Friends in Faith
By Amy Bremers
Amy is assistant editor of Pockets, a devotional magazine for children ages 6-12 published by The Upper Room in Nashville, TN. The Pockets web site can be found at www.upperroom.org.

As someone who is still in her 20s, my faith life is often a hotbed of questions and interest from the "older" people I work with. One topic people occasionally ask me about is my faith development, what works best for me in nurturing and strengthening my faith. What I always respond with is "my friends."

I live pretty far away from my family and my closest friends. So twice a year I "go home." Every time my friends and I (and everyone's children now!) get together. Even though where we get together is not physically my house, it is home for me. These acts of returning home matter a lot to my faith life.

Two faith traditions that aren't talked about much it seems are fellowship and searching. Maybe it's because they, unlike other traditions, often aren't practiced intentionally. But they are important nonetheless. These traditions are, for younger people, two of the most crucial in nurturing and strengthening faith. So I, as a relatively young person, would like to briefly talk about them and why they are so important.

Fellowship
Friends in faith are key. Take Jesus, for example. He needed friends to help him in his ministry (and then, of course, to carry on his ministry when he was gone). And it's not a stretch to imagine that Jesus talked with his disciples about what he was going to say to those he taught and perhaps used his disciples as a sounding board. And take Paul. His friends, those he wrote to and those he traveled with, were vital to his faith life. He had friends everywhere he traveled, and besides providing him with food and a place to stay, they provided him with necessary fellowship. Paul, as I do, was constantly asking his friends to pray for him and was constantly nurtured by the faith growth he saw in his friends. Just read the beginning and ending of any of his letters and you'll see.

In college, my friends and I would spend hours discussing, quite fervently sometimes, what we believed and what was important to us. During these ummm, discussions, often around a campfire on the bank of the Missouri River, we would try to persuade each other that WE were right. (I was, but we won't get into that!) Fellowship with friends allows you to vocalize your beliefs in a safe environment with the knowledge that you're going to be respected and loved no matter how different your views are from someone else's. And the act of vocalizing your beliefs can help strengthen them; it's not just something you believe, it's something you CONFESS to believe.

Searching
Not only did our campfire discussions help to strengthen my faith, but they sparked, more than anything else, my questions, my doubts, my wonderings-my searching. In order to grow and develop spiritually, a person must search, must question or at least wonder about what he or she believes in and has been taught. Not searching or not being willing to search is like being fed baby formula all your life. You just keep taking what others give you without questioning and discovering whether you actually believe it's true or not, without trying something new, without learning more about your own faith. And you can't grow on baby formula alone!

You can find an example of the importance of the questioning process in Acts 10:9-19. Peter has a vision during which God says that it's okay to eat certain animals and Peter says that he can't; he had been taught that these animals are unclean. God then says that it's okay to eat them because he made them clean. Peter then questions what that vision means. Peter's questioning of his vision eventually leads to his and others' Christian ministry with Gentiles, which had before been thought to be wrong. (I'm a vegetarian, but I still think this is a good example!)

Most people go through a major searching stage in their late-teens and twenties, but searching, as a tradition, should never be over. One should never give up on learning new things, stretching him or herself to grow, and questioning what he or she has been taught. The famous Bible verse says "seek GOD and you will find him," not "seek the laws of religion that you have been taught all your life." My friends, through both casual remarks and long talks, help me to seek God, even more than formal church does.

Now, my friends and I don't argue heatedly over faith issues. Instead, as we've grown, our fellowships have calmed into quiet times of pondering deep questions when we offer answers as possibilities rather than absolutes. My friends, those people close to me whom I come home to, are essential in helping me practice, usually unintentionally, the two most important faith traditions to me.

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