God over time, to anchor their own webs of faith. We get to participate in various faith practices and habits together, weaving internal threads that are unique to the child, their family, their culture, their community, and more.

Perhaps most important is what happens when a spider’s web breaks. Because a web is designed with the expectation that breakage happens, and with resources for repair. When it does, it’s not because the spider failed; the web was made for this.

In fact the spider (and you may relate to this) doesn’t have the energy to start all over again, over and over again every time one strand fails. If it needed to do so, it would actually die.

Our faith isn’t an unbreakable heirloom. It’s a web, and sometimes strands break and need to be replaced because they just aren’t true, or because they just don’t work anymore. We realize our ways of seeing God don’t match reality. Our ways of experiencing God don’t work like they used to.

Those strands break, but we have not failed.

And we don’t need to remake everything. We tend to what broke, knowing the web will actually be stronger upon repair, even if it takes a while.

What a gift we offer young people when we share that faith changes, beliefs change, practices change, and that is OK. It’s not just normal, it’s necessary. It’s part of the process of weaving a web of faith all our own.

Faith if not a wall, built brick by brick, identical to a predetermined blueprint.

Faith is not gifted like an object, passed down like an heirloom.

Like a spider’s web, it’s woven.

If you’d like to consider more deeply how to engage the kids in your life in their faith, you might enjoy my book, Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From. It draws on faith formation research, offers right-now ideas you can try, and assumes the hope is to weave a web of faith anchored to a trustworthy God.

Now I'd like to hear from you!

Did you find this helpful? If so, be sure to follow Meredith on Instagram as well!