Fred looks up and sees his friend George walking down the sidewalk towards him and immediately is overcome with bewilderment. “George,” he says, “I heard you had died!” “Hardly,” says George laughing, “As you can see, I am very much alive.” “Impossible,” says Fred, “The person who told me is way more trustworthy and reliable that you!” Think back when we were very young children. No one was more reliable or more trustworthy than our parents. If they said it, we believed it. In fact, they didn’t even need to say anything, we automatically grew up like them. Yes, they taught us things, but we all know we caught far more than they taught. Children are like that. They absorb all sorts of things, including their parents’ faith. In this series, we are talking about the six stages of faith. Stages are distinguishable periods of growth and development that take

Excuse me, but I need to rant. Recently, I have become extremely frustrated with the River Kid’s Sunday school curriculum for preschoolers. It is more than frustration. It is close to rage. How hard can it be to teach preschoolers? See, we have a holy charge to teach our kids; but instead of fulfilling our obligation to God and to the parents of these kids, our teachers do nothing but share Bible stories with our kids. That’s not quite true. They also sing cutesy songs to them. When did we give in to the spirit of our age? When did we decide that we needed to dumb down our faith? See, I have looked through our curriculum extensively, and I have yet to see one lesson (no not one!) on divine timelessness, unlimited duration and the foreknowledge of God.  Nor has there been one discussion on Modalism, Docetism, Adoptionism or

Shakespeare was right: all the world IS a stage! Think about all the things in our world that utilize stages. Rockets come in stages. Butterflies come in stages. Even the common cold comes in stages. There are stages in the consumer buying process, in how to buy a home and in how injured toenails grow back. There are stages in how we form our relationships and in how we break-up. There are stages of life, stages of sleep, stages of depression, and stages of labor and delivery. Almost every disease progresses through stages. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the five stages of grief. Jean Piaget gave us the four stages of cognitive development. Erik Erikson gave us the eight stages of psychosocial development. And Lawrence Kohlberg gave us the six stages of moral development. And I didn’t even mention Prochaska and DiClemente’s six-stage theory of change (but I think I changed