Generations of Faith
Generations of Faith is a particular approach to total community catechesis that arose from the ministry of a team of theologians and religious formation directors on the east coats. It now represents a nation-wide movement.
Generations of Faith as an approach holds that religious education/faith formation is for everyone of every age in the parish: whole-community, cross generational, a life long process. It also needs to be anchored in the natural flow of the events of Church and parish life: Advent, Lent, parish feast days, sacramental celebrations, etc. Faith is not something we take classes about as children and then presume we know everything we need to know. Rather, faith requires life-long study, sharing and reflection so we can give ourselves over to ongoing conversion into the pattern of life Jesus has taught us.
Moving the Ladder
Generations of Faith invites that parish community, then, to a great shift. In the past, we American Catholics put children and their learning about faith at the center of parish life. There were good reasons for that: preserving immigrants from the lures of Protestant and commercial America, enculturating them as Americans and as Catholics, and equipping them for success in American society. The Catholic Church in the U.S. worked hard to place this ladder of religious education/faith formation against the wall of the youngest members of our community, and we have climbed high on that ladder these last 150 years.
Today home is less connected to Church than in the past. The Vatican II and post-Vatican II generations know less about their faith, teach their children less and are participating less in Church. American culture has little respect for religious education or Sunday worship and, for instance, schedules sports against both. To consider just one important statistic: in 2005 only 33% of American Catholics said they attended Sunday Eucharist regularly (and regularly is defined differently from one to the next). In 1957, 75% of American Catholics attended Mass weekly.
In this changed situation, the Generations of Faith approach holds that we need to move the religious education/faith formation ladder from the wall of children-only learning over to the wall of whole parish community learning, from the wall of children at the center of parish life to the wall of total community/cross generation life-long learning at the center of parish life. That is the aim of Generations of Faith. That is the aim we are taking up here in the MCC.
The Generations of Faith Core Curriculum
The Generations of Faith approach follows both Vatican and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops guidelines for catechesis. The curriculum for it in the MCC, therefore, will follow the six major themes suggested by these bodies.
The six themes for the MCC will follow this order, each theme taken up one per year for each of the next six years.
