In September, I will travel back to Pennsylvania for my 50th high school class reunion. The last reunion I attended was my 10th, so it will be interesting to see how classmates have changed and what has happened in their lives over these last 40 years! I have had a host of changes. When I last saw many of my classmates, I was an attorney in Harrisburg, PA, with no kids – and hair on my head! Now I will meet them as a bald Virginia pastor with two grown children, a granddaughter, and two titanium hips! Life goes on, and we change – some for the better, some for the worse.
Faith, too, changes over time. When elders return for a second stint on Session and present their statements of faith, they find that the statement prepared for their first stint no longer adequately reflects what they believe. Faith grows through new insights gleaned from study, reflection, experience, and even a sermon or two along the way. We expect those changes as we move from a childhood faith through confirmation to adulthood, but faith continues to grow, ebb, and flow across our adult lives too. New questions and doubts arise even as others are resolved. How has your faith changed across the years, especially across these recent years? With a pandemic, world events, and developments in technology, including AI, our world is changing rapidly. Is your faith rising to the challenges these changes present? Do you look at them through the lens of faith, or do you try to segregate the secular from the religious?If we believe that God is Lord of all creation, then we really can’t separate secular from religious, for the Lord is God of all. All of life is seen through the lens of faith with an eye toward what faithfulness demands of us. Advances in AI raise ethical questions about how it might be used responsibly, and faith shapes our ethics. The pace of change seems to be outpacing the ethical reflection necessary to assure responsible use of AI, and we should encourage that reflection as an essential part of responsible innovation. Just because we CAN do some things does not mean that we SHOULD do them.
As you read about changes to our world and experience them day to day, consider how your faith might inform a faithful response on your part. Wrestle with the questions that arise – engage them, don’t evade them – for faith grows through that wrestling. To paraphrase Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Faith is formed in the crucible of doubts.” That is true only if we wrestle with the doubts, wrestle with the questions, wrestle with the changes. What better place to do that wrestling than the church, within a Covenant family who is wrestling with those questions as well, but who also is there to love and support one another – including you – through it all!
— John Peterson
