Exploring Practices of Ministry

Pamela Cooper-White, Michael Cooper-White

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451488937
• eBook ISBN: 9781451489736
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Fortress Press's Foundations for Learning series prepares students for academic success through compelling resources that kick-start their educational journey into professional Christian ministry. In Exploring Practices of Ministry, Pamela Cooper-White and Michael Cooper-White share insights from their extensive experience as parish ministers, church agency executives, and seminary educators in diverse multicultural and international contexts. Pamela, an Episcopal priest who teaches pastoral theology, care, and counseling, is also a pastoral psychotherapist with an extensive clinical background. Michael, a Lutheran pastor and seminary president, is also a pilot and flight instructor and has served as a chaplain with the Civil Air Patrol. The authors share their wisdom with seminarians and other readers seeking to deepen theological reflection and expand skills as ministry practitioners. While not all readers are preparing to be ordained ministers, most will engage in many of the practices described in the book: preaching and public speaking, teaching, leading liturgies, conducting ceremonies, counseling and offering pastoral support for persons undergoing life transitions, and serving as organizational leaders in congregations, chaplaincies, social ministries, and in the public arena. This book is a companion journal for pilgrims on the way to becoming confident practitioners of ministry.

5

Companions in Telling the Story: Practices of Christian Education

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

—Luke 24:27

If you were raised in a Christian tradition, you are likely to have had some experiences that fall into the realm of Christian education. Pamela remembers going to a local church’s “Sunday school,” where a burned-out volunteer persisted for several years (third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, . . .) in having the children color maps of Paul’s journeys. After having dutifully gone through several boxes of crayons and colored pencils, Pamela came out of this exercise having no idea who Paul really was nor why his journeys were important, but having received training to be a “good girl,” able to follow instructions and color inside the lines. Another learning venue there was junior choir, which was more fun but also left no discernible theological traces. Later, in her teen years, Pamela decided to return to the Episcopal Church, her family’s denomination, and remembers little from confirmation classes except that, as a girl from the neighboring town with the rival football team, she experienced little fun and a fair amount of shunning in the social activities, and the priest (with somewhat grudging admiration) branded her as “the one who asks questions all the time.” The experience of confirmation itself, however, with the laying on of hands by the bishop, has stayed with her to this day as a sacramental experience of grace that strengthened and renewed her relationship with God and the church.

Michael remembers (somewhat more fondly) going through two years of Lutheran confirmation classes in his early teens, during which the stern but kindly pastor, Rev. A. J. Sheldahl, led his small band of confirmands through Luther’s catechism, culminating in a medieval-style public examination before the entire congregation. To this day, Michael has the catechist’s words “What does this mean?” engraved on his brain and heart. Somewhere along the line, both of us as young adults who had initially set out on other trajectories in graduate school (musicology and the law, respectively) felt drawn toward a vocation of ministry and, along with that, an immersion in theological education.

For Pamela, the genuine sense of drawn-ness began with an interfaith youth group sponsored by a local Congregational church, where the wise youth leaders—a young couple with much love and enthusiasm—allowed a weekly gathering of Catholic, Protestant, and religiously questioning teens to run a folk music coffee house, join in a weekly circle for prayer and singing around a candle, and engage in any questions whatever about faith, feeling, and intellect. Later, immersion in a small blue-collar church as a minister of music caused her to discern a formal call to ordained ministry. But everyone from this original youth group experienced a sense of God’s nearness and a particular sense of calling in their lives—two became ordained clergy, one entered religious life as a Little Sister of Jesus, and many more found their ministries in a variety of secular (non-church) occupations.

For Michael, this sense of calling began in his boyhood rural congregation, where a pastor and some lay leaders encouraged him to consider public ministry. Along the way, an opportunity to be a vacation Bible school teacher leading other young persons as they were challenged to grow in knowledge and devotion signaled a possible vocation in the church. This later crystallized through involvement in an avant-garde new mission congregation whose pastor’s and key lay leaders’ expansive understanding of Christian education included intense discussions of social issues in the era of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

In both our cases, it might be said that much of our Christian journey was “formed” (a word we will return to shortly) in part because of, and in part in spite of, our experiences of formal Christian education. Returning to the Emmaus road, what does the simple sentence in verse 27 about Jesus’ interpreting to them from the Scriptures tell us about what “good” Christian education might be, patterned after the Savior’s example?

Christian Education Is Not Just for Women and Children!

While Jesus appeared to relish times with children, on the road to Emmaus he approached two adults and walked beside them to foster their growth and edification. But there is still a strong bias toward the idea that education is primarily for children. Traces of this are reflected in the etymology of the word pedagogy, which, although it is now used generally to refer to methods of education for all ages, derives (like pediatrician) from paedeia, the ancient Greek word for holistic education of children—specifically, in that culture, boys.^[1] Back in the post–World War II church boom of the 1950s and ’60s, Sunday schools were full of children, and Christian education was largely geared toward them. While this is surely an overgeneralization, a kind of majority view persisted in both Protestant and Catholic congregations that children needed a brief intense indoctrination in the faith so they would grow up in it and adhere to it later in life. Many curricula were developed following the best secular educational models available, to help children learn biblical stories, memorize the most important formulas, including the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and otherwise be introduced to key biblical and theological tenets of their specific church tradition.

Christian education is formation. The word formation is often used in Christian education to signal that, while we come into the world already in relationship with God who made us, our faith and practices are formed or molded by the Christian community around us, along with the workings of the Spirit in us, in a lifelong process of spiritual growth.

Despite this general devaluing of adult education, Sunday school was not always just for children. Pamela cherishes several tiny hand-colored “certificates of merit” from the early 1900s, signed in the elegant, spidery handwriting of the time, commending her great-great-grandmother for diligence in “Sunday School” as an adult. Fortunately, in recent decades, as adult education became a trend in secular educational circles, so “lifelong learning” was reclaimed in Christian education as well. This is the idea behind the use of the word formation for Christian education—that the journey of faith is a continual process of being molded by the Spirit, with the support of the whole Christian community, into “maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). We are being “conformed [formed together] to the image of Christ” (Rom. 8:29, italics added) and transformed (formed and changed) into the image of “the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor. 18); also, Christ is being formed in us (Gal. 4:19). A prominent leader in this reclaiming of lifelong formation, Maria Harris, wrote in 1989:

Education in the church is lifelong. This is too obvious to bear repetition, too obvious until we begin to see how major are the revisions this belief demands in our educational curriculum. Still, education in the church as lifelong must be our starting point because the pastoral vocation is lifelong. For a people called by the gospel in baptism and confirmation, there is no time in our life when that call ends. Our education into it is ongoing and ought to become increasingly richer and more complex as we develop through adulthood.^[2]

In previous generations, Christian education was also considered one of the few proper domains for women in church leadership. While men (both ordained and lay) held roles in church governance, women were assigned to the kitchen, the Sunday school, the nursery, and their own ladies’ circles, which were mainly dedicated to socializing, cooking and sewing, and ladylike forms of community service. Since it was the domain of “second-class” members, accordingly, Sunday school and other forms of Christian education were low on the priority list for those who determined budgets. Women interested in full-time ministry as a vocation were steered in the direction of education as an acceptable calling, even as they were steered away from ordination and other forms of church administration, preaching, and leadership.

Some Fundamentals from Psychology and Educational Theory

Beginning with theologian/psychologist James Fowler in the 1980s,^[3] Christian educators and pastoral theologians began to realize the importance of “human development” to understanding persons’ growth in faith. Drawing from psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories of cognitive development and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s “eight stages of man,”^[4] Fowler identified five “stages of faith” across the life span, in which different modes of thinking at different ages influence both the form and the content of individuals’ faith—defined as “our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relations that make up our lives.”^[5] Christian educators realized that learning could be enhanced by appropriate attention to the different ways in which persons learn at different ages or levels of maturation, and it is their task, at least in part, to help facilitate growth in faith in age-appropriate ways. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to rehearse all the details of developmental theory, key moments of growth—including growth in the brain itself—determine a child’s and adult’s capacity literally to put two and two together. Infants’ learning is “preverbal,” acquired primarily through bodily sensations. Toddlers and very young children tend toward “magical thinking,” in which wishes and fantasies are difficult to distinguish from reality. School-age children become very adept at “concrete” thinking, in which facts, “true stories,” and rules become prominent. Abstract thinking, however, does not fully come on board until adolescence. Much of what we may take for granted as religious beliefs and ideas, because they are in the realm of spiritual or theological propositions, make absolutely no real sense to a child before the age of twelve or so.

Human development and faith: Christian educators recognize that just as our growth across the lifespan falls into certain recognizable stages or phases, so does our maturation in faith. Education and formation therefore cannot be “one size fits all,” and Christian education is not only for children and youth, but should be considered a lifelong endeavor.

As an example, if we say to five-year-old Dylan that “Jesus died for your sins,” he may very well believe Jesus died (probably sometime just last week) because Dylan hit his little brother! While in our mature abstract thinking, we might yet be able to turn that around into a workable theological proposition, the child is not left with reassurance of God’s grace, but with the possible fear and guilt that he personally killed Jesus. He’s not sure who this Jesus is anyway. He’s not so sure about what death means; he never met this “Savior,” who is no more real to him than a character in a storybook; and the resurrection must seem mostly like the experience of “dying” after five attempts to get to the next level on a video game but then, in about twenty minutes, getting a new set of “lives.” This is why so many children’s sermons can be more enlightening, or at least entertaining, for the adu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• On the Road: Practices as Theology, and Theology as Practice
• Setting Hearts on Fire: Practices of Proclamation
• Stewards of the Mysteries: Practices of Worship
• Companions in Healing: Practices of Pastoral Care
• Companions in Telling the Story: Practices of Christian Education
• Called to be Servants: Practices of Leadership
• Epilogue: Journey into Joy