Molly Baskette - Bless This Mess: A Modern Guide to Faith and Parenting in a Chaotic World

In July 2004, toting my firstborn in a sling, I (Ellen) walked into a small, sweaty service at First Church Somerville, Massachusetts, a United Church of Christ where Molly Baskette had been pastor for less than a year. A once-dying congregation in a funky, gentrifying neighborhood, First Church was about to make a remarkable turnaround. Dozens of young people were beginning to show up, joining the older Protestant forebears of the church, attracted by the authentic, raw, and soulful worship style and the engaging sermons Molly preached (liberally peppered with personal stories).

This was a welcome change of pace for me. I had grown up steeped in Catholicism, but had left the Church at the start of the millennium over the sex abuse crisis and the Churchs reluctance to adopt more progressive policies. Although I felt disappointed by my old faith, I was not ready to leave Christianity behind completely. Religion had been formative for me, for better and for worse, and I still wanted my three-month-old, Luke, to grow up knowing how to look for the good in a world that could be so hard, but without all the baggage of the religion I had grown up with.

I was in graduate school for clinical psychology at the time, working at a residential home for children and adolescents outside Boston. During Lukes naptimes, I was writing a dissertation on what makes for good parenting. I was voraciously reading hard-core parenting research, but also mainstream parenting books, memoirs like Anne Lamotts Operating Instructions and first-wave mommy blogs. I even dipped into the work of Dr. James Dobson; about the only resource on Christian parenting at the time. But none of my research provided practical guidance on raising a spiritually grounded Christian kid in a liberally minded family. So I did what any good doctoral student would do. I ditched the books and googled a list of churches to try on for size. Typing in liberal Christian churches, I saw a picture of Molly and a rainbow flag. First Church Somerville was the first and last church I visited.

When I came into that first service, there were only two kids in the congregation, and one of them was Mollys two-year-old, Rafe. He was in a local family daycare, and soon I started Luke there as well. So began a carpool that lasted four years and a friendship that has lasted many more. It was also the start of this book.

Seeing each other at the difficult liminal moments of the carpool pickup and drop-off, when a kid was melting down or simply refusing to put on shoes (or even clothes!), Molly and I began to share our own stories, which really meant being totally vulnerable with each other about the often manic challenges of balancing home, mommyhood, and careers. We each brought different viewpoints and ideas to the table. I could provide Molly with much-needed perspective from the science of child development, and Molly could provide me with spiritual practices and pastoral guidance. Psychology was not enough. Spirituality was not enough. Each of us had something the other needed for the hard, messy, on-the-job training of raising children.

Avid readers both, we realized we could provide the world with the parenting book we longed for and that didnt yet exist: a book that combined the best of what psychology, science, and Christianity have to offer, a book that was inclusive, and that encouraged the idea that parents are their childrens first and best spiritual teachers (but also that they are not alone in this calling!).

Time passed. We each had second kids (Mollys Carmen and my Jonah, whom youll hear more about soon). I finished my PhD and became a child psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Molly faced and defeated cancer and saw her church grow in health and strength, as the Sunday school enrollment expanded from three kids to eighty in just a few years. Today, 40 percent of the congregation of First Church Somerville is gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual. There are families with two moms, or stay-at-home dads; kids who are adopted, multiracial, or were born from IVF (in vitro fertilization) or IUI (intrauterine insemination). Molly eventually left Somerville and now serves First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, a United Church of Christ (UCC) whose tagline is The Motley Pew. She wrote and published a couple of other books. And finally this one got born!

From the beginning, we conceived our book as a go-to for credible scientific research on child development and parenting, digested into lay terminology. We hoped it would inspire open-minded Christian parents with practical ideas and a heavy dose of humor (we believe that God, first among us, loves a good laugh), as well as provide real-world insights to help the stressed-out and/or bewildered family that sometimes just needs a friend to say its OK.

Most of all, we wanted to make our own experiencesour triumphs, disappointments, brokenness, foibles, and mistakesthe foil for it all. So many parenting books make it all sound so eeeeeeasy. And its not. Parenting is like a highly competitive endurance sport that is always pushing us to new and sometimes frightening levels.