Embracing Questions in Faithful Parenting: A Lent Bible Study with Bird Treacy
Episode 137, Published 03/31/2025, Listen Here
Gain confidence with the scriptures through our weekly Bible Study - this conversation discusses the Bible Readings for the week of 03/30. Find the prayer services and upcoming reading list here.
Today’s discussion centers around intergenerational faith formation, exploring how churches can create spaces where all ages worship together while also addressing the unique needs of children. Bird emphasizes the importance of playfulness, openness, and the intentional inclusion of those on the margins.
Our conversation explores how key biblical narratives—such as the story of Jesus healing the man born blind—challenge traditional structures. Bird highlights the transformative power of embracing complexity, especially as those raising young humans, rather than seeking easy answers. We hope this episode is an invitation for you to remain present with their questions and to recognize the light of Christ in every aspect of life.
Bird Treacy is a Godly Play Trainer, Episcopal church lady, church programming consultant, and writer based in the greater Boston area. Prior to finding her way to professional work in the church, Bird earned a masters degree in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies with an emphasis on Disability Studies from Emory University, and she brings both an academic lens and a lived experience of disabled identity to her current work. When not wranging small humans or developing programming, you can usually find Bird cooking, writing, competing in jigsaw puzzle competitions, making lace, or doing some other craft project. She lives with her wife, a current veterinary student, and their five cats. Bird has a WEALTH of Resource, stay in touch with her -- Website, Substack, @abirdinchurch (Instagram)
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Key moments in our conversation include:
00:25 – Discussion on intergenerational faith formation and challenges in ministry
04:39 – Integrating children into worship and the evolving nature of church practices
08:00 – Discussing Jesus’s divinity with children
12:00 – Jesus healing the blind man and its implications for inclusion
17:40 – Reflections on proclaiming Jesus’s identity and the personal journey of being the light
00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly Bible study. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:04 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:09 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families who are trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:17 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short Gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for the fourth week of Lent.
00:00:25 Natalie Thomas
And we are here today with Bird Tracy, who we know through shared ministry in Massachusetts, a web of beloved colleague friends, clergy friends and just been so great to have you with us, Bird, over the last few weeks to really ground us in Lent. And as we have talked about, you have extensive, I think is a word I will choose to use, whether or not you choose to use it, extensive experience working with churches around intergenerational faith formation.
And I'm just curious that, you know, in your experience, as a way of introducing yourself personally a little bit more to us, what are some of the themes that you've seen around faith formation at churches in terms of developing programming that serves all ages? What are some turns or pivots or shifts you think the church is making?
What's exciting to you right now? Anything in that direction?
00:01:22 Bird Treacy
Yes. So I think I was joking to a friend who was trying to figure out where to go to church one week about the use of the word intergenerational in the church. And there was a great headline of an article at one point also that sort of pointed to this, which was is it intergenerational or are there just children there?
And the distinction between have we created a program and called it intergenerational, but it's actually just a thing where children show up and aren't included, or a thing where actually only children are really centered. We have a really hard time figuring out that sweet spot of really being in community and ministry together.
But when it works well, it works really well. And I think when I see it work best is when we are in a place of sort of playfulness and openness as adults in particular, because we can't just plug children into the adult formation frameworks that have worked for, you know, grown humans in the church for however long and expect them to keep up.
But there's a lot that adults can learn from kind of pivoting the way that they are engaging with things. And so having an openness as adults is really where I see congregations thriving in intergenerational programming. I also see it working really well in confirmation settings. I really, deeply believe in the work of confirmation mentors and prayer partners, that those are powerful intergenerational programs and ultimately that the most impactful thing we can do is be together and worship and to do so in a way that really welcomes everyone to the table.
And I say that as someone who actually serves at a parish that keeps step stools under the altar so that when I bring children up to the altar during the celebration of the Eucharist, they can see over the altar to what's happening. That is such a huge piece of that. And also as incredibly valuable as intergenerational programming is, I always want to be really clear that particularly with children under about the age of eight or nine, we cannot set aside the importance of children's only formation because we do need to equip them with the tools to participate in these other spaces.
And that can't always be done in intergenerational settings. So this will always remain a bolt end, as hard as that can be, particularly in small parish settings.
00:04:39 James Thomas
Yeah, we've been talking about that so much recently and Natalie and I, although our role as deacons, for those who don't know, we are sworn to the service of the bishop, we serve directly under the bishop, but it is the bishop's good pleasure to task a deacon to serve in a particular parochial context.
And I have been assigned to serve at Christchurch parish in Plymouth for the past four years. And Natalie is on a parental leave with our very young children, but is often at Christchurch with me. And you know, we are in many ways it's, it's a vibrant parish in many ways. And this exact issue that you're talking about is not easily navigated.
There is the both and of children in church and religious formation for children, the logistics of that in the face of modernity and the requirements of often one or both parents or caregivers working and the many activities for which children are scheduled, it's not quite so simple as it, as it used to be.
And the in many ways open heartedness of older generations and some of the difficulties. I had our daughter at the altar as I, as I sometimes do, she'll help me set the table from time to time. And one person remarked, I've never seen a child in the sanctuary before. And you know, I'm not quite sure what the appropriate response to that is.
Sometimes my gut reaction would be to say get used to it. And also to be sent, you know, I mean, and if I'm being honest and also to be sensitive, that's like, well, you know, this is the church in which this individual was raised for 70 some odd years. And so we are doing a new thing.
It should not be a new thing, but it is. And all of this is difficult to navigate. And it's our hope to be a voice in that space. And we're very glad to have you lend your voice to ours as we move into this last week together.
00:06:49 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, and I would just build on that, James, to say that when I think of intergenerational programming or an intergenerational church, I think that it necessitates, Byrd, what you said of affinity or identity based spaces that can build. Inform people with the skills to participate in an intergenerational worship space as well, or formation space as well.
And so to me, what you said about the both, and that is true for building up the capacity of younger folks and smaller humans to, you know, participate in conversations. And it's also about really disrupting and rebuilding some expectations that adults or older folks might have about what their role is in an intergenerational space.
It's not to be the person in charge or to listen, but it is to be a participant in play together. So I think when I say intergenerational, at least I'm not talking about solely combined spaces, that I think the affinity spaces really build the combined space.
00:08:02 James Thomas
So as we move into the readings for this week, we started talking about this one during our first week together when we were discussing the prologue to John and John's concern with what you might call a high Christology. How have you seen kids make sense of this idea of Jesus is divine? What's that?
What's that construction? I'm going to forget who it is. I think it's Gregory of Nazanzius who says everything God was God remained at the incarnation, which is quite a thing to wrap your head around. How do we do that with younger people?
00:08:37 Bird Treacy
I think it's so interesting, the framing of Jesus is divine as the piece to communicate because it seems so obvious that this person who was walking around in the world must have been human. But I actually find that that is the harder piece in working with children that they hear so much about Jesus in the context of, of miracles and prayer and Jesus's relationship with the Father aspect of God that they feel pretty clear about the divinity of Jesus.
And it takes a lot more reminding to be present to like, this wasn't just God in the world, but that, you know, in talking to children like Jesus was a little boy like you, or like he played with his cousins and he went to celebrate holidays with his family, and that those kind of physical, tangible, human parts of Jesus are actually often harder to communicate.
I have a contingent of Sunday school children who are really grappling with the Trinity. And so much of what's happening in these chapters of John is really fitting to the questions that they've been asking, because we get this notion of Jesus as outside of time and before creation in his divinity. But they are also developmentally still in a place where if the Bible tells us that Adam and Eve are the first people versus Jesus as the first person, but Jesus is God, how did anything happen before Jesus if Adam and Eve are before Jesus on the timeline?
And so, yeah, yeah, we're like, yes, Jesus is the first person, but not in the way that you are asking the question. And so that human divine balance has been one of our big pieces of work in my circles recently.
00:11:00 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, that's a conversation I want to be part of.
00:11:03 Bird Treacy
It's a good conversation.
00:11:05 Natalie Thomas
Yeah. Prior to the current work I do, I did a facilitation of conversations in the Episcopal Church around social justice and the work of the church in taking part of dismantling structures. And one of our guests at one of the panels that we led, the Rev. Eric Littman, who was a mentor and friend to James throughout the ordination process, said that the one of the biggest.
I'm not going to quote him here also, but I'll try. That one of the biggest harms done by white men was offering easy answers to complex problems. I'm finding Delight bird in that conversation because it's such a reminder that if we find an easy answer to that, it doesn't actually address the complexity.
How do we let our kids and younger people in our lives draw us into the complexity and stay there? Not need to solve it. Right. But stay in the conversation with them.
00:12:04 Bird Treacy
My job circle is not to solve the questions. It is to be present in them.
00:12:09 Natalie Thomas
Yes, I love that. My job is not to solve the questions, it's to be present in them. So our last three nights of this week, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, we are in this story of Jesus interaction with a man who was born blind. And it is a story of physical healing. What I am more drawn to in the story is actually Jesus turning the relationships upside down and lifting up someone who has been cast outside of society as the teacher, as the teacher for the scribes and the Pharisees with whom he's engaging.
And so I'm curious from your point of view, how centering children in our churches can really be A turning upside down and an entry point into shifting societal structures and systems to build a more inclusive community.
00:13:01 Bird Treacy
Absolutely. I am also much more interested in that piece because I think that anytime we're looking at these healing miracles, we are getting into really tricky territory around the status of disability in our faith communities. And I also think that in terms of access and inclusion, we run into really similar challenges around issues of disability as we do around the inclusion of children, in fact.
And so to come to sort of this question of structures and systems through this lens of healing, I find myself thinking about how Jesus has already come to us through this series of kind of transformations, like coming into the world as a human, as a baby, and toppling structures of power from the beginning, creating these waves of fear fundamentally through the power structures around him, and then proceeding through each part of his life to call people from the margins into the center.
And that is consistently what we have seen Jesus doing throughout these first chapters of John that we've been working our way through. When we see him in his encounters with the Samaritan woman, when we see him in at the sheepskate with the man who can't walk. All of these encounters are with people who exist not just in terms of social norms on the margins, but historically speaking, there's literally the like casting out of disabled bodies and diseased bodies outside of the gates.
Like when you think about lepers as on the outside, it's literally beyond the city limits. Old phrases like the ship of fools have historical roots in literally putting mentally ill people on a ship and sending them out to sea. Like the margins are not just about metaphor and treatment, but about the physical locality.
And so in coming near two people, Jesus repositions the center. They can physically be on the margins, but with Jesus as the center of these stories, he comes close to them and brings the center to people who otherwise cannot access to it. I think a lot about another historical framework, which is the notion of Christians as eccentric people, and the idea of literally having a center that is different than the center that the world is communicating to us.
And so that we are called then to travel with Jesus to create that new center, to migrate with the center to those on the margins.
00:16:41 James Thomas
Thank you. Music to these deacons ears for sure. So I think it worked out with our first guest, the Reverend Gary Commons, that I think we just happened to leave him with. Our last question for him was at the point in maybe Luke's Gospel, where who do you say that I am? Right?
And he happened to answer that question coincidentally, as his last question. And then maybe somehow it lined up for our next guest to have answered the same question as their last question. And at that point we sort of made it a habit leaving our time with someone who's been with us for a few weeks on this question.
So for you, Bird, with great, great thanks from Natalie and I for five weeks together, a Lenten journey towards the cross and all that comes with it, Let us ask you, what do you think these stories are saying about who Jesus is and how should we go about proclaiming Jesus identity in the world today?
00:17:40 Bird Treacy
I'm so glad to have entered these weeks of conversation with the Prologue to John and all of the language about Jesus as the light of the world, because that feels so connected to my own personal full story arc of thinking about myself as a child in the church where I grew up singing this Little Light of Mine and the notion that in order to proclaim Jesus to the world, we also have to be the light.
And so I think that is so much of the journey that we've been on with the Gospel of John is being witness to Jesus as the light, but also being witness to John the Baptist as a model for proclaiming the light. And we are called to live as that light. Through the core tenets of our baptismal covenant in which we receive the representation of our light, we are called to proclaim Jesus by honoring the dignity of every human being in godly play.
My children's favorite story, and I say this because I have abandoned my calendar plans to tell it at their demand, is the story of baptism. And during that story, each child is invited to light a candle in remembrance of their baptism or looking towards their baptism if they are not yet baptized. And it is that light that anchors our understanding of both who Jesus is and who Jesus asks us to be in his name.
00:19:45 Natalie Thomas
I want to echo James's great thanks to you Bird, on behalf of us and also on behalf of everyone who's listening. You know you have been able to touch and support many people who are part of this community. And if you want to stay in conversation with Bird beyond these episodes, you can find her@abirdinchurch.com Wiggles and Wonder substack and a Burden Church on Instagram and we also want to be in touch with you.
We are so grateful for this community of people that is praying with us. You sustain us and support us in providing this ministry. So please find us on Instagram or Facebook. Bedtime Chapel is our handle. You can write us an email bedtimechapelmail.com and you can find all of this on our website, bedtimechapel.com and until next time, we'll be praying with you
