How the Church Can Improve Christian Education, Part 2

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In Part 1 of this limited series on how the Church in America can improve Christian education, I showcased two videos by Sir Ken Robinson, a British education expert who seems to be all the rage among the intelligentsia. Included in that post were two videos, which are important for understanding what follows, so I encourage everyone to watch them, especially the first from RSAnimate.

Okay, now that you’ve watched the video(s)…

Robinson states truths that are quite obvious to anyone who has worked in education. One truth is that all learners are different. Another truth is that nearly all children start out with a capacity for creative problem solving, often exceedingly creative. Combining these ideas, Robinson leans toward the kind of educational theory that asks educators to work harder to differentiate learning in learners. It all comes down to accommodating the learner with as many opportunities for self-direction and self-discovery of knowledge as possible.

But there’s a problem with that philosophy.

Certain kinds of rationalistic knowledge can be arrived at rationally. A great deal of how our world works can be deduced through experience, with a little mentoring added in. This kind of learning style has been advocated for years, going back all the way to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and continuing to the modern day in theorists like John Holt. In short, Robinson advocates nothing new. In fact, that path is well worn in some educational circles.

Christian education, however, can’t be addressed solely through this method. While Romans 1 states that from creation we can deduce some truths about God, we can’t deduce all by observation. General revelation (creation) and special revelation (the Bible, the voice of the Holy Spirit) exist together because of this.

So while it may be possible to observe the world and make deductions about mathematics from it, coming to truths about Christian doctrine requires book learning. At some point, teaching the Christian faith must have some rote element.

That element has been problematic for years, though. Go back a couple centuries and rote knowledge of the Faith was about the only kind one could find. The way we taught our children the Faith felt mostly like a lecture, wherein we drilled the same core truths into everyone. DuncecapFor a long time that method worked, mostly, no matter what Sir Ken Robinson thinks. We did a good job of schooling everyone in basic theology and doctrine.

Somewhere along the line, though, the Church got away from a disciplined methodology for making disciples. Post-19th century, the way we disciple people has become a haphazard mess because we rebelled against any notion of standardizing the way we teach people the Faith. Instead, we’ve left most people to attain depth in the Faith on their own, treating most Christian education as a supplement to what people, even children, are getting elsewhere. The problem is that they are either not getting that instruction elsewhere or the instruction they are receiving is wholly undermining what they should be receiving.

The result? Christians today are staggeringly ill-informed about what they are supposedly to believe about the Christian Faith. When a “mature” Christian can’t lay out a solid presentation of why Jesus is the only way to God, when he or she can’t explain why the doctrine of the Trinity is important, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands. And much of that goes back to a total lack of solid rote teaching.

But poor rote-style teaching is not the only problem. While we may admire Christians of the past for their head knowledge, heart knowledge matters too. And more than that, today’s Christian faces challenges unknown to his ancestors in the Faith, challenges that require bold, creative thinking to resolve.

Learning by rote doesn’t fully work because Christianity is not merely a rationalistic or philosophical exercise. While critical doctrines underlie it, our Faith is not entirely cerebral. Unlike its secular counterpart, Christian education doesn’t come down to knowing what a cosine is or how best to tune a car engine. It’s foundationally relational and spiritual. Adding to that complexity is God’s wisdom in making each of us unique in our spiritual giftings.

That each of us is uniquely gifted to serve the Lord, that each of us has a personal experience of God that must also fit into a corporate understanding of Him rooted in unwavering truths,  presents an enormous educational challenge that dwarfs the challenge Robinson discusses. The problem of education within the Church is so multifaceted that—as I believe—we’ve punted any attempt to make it work at all.

The upshot of the problem in the American Church:

Our people don’t know or understand the basics of the Christian Faith.

Our people don’t know what their personal giftings are.

Our people don’t know how to use their giftings.

Our local church leaders have abandoned their role of helping others to identify their gifts and use them for the building up of the Body of Christ.

Our local church teachers have seen so little advancement in their pupils that teaching becomes a purposeless, dispiriting chore.

Parents in our local churches have no idea how to address the Christian educational needs of their children (and feel even less capable when even the “experts” in the churches achieve such modest results).

Our church leaders address these problems with a “business as usual” approach, even when that approach achieves few results.

Our churches lack a cradle-to-grave plan for education.

A further major hurdle exists, and it’s the backbone of Robinson’s ideas—and a major headache for Christian leaders.

One of the greatest failings of the modern Christian Church, particularly its Evangelical branch, is a wholesale distrust of creative people. We love our doers, our teachers, and our pastors, but someone who creates artworks we may not immediately grasp or who has creative, nontraditional ideas about how to solve pressing church issues gets the evil eye from us. As a result, we’ve driven too many of these folks out of our churches at a time when we desperately need them to help us address needs within the Body in a more proactive way.

Watching Ken Robinson’s explanation of how to right the ship of public education can give us hope. But there’s a gotcha. Robinson’s call for a massively individualized approach to education makes the work of the teacher even more difficult. A 1:1 type of teaching style asks teachers for a huge investment of time to give each student unique direction that best matches that student’s unique gifts.

In light of this, the following questions loom for the Christian Church in America:

Are we prepared to teach a systematic doctrine tailored to a cradle-to-grave plan?

Are we prepared to address the unique needs of each student as God deals with that student individually?

Are we prepared to identify the unique giftings of each student and tailor his or her spiritual direction toward the best use of those gifts within the Body of Christ?

Are we willing to reach out to the creative people we’ve often pushed away?

If we say yes, then we have to be prepared to question every aspect of how we live. If we don’t make the changes to our lifestyles that free us to dedicate the time and energy needed to fix these problems, they will continue to fester, undermining the growth and the effectiveness of the Church.

The secular world WILL address those problems in time. The question is whether the American Church values educating its own as much as the secular world does.

Stay tuned to the next post in this series for solutions.

The complete series:

How the Church Can Improve Christian Education, Part 1

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Many readers know that my degree is from Wheaton College in Christian Education. Today, Wheaton labels that same degree Spiritual Transformation. While that’s a spiffy title, it muddies what we’re doing. We ARE educating the next generation. While the goal may be spiritual transformation, unless we comprehend that this is an educational issue, we’ll drift aimlessly and fail to reach that lofty goal.

I like the RSAnimate videos online and have watched them all over the course of this last year. One featuring Sir Ken Robinson surfaced recently, and it addressed the increasingly flawed way we educate the next generation. Robinson also spoke at a TED symposium a few years back, and that presentation is equally fine (and funny). I HIGHLY encourage you to watch both videos (or at least the RSAnimate one), as this limited series of posts will riff on Robinson’s ideas:

Good stuff, eh?

I believe that the Christian Church in America suffers from the same failed outcomes in education, and I think the failure of our general educational systems contributes to the failure of Christian education. In addition, Christian education suffers from its own, peculiar failures.
Here is my take on what is not working:

1. We’re not transmitting basic Christian doctrine to our people.
2. We’ve undervalued and stymied the talents of the more artistic members of our churches.
3. As a result, we don’t connect creative vision with the Gospel, nor do we allow that vision to inform the practice of our doctrine.
4. As a result, we’ve fallen into patterns of operation that no longer work within a changing culture.
5. Because our patterns of operation are less effective and are met with increasing hostility (because they are deficient), we’ve adopted a bunker mentality.
6. Our bunker mentality further alienates the culture at large.
7. That alienation results in a continued loss of existing churchgoers and potential converts, and the people we do manage to keep are less deep in the faith because no greater vision exists.

Let’s start with the most pressing problem: The people in the seats don’t know the basics of the Christian faith.

If you disagree with that statement, I would ask you to ask the average Christian two questions (one simple and one more complex):

1. Why is Jesus the only way to God?
2. Why is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity essential?

I believe that many Christians would flail at the first question and punt the second entirely. Sadly, I think a lot of Christians aren’t entirely convinced that Jesus is the only way to God, which is why that question becomes so damning when asked. And consider that we tend to take for granted that Christians should “just get” the Trinity by some kind of happenstance spiritual osmosis, and it becomes all the more obvious why that question leads to blank stares.

I believe that the greatest educational failure in the American Church is the lack of a comprehensive cradle-to-grave educational plan. This occurs because too many churches have made happenstance spiritual osmosis the primary basis of their educational philosophy.

One verse may be the culprit here:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
—Philippians 1:6

A misguided understanding of that verse is probably the greatest reason that so many churches have an educational philosophy of “throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.” And folks, that chancy philosophy is making us stupid, barely there Christians.

The other day, the Holy Spirit walloped me with a passage in Acts that opened up the reason why we can’t rely on happenstance spiritual osmosis as an educational philosophy:

But it was not long before a violent wind (called a northeaster) swept down from the island. The ship was caught so that it couldn’t face the wind, and we gave up and were swept along. As we drifted to the sheltered side of a small island called Cauda, we barely managed to secure the ship’s lifeboat. They pulled it up on deck and used ropes to brace the ship. Fearing that they would hit the large sandbank near Lybia, they lowered the sail and drifted along. The next day, because we were being tossed so violently by the storm, they began to throw the cargo overboard. On the third day they threw the ship’s equipment overboard with their own hands. For a number of days neither the sun nor the stars were to be seen, and the storm continued to rage until at last all hope of our being saved vanished. After they had gone a long time without food, Paul stood among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have sailed from Crete. You would have avoided this hardship and damage. But now I urge you to have courage because there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For just last night an angel of God, to whom I belong and whom I serve, stood by me and said, ‘Stop being afraid, Paul! You must stand before the emperor. Indeed, God has given you all who are sailing with you.’ So have courage, men, for I trust God that it will turn out just as he told me. However, we will have to run aground on some island.”
—Acts 27:14-26

The Apostle Paul stands up and gives an encouraging prophetic word: The storm is awful, but not a one of us passengers will die. God will take care of us.

What struck me about that passage is the massive caveat in that final sentence.

Paul’s prophetic word wasn’t going to come true if the ship remained hundreds of miles from shore. They had to get nearer to land. Your ship breaks up in the middle of the sea in a violent storm and people will die. Get closer to land and your chances increase. You have to take some practical steps to see that vision come true. God asks something of the sailors: Get yourself to a place where I can make this happen.

Right now in the American Church, the educational ship is in a storm in open water. We have got to take practical steps to get that ship closer to land. God WILL make Philippians 1:6 happen, but we can’t be stupid about getting the Church to a place where He can.

In the next posts in this series (2, 3), I’ll talk more about what we can do to improve Christian Education in our churches and what “getting to a place where God can make it happen” looks like. Stay tuned.

The complete series:

Equipping the Saints: How to Have a Sweet Hermeneutic

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The Bible, old school style...Apologies for being away for more than a week. Thanks for being a reader and for hanging in there through blog hacks and workloads.

As we start winding down this look at equipping the saints, let’s talk about hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is NOT the fan club of the father on The Munsters. It’s the theory behind how to properly interpret. While the word hermeneutic may be associated with other fields of study, it gets its workout in the field of interpreting the Bible. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today, biblical hermeneutics.

If you’ve been a Christian long enough, you’ve encountered both good and bad biblical hermeneutics. The classic example of bad hermeneutics is the fellow who decides he wishes to hear from God and chooses as his oracle to let his Bible flop open, followed by him blindly dropping a finger on the open page. The first verse that comes up is Matthew 27:5, wherein Judas hanged himself. Unnerved, the guy lets his Bible flop and ends up on Luke 10:37, where Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.” In a near panic, the guy tries one last time and comes up with John 13:27, which admonished, “Whatever you are going to do, do quickly.”

We laugh, but I’m certain each of us has encountered this kind of application and  interpretation of the Bible, not just by those new to the Faith but also by teachers, pastors, preachers, and leaders who should know better.

If we are going to truly equip a generation to be strong in the knowledge of the Bible, we have to have a solid biblical hermeneutic.

Here are my top ten suggestions on how to interpret the Bible properly:

1. Always ask the Holy Spirit to be your guide. One of the reasons the Holy Spirit was given by God is to help us understand God’s words to us. If we ask God for His Spirit’s guidance in understanding the Bible, He will be faithful to provide it. Not enough of us make this plea, and it is one reason why we have so many weird Bible interpretations out there.

2. Let the Bible interpret the Bible. The Bible is a coherent whole. God is wise enough to know how it comes together, so He can help us see that unity. If we come to the Bible with an agenda or with the latest nonfiction title from Oprah’s book club in our other hand, we’re going to let those doing the interpreting for us. So many people fall down at this stage that I would advise “Let the Bible interpret the Bible” be stamped in large letters on every Bible printed.

3. The Bible has two distinct testaments, Old and New—and that’s for a very good reason! Whenever New Testament Christians begin to read the Bible through Old Testament lenses rather than New, error crouches at the door. It boggles my mind how many Christians attempt to resurrect Old Testament practices and make them “new,” even though those old practices were fulfilled in Christ. More often than not, the Church suffers for this, as people attempt to live by the Law and not by the Gospel of Grace. If I had my way, every new Christian would spend a full year in study of the New Testament book of Galatians before ever being allowed to read one page out of the Old Testament. Whenever I hear a teaching meant for the Church today and it spends the vast majority of its time in the Old Testament, the flags go up. Be very careful on this, as confusing the Testaments makes for deadly cases of damnable legalism. This is not to say that the Old Testament does not speak to modern Christians, only that what it says must be interpreted through the reality of the Gospel and the Kingdom of God as revealed through Jesus.

4. Thou shalt not build entire systematic theologies on a single verse. If God really wants to command us to do something or show us how to live, He’s going to do so more than once. Some of the wackiest things Christians do comes from some leader’s weird interpretation of a single verse, usually taken out of…

5. Context, context, context! When verses are taken out of their full context, they can be made to say anything. Witness again the poor fool with the floppy Bible and errant finger. Context is king! I recent had the displeasure to hear someone talking about Jesus’ sole “command to tithe” in Matthew 23:23, as it seems that Jesus is praising the Pharisees for tithing their spices. That this passage occurs within a litany of condemnations Jesus calls down on the heads of those same Pharisees, the poster children for doing it wrong and missing the real heart of the Lord, should give us pause. Context begins with the whole of Scripture and trickles down through the testaments, the books, the chapters, and the scenes (but never to the verses alone). I would even offer that for some books of the Bible context should never go lower than the whole book. The epistles (letters of Paul and other writers) of the New Testament are meant to be read in their entirety and should be understood in that larger context.

6. Beware of numbers. I don’t mean the book of Numbers in the Old Testament, but any teaching that makes enormous use of the numbers of the Bible. Some of the worst theology, especially related to end times predictions, has been concocted by people attempting to string together numbers in the Bible. For instance, I have heard numerous teachings over the years on the “number of completion in the Bible,” with the only problem being that each teacher chose a different number: 3, 7, 10, 12, 40, 100, 1,000, and 144,000.  Such exercises are more likely manmade than God-inspired, as tossing around numbers is a sure way for a “Bible expert” to appear “deep.” Numbers are what they are, and attempts to read too much into them can lead to some seriously goofy teachings, especially when trying to make them say something within a teaching agenda. (A glaring exception to this is the Trinity, but even then, I would be wary of always associating anything with the number 3 back to God. I mean, Paul asked God three times to take away his thorn, but I don’t think I’d carve in stone that he was addressing a different person in the Trinity each time!)

7. While the Bible is timeless, culture is not. This can be a fine line for people and creates the most arguments as to WHAT GOD REALLY INTENDS™. For the serious Bible student (which, honestly, should be every Christian!), it pays to understand the cultural context of the times in which the Bible was written. When God says he doesn’t want trees near His altars (Deut. 16:21-22, and elsewhere), it pays to understand why, especially if we wish to see if that reasoning is based in culture. When Paul tells the Corinthians that women should always wear a head covering when praying and prophesying, is His admonition culturally mandated or not? Why? (Evidently, we think it is a product of the times, since rarely do I see today’s women covering their hair in church as commanded by Paul.)  Be very careful, though, to avoid confusing timeless truths with cultural ones, as that confusion is often used by moral relativists to justify all manner of sin. Such sins as lying, pride, and sexual perversion are always wrong, no matter the cultural context, and the Bible will always bear this out.

8. No matter who a Bible teacher might be, always be discerning. Paul praised the Bereans for not taking him strictly on his word, factchecking him against the Scriptures (Acts 17:10-11). That kind of healthy skepticism is missing in the lives of too many Christians, as millions readily fail to check if what they are hearing is really true. Honestly, in my own life, I start with the assumption that what I am hearing is suspect until proven otherwise by the dual testimony of the Holy Spirit and the fullness of the Scruptures, and that reasoning has not failed me in nearly 35 years of walking with the Lord.

9. Use multiple translations of the Bible when examining passages, especially ones that are not immediately clear. Some Bible companies offer parallel Bibles that include multiple versions/translations side by side for comparison. Chronological bibles are fascinating tools to help readers see how books like the Psalms or Jeremiah fall into the context of books like Kings or Chronicles. The Amplified Bible is an interesting attempt to expand the meaning of certain Hebrew and Greek words and phrases (though I would NOT recommend it as an everyday reading Bible), which can help illuminate the text. I believe that English-speakers will be well off with a literal translation (such as King James, New American Standard, or English Standard versions), a dynamic equivalency (which tries for literal phrasing, if not word for word—the New International Version is fine), and a paraphrase (such as the New Living Translation or the NT-only New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips).

10. Don’t just read the Bible, study it! And use good reference books, too. A devotional reading of the Bible will not help us understand it fully. Such a technique may help us find comfort in its words, but there is much that lies below the surface, and it pays to root out the deeper truths. Many good reference books exist (I use a bunch of old, dusty ones that are no longer in print, but excellent contemporary helps are available), so do a little comparative shopping and talk with people whose spiritual lives you wish to emulate. I’m sure they can recommend books that can help them. (One newer book I recommend on this topic of proper hermeneutics is How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart.) Every student of the Bible should have a good concordance (for looking up words in verses), Bible dictionary, and Bible commentary (or three) as a means for study.

These ten suggestions do not comprise the whole of good hermeneutical technique, so I would encourage you to delve deeper into the topic of how to properly read and interpret the Bible. With so many bad teachers and preachers out there today, wisdom dictates that being properly equipped demands more of us than simply nodding our heads in unison to whatever some guy with moussed hair, brilliant dentition, and a Brooks Brothers suit tells us to believe.

Finally, why did I choose to label this post “How to Have a Sweet Hermeneutic”? Because when we truly know how to handle God’s word correctly, we’ll enjoy this:

How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!
—Psalms 119:103

And in the end, isn’t that what every believers truly desires?