By Rev. Todd Peperkorn, Admissions Counselor

One of the most memorable events of my life happened four years ago. I was serving a summer vicarage at St. Thomas Lutheran Church in Baltimore, Maryland. My job for the summer was to run a Christian day camp for the children in the neighborhood. St. Thomas is an inner city congregation, and so of the fifty or so children I had, only five had stepped foot in church before.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I love to sing. So, one of the things we did every day was learn hymns. We were learning We All Believe in One True God (TLH 252, LW 212), and an amazing thing happened. One of the wildest of the kids came up to me. His name was Brian.

"Victor?" Brian asked.

"Yes, Brian?" (I had long since given up trying to get them to lose the "t".)

"Can we sing the verse about the Holy Ghost again?" He asked. "That's my favorite!"

What could I say? A seven-year-old boy, who had never known Christ before, wanted to sing! He wanted to sing one of the oldest confessions of the Christian faith. You see, that isn't just a hymn. It's really an arrangement of the Apostles' Creed. Obviously, we sang the verse again.

This episode brought home to me the impact a pastor can have in the lives of children. I graduated from one of the Concordias, and I came to seminary (through no fault of theirs!) with the mistaken impression that being a pastor is primarily an academic exercise. This is an easy mistake to make. If you have spent your whole life in school, then that is all you know. This summer vicarage really showed me the relationship between sound doctrine and practice.

Sometimes we get the idea that children will simply learn the faith by osmosis. Somewhere and somehow they will learn what it means to be Lutheran. Faith, however, is something that is given by God and received, not something that just "happens".

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but one of my favorite words is tradition. For many, the word tradition carries a lot of excess baggage. Tradition is useless. Tradition is living in the past, or whatever. What the word really means, though, is to hand over, or perhaps to carry on. St. Paul in 2 Timothy 1:13 talks about this tradition:

We have a tremendous treasure of hymns in the Lutheran Church. But the sad fact is that if we don't teach our children to love the hymns and worship of our church, we are not "keeping the pattern of sound teaching," as St. Paul says. They are the words of the Gospel. How can we not teach our children to love the Gospel?

Here at CTS we are about teaching both young and old the gift of Christ Jesus our Lord. This is a place where you will learn both the what and the how of being a pastor. So have you hugged your hymnal today? The treasure of eternal life can be found in its pages.

From Volume 1, Issue 2, Summer 1997