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Receiving acclaim for 'The Child in Our Hands'

By Lynn Mena

The Youth and Family Institute at Augsburg has been receiving both national and international attention, praise and bookings for its Child in Our Hands conference series. The two-day conference "presents a vision for effectively passing on the faith to the next generations and strengthens congregations to move from vision to action, from being church to doing church." At its core is the guiding principle that the home and the congregation are both partners in teaching and nurturing the faith.

Recently, congregations in Australia asked for conferences, as well as for YFI to train their congregational leaders with the conference's follow-up program, Hand-in-Hand. This year the conference will also travel to sites in more than 10 states from coast to coast. In addition to increasingly becoming nationally known in the ELCA and the Missouri Synod, the conference is also being booked by other denominations, which take the conference and adapt it to their own denominational setting.

"That's an important point - as we enter the 21st century, it's clear to us at the institute that the ministry of the church needs to be a cooperative ministry. To oppose each other sends out such a negative message," says David Anderson, YFI program director.

The conference was developed from a model created by Anderson with Dick Hardel, YFI executive director, and Roland Martinson, YFI senior associate and Luther Seminary professor.

"For various reasons on the part of all three of us, we came to a common juncture in our understanding of the life of the church," says Anderson. "So we brought together our three perspectives and experiences in congregational ministry and put together a model that includes eight strategies to partner home and congregation. What emerged from that are five principles out of which the Child in our Hands lives and breathes:

1. Faith is formed through personal trusted relationships, and often those relationships are in our own homes.

2. The church is a living partnership between the ministry of the congregation and the ministry of the home.

3. The home is church too, where Christ is present in faith.

4. The Christian faith is caught more than it is taught.

5. If we want faithful children and youth, we need faithful adults/parents.

"It's been very fulfilling and gratifying to see how this is growing," says Anderson. "The challenge is keeping up with it."

The Youth and Family Institute was founded in 1987 by Merton Strommen '42 in memory of his son, David Huglen Strommen.

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