Real Kids, Real Faith: Practices for Nurturing Children's Spiritual Lives

by Karen Marie Yust

Book Overview

In a culture that has lost touch with love, compassion, and meaning, how can parents be intentional about building a spiritual foundation for their children's development? In looking to their own upbringing for guidance, parents often feel even more at a loss--they don't want to make the same mistakes their parents did, so they either become too strict, or they take a completely hands-off approach. A pastor, a teacher, and a mother, Karen Marie Yust offers a refreshing array of resources and provisions to guide and sustain parents and children on thier mutual journey. Drawn from a three-year study of children's spirituality, as well as the best in theological tradition and literature, Real Kids, Real Faith provides insight and a variety of helpful tips for nurturing children's spiritual and religious formation. Yust challenges the prevailing notion that children are unable to grasp religious concepts and encourages parents to recognize children as capable of authentic faith.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787964077
• ISBN13: 9780787964078
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great Book!

This book was the required text for a class I took at seminary about ministry with children, and I can see why. It's so much more than theory and theology. It includes real life examples of how to raise your children in the Christian faith. A must have for all parents and anyone interested in Christian Education

Every parent should read this book!

This book is so helpful to parents exploring how to introduce children to their faith journey! It is written from the author's prospective of not only teaching this art, but from her real life experience. It is easy to read, and offers so many useful ideas and techniques. I am offering a small book study this fall using this book. If fits in perfectly with our core theme of personal spirituality!

Spiritual development for families

Karen Yust has written a wonderful text about spiritual development of children. Her approach is very practical with excellent themes and tips on how to help children spiritually develop. She shares stories and themese from her family. Every person interested in spiritual development of children MUST read this book! Teaching children spiritual practices at a young age is essential. She provides the tools needed to do so and the confidence in how to do that. I highly recommend reading this book.

Real substance

The author, Karen-Marie Yust, is a professor in charge of the Christian education programme at my seminary. A person of skill and accomplishment in both practical and academic aspects of ministry and education, she brings a lot of knowledge and resources to the task of looking at the spiritual development of children. This volume is part of the larger series on Families and Faith, looking at different aspects of faith formation in family settings, published by Jossey-Bass. The purpose of this series, according to Diana Garland and J. Bradley Wigger, is to help make love and grace real in family, congregational and community settings. The idea of education for children, in secular and religious settings, is far from new, but the idea of formation for spirituality in children is relatively uncharted in the modern world. Spirituality is one of the ways in which we as human beings, adults or children, make sense of the world and where we belong in relationship to each other, and all others. Children have a sense of discovery and exploration, an appreciation for mystery and the unknown that is a vital part of spiritual formation - many is the adult who tries to recapture this sense in their own journey.Finding appropriate resources for guiding children is not an easy task. Yust discusses the almost paradoxical situation of living in a society that purports to love and support children, but is lacking in resources appropriate to vital tasks - Happy Meals and Dr. Seuss books abound (and, in some ways, are valuable), but the tools for helping children exist as spiritual beings and grow into spiritually aware adults are lacking. She references John Westerhoff's text, `Will Our Children Have Faith?' drawing a similar conclusion that children will have faith so long as adults make the spiritual journey with them.Yust's book is a practical one; it presents theory and observational data as appropriate to the task, but it is really a how-to guide in many respects. In one chapter, she likens the American culture in some ways as a `foreign' culture to the religious culture, and compares the struggle to co-exist in both to the way that immigrant families learn to co-exist with elements of the `old country' and their new home, developing a bi-cultural identity. In other chapters, she looks at the use of narratives and storytelling, as well as adaptation to language use (even if the same language of English is spoken in both home/secular culture and religious culture, the real `language' of meaning can be different). The fifth chapter deals with prayer practices, and how to make these real and meaningful for children, including centering prayer and guided meditations. This is a useful guide for adults, too, as the chapter goes through in a clear and organised fashion the various types of prayer (supplication, confession, intercession, etc.) that we often forget. The next chapter deals with the introduction of theology for children - what they can know a