From Generation to Generation

The Adaptive Challenge of Mainline Protestant Education in Forming Faith

Foster

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894599
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Mainline Protestant congregations face a profound adaptive challenge. In the midst of significant social, cultural, and technological change, the denominations they represent generally abandoned a view of education capable of maintaining and renewing their faith traditions through their children and youth. New curriculum resources and innovative pedagogical strategies appropriated from the marketplace of religious education options have not met the challenge.A transformation of consciousness is required in congregations seeking a future through their children. It involves the exercise of an ecclesial imagination to reclaim a view of education rooted in the revitalization of their religious traditions in the past and re-envisioning the congregation as a catechetical culture of faith formation.

Chapter One

Education in Forming Faith

Let’s say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross?

—John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Introduction

Themes in this chapter are rooted in an assumption I bring to any discussion of education. We are relational creatures. This assumption also grounds the Christian life. We are loved by God. In turn we are to love God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves. That is the basic structure of the covenants of Abraham and Moses that bound our ancestors and still binds us in relationship to God and each other. The implication, as the writer of the letter to the Ephesians suggests in his vision of the church, is to live as “members one of another.”1 The consequence is that even if we try to separate ourselves from any contact with others, we still know ourselves primarily in relation to the others from whom we have distanced ourselves.

I build on this assumption to explore a way of thinking about education, particularly the education of congregations in forming (which includes transforming) Christian faith and practice. This discussion establishes a framework through which I will then seek in the next chapter to explain why the old Protestant mainline denominations after the 1960s abandoned education as a means of assuring their own futures. In subsequent chapters, I will then explore clues to the adaptive challenge this action created for their contemporary congregations.

The Impulse in Communities to Educate

In The Creative Word, Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann explores sources to the persistence of Jewish community identity through many centuries. He wonders why the children of Abraham and Sarah could survive repeated experiences of war, exile, and persecution. He concludes their continuing viability as a community could be traced to a persevering commitment to education.2 An early description of that commitment is found in the sermon Moses delivered as the Israelites prepared to cross the Jordan River into the long awaited Promised Land. Its key elements, found in the sixth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, not only continue to influence contemporary Jewish life and practice: they speak to the current situation of Christian congregations as well.

The impetus to education for the writer of this ancient sermon originated in the desire of the Israelite tribes “that all would go well” for them in this new land “flowing with milk and honey” so they might “multiply greatly.”3 The inference, of course, was to their desire to become a great nation. The sermon did not outline a military, political, or economic strategy for the realization of that dream. Instead, Brueggemann argues that it emphasizes a subtle and radical insight about community and nation building; namely that any community wanting “to last beyond a single generation must concern itself with education.”4 His insight, I contend in the pages that follow, is as true for contemporary congregations and their denominational traditions as it was for a confederation of Hebrew tribes several thousand years ago. That means we need to be clear about what we mean by education.

Since the distinctive feature of the ancient community of Israel was its relationship to God, its education necessarily centered on learning to obey the commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”5 The practice of obedience could not be assumed or left to chance. It had to be cultivated through intentional effort. About what that effort might entail, the sermon is quite specific. If the Israelites were to succeed in this adventure of community building, they needed to keep the words of the commandments in their hearts. They could do this by:

• Reciting them to their children;
• Talking about them at home and away from home;
• Wearing signs of the commandment on their hands and emblems of their bond to God on their foreheads;
• Posting them on the doorposts of their homes;
• Exercising the commandments, decrees, and statutes of God in their relationships with their neighbors and the activities of daily life;
• And telling the stories of God’s liberating activity to answer their children’s questions about why they had to do these things.6

These ancient instructions suggest a way of thinking about education still relevant in our own time. They distinguish its outcomes for learning, for instance, from the processes of enculturation that are the object of anthropological study and those of socialization explored by sociologists. The difference, as historian Lawrence Cremin emphasizes, is that families, congregations, communities, and nations through education intentionally seek to “transmit or evoke” the “knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities” deemed central to the continuing vitality of their identity and character.7 Again this does not happen by chance. It involves deliberate decisions about what needs to be learned, how, when, and where. It establishes systematic patterns of teaching and learning for increasingly complex ways of knowing, doing, and being. It is embedded in a web of agencies that sustain and reinforce these patterns of teaching and learning from one generation into the next.8 These terms highlight the purposefulness of education, but they do not yet clarify what it does. Again in the sermon of Moses we may find clues to its distinguishing features. I focus attention on three: its function, aims, and agencies.

The Function of Education

Brueggemann identifies two functions of education pertinent to our discussion. In the first, education is concerned with maintaining the identity and character, practices and traditions of a community over time in and through those who identify with them. Through education a community discerns a course for its future in the resources of its heritage.9 This is as true for congregations and their denominational traditions as it was for ancient Israel. Each needs “enough continuity of vision, value, and perception”10 to link the generations. This means the future of a community’s identity depends significantly on the extent to which successive generations identify with the traditions, values, and practices they receive even as they, in turn, renew and hand them on to the generations that follow.

In congregations and their denominational traditions, however, the practices of forming faith in one generation for the sake of the generations that follow are not enough to ensure their long term future. A second function of education is also required. If the faith of a congregation and its members is to be relevant to the challenges of ever changing situations and always new circumstances, its education requires “enough freedom and novelty”11 to survive in and be pertinent to the impact of those challenges on their future. This suggests that the maintenance of congregational identity, character, and practice can only be sustained if it is renewed through the regeneration of the faith of its members in each passing generation. Forming faith in congregations can only be renewed, consequently, as it is also transformed.

This insight I encountered most clearly in Robert MacAfee Brown’s discussion of the dynamics at work in the practice of faith.12 Brown seeks to understand how faith shapes our identities and forms our commitments. As he probes how faith works, he observes it has to do with something that happened in the past that we must “put to some use.” This insight may be stated another way: something happened in the past that makes a claim on us that we must somehow acknowledge and engage. He notes we typically associate that “something” with a past event through which we begin to understand who we are and what we are to do with our lives. For all of us an important event influencing how we understand ourselves is the occasion of our births. It makes a difference whether we were born during the depression or the Vietnam War or after 9/11 because each event distinctively shapes the conditions through which we form our perceptions of and responses to the challenges we face daily.

For the followers of Moses, that event in the past was the liberating activity of God freeing them from the oppression of slavery, leading them through the chastening experience of the wilderness, and bringing them into the Promised Land. For most Americans, that event was the establishment of a new community, indeed, a new nation, freed from dominating religious and political institutions. For Christians, that event (or more properly, cluster of events) is centered on Jesus of Nazareth. His life, death, and resurrection establish both the purpose and shape of our lives as his followers. That event did not just happen in the distant past. The trajectory of its influence and meaning continues into the present and future as we participate in and extend its traditions and practices embedded in the histories of Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Wesleyan, or Pentecostal communities of faith.

Brown describes the mutuality of transmitting and renewing, forming and transforming faith as the “creative appropriation” of a past that becomes increasingly “open” as we come to know more about it.13 In other words, the practice of faith from this perspective is an inherently educational practice. It relies on continued learning not only in the experience of each of us but also in the experience of our communities and congregations. It emphasizes the mutuality of a community’s quest to form in each successive generation values, commitments, and practices integral to its identity and the transformation of those same values, commitments, and practices in response to our encounters with the redemptive activity of God in our midst.

This is not such a strange insight. We can see this pattern of engagement in our own responses to the stories we have heard about the Christ event. We may have first heard stories of that event as children. Through the years we may have heard those stories many times. At some point a story or group of stories attracts our attention. We read them again and again. We find ourselves thinking about them at odd times of the day. We begin to anticipate the repetition of their increasingly familiar storylines. We ponder what they might be saying to us; how they may be influencing our thinking or our relationships with others. They begin to shape our perceptions and actions. We begin to be more attentive to strangers. We make more frequent and larger contributions to the community food bank. We may discover in our prayers renewed energy and focus. At some point we may find ourselves making a change in the way we prioritize our time and resources. We may not recognize how the content of those stories is beginning to shape what we think and how we act, but as they become increasingly important to us we may find ourselves caught up in acts of creatively appropriating; i.e., internalizing and embodying perspectives, values, and commitments embedded in them. Education in the formation of Christian identity and practice, consequently, is an inherently theological practice. Originating in the human quest to discern, relate to, and understand God, its theological shape is nowhere more evident than in its aims.

The Aims of Education

If the function of education is to ensure the maintenance and renewal of a community through the present and into the future, then its aim or task in Christian communities is to facilitate the learning that fosters faith in the creative and redemptive work of God. The issue is not learning for its own sake, but the learning that cultivates the vitality of the relationship of congregations and their members to the God who calls them into community. We do not have to be taught to learn. From birth we begin to exert our curiosity. We give expression to desires and longings that expand our worlds. We seek connections with purposes and meanings that exceed our understanding. We struggle to make sense of the consequences of our personal and collective actions. Our capacities for self-transcendence lead us to anticipate the mystery associated with the word “God.” Our growing bodies and developing minds provide the impetus for ever new opportunities of learning. To be human is to learn. To learn, in turn, is an adventure of faith. We do not know nor can we fully anticipate the outcomes of our learning.

The learning required for the continuing vitality of the faith of a community or congregation in the creative and redemptive work of God, however, cannot be left to chance. It must be cultivated if its integrity is to persist from one generation to the next. That ancient sermon of Moses to the Israelites highlights three modes of learning relevant to our discussion of education in forming faith. Each emphasizes a different impetus to and readiness for learning in each of us. At the same time each evokes a different responsiveness on the part of the educating community for our learning. And yet, they are necessarily interdependent in the mutuality of forming and transforming personal and community faith. These three modes of learning may be described as developmental learning, practice learning, and discovery learning.

Developmental learning. During the last half-century and more a number of scholars and researchers directed our attention to the patterns of developmental learning. Each focuses their attention on some cluster of “developmental learning tasks” in the human experience. Among the more prominent of these researchers, Erik Erikson explores the development of our ego-identities, Jean Piaget our cognitiv...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Education in Forming Faith
• Chapter 2: What Happened? An Adaptive Challenge!
• Chapter 3: Learning in Faith Formation
• Chapter 4: Congregations as Catechetical Cultures
• Chapter 5: Educational Imagination in Adaptive Change
• Bibliography