Garber recounts conversations with many young adults, exploring the questions “What do you care about, and why?” and pushing to discover: “What is it that happens when a person , moving from student years into adulthood, continues to construct a coherent life? How does a worldview become a way of life? How do students learn to connect presuppostions with practice – belief about the world with life in the world?”
Garber has much to say about the process of faith formation during the post-high school, young adult years, the purposes of education, the integration of faith and learning. As he talks with adults who have moved on to mature faith, those who “with substantial integrity have connected belief to behavior, personally as well as publicly,” he identifies three essentials, or what he calls three “strands” that must be woven together:
Convictions: They were taught a worldview which was sufficient for the questions and crises of the next twenty years, particularly the challenge of modern and postmodern consciousness with its implicit secularization and pluralization.
Character: They met a teacher who incarnated the worldview which they were coming to consciously identify as their own, and in and through that relationship they saw that it was possible to reside within that worldview themselves.
Community: They made choices over the years to live out their worldview in the company of mutually committed folk who provided a network of stimulation and support which showed that the ideas could be coherent across the whole of life.
Convictions: I need to be talking about worldview, ways of seeing and knowing, and making sure I am clear in my own belief, but approachable to answer the questions that inevitably, repeatedly, confront our kids. It means working hard to create a safe place where worldview questions are explored, considered, and faithful alternatives are explained and affirmed.
Character: I need to incarnate, with humility and transparency, the reality of the gospel lived out in this place, this time. But I also need to be finding ways to help kids meet other adults, many other adults, who are equally committed to living as faithful followers of Christ.
Community: I need to encourage kids to find faithful communities in their colleges and beyond where they’ll be challenged and encouraged to live their faith coherently.
Character: I need to incarnate, with humility and transparency, the reality of the gospel lived out in this place, this time. But I also need to be finding ways to help kids meet other adults, many other adults, who are equally committed to living as faithful followers of Christ.
Community: I need to encourage kids to find faithful communities in their colleges and beyond where they’ll be challenged and encouraged to live their faith coherently.
Just listing that out makes clear to me why I find this book so daunting, and why I find the need for community so compelling. Convictions, character, community, are all shaped and shared by a network of people. No one voice is adequate.
Yet in many ways, we live as if our faith is our own issue, not to be shared too much, not to be questioned too much, not to be held up against our actions, not to be taken too seriously.
So – this blog is a way to explore the habits of heart that isolate us, that make faithfulness harder, and to find ways to weave something different – the three-strand tapestry Garber describes, where conviction, character and community all merge to provide a web of safety, and fabric of faithfulness, for ourselves and our maturing children.
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