A Bag Full of Wet Tribbles

A couple weeks back SF Gate columnist Mark Morford wrote an op/ed piece called “American Kids, Dumber than Dirt” in which he quotes a longtime teacher friend as saying that kids today are stupid to the point of verging on inert:

It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

I know that I’m perpetually saddened (yet oddly amused) by what people don’t know. And that’s not in some kind of snobbish way. Watching a high school graduate grossly mis-tally a simple three item receipt from a restaurant makes me wonder how such a lapse can exist.

You long-time readers know that I have a degree in Christian Education and know all the educational theorists. You know that I homeschooled up until this fall. You also know my child is in public school right now. You know that I believe that no educational system is perfect.

But as much handwringing goes on today about education, I keep returning to one inescapable truth:

Kids are only as smart as their parents are.

The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, and in most cases today, a lot closer to the trunk than some would like. A classroom (and a home?) full of dunces... But when it comes right down to it, smart parents have smart kids—no matter what kind of education (public, private, or homeschooled) their children receive—because the parents themselves value education and pursue it in their own lives.

If the parents of a child are about as sharp as a bag of wet tribbles, then how can we expect the child to exceed the parent? That rarely, if ever, happens.

We expect most homeschoolers to be winners of spelling and geography bees, but look at the parents in those cases. They’re engineers, scientists, academics—the national brain trust, in other words. The only way they’re going to turn out a dim bulb is if they give birth to a brain-damaged kid. And even then, that’s going to be the brightest brain-damaged child of the lot.

But even when it comes to homsechooling, the weak link in the chain is the parent. A parent with smarts that rate a 6 on a scale of 10 is probably not going to teach their kids to a level 8 or higher. Why? Because that parent will be uncomfortable exceeding his or her own knowledge. This leads to what is known as the law of diminishing returns.

Parents are never going to feel adequate to teach their kids to the limits of their parental smarts—ever. That truth wipes out most distinctions of public, private, and homeschool. As much as a we’ve castigated public schooling, smart parents who put their kids in public school are not going to turn around when that kid is eighteen and find a numbskull. This truth works in the opposite, as well. If parents can barely tally three lines on a restaurant bill, why should we expect their children to? Yet we’re perpetually astonished by the seeming ignorance of youth today.

“But Dan,” you say, “isn’t your blog about the Church in America? How does this fit with your theme?”

If we wonder why the youth of today can’t theologize their way out of a damp paper bag, we have to look at the parents.

Christian parents suffer from a few maladies that make them inadequate to the task of teaching their children about the Lord:

They’ve been told that they are inadequate for the job… – This same instructor superiority afflicts parents in all types of learning environments. The educational elites turned up their noses at the bourgeois attempts of parents to teach their own children and slapped their knuckles with a mighty big ruler in the process. And just as it afflicts the public and private school systems, it afflicts Christian education.
…so as a result, parents have abandoned their role in education – This is not only the parents’ fault for being weak-willed and lazy in their children’s Christian education, but also the willingness of most church people to treat the educational staff at their churches like divine oracles who can do no wrong. Worse, those so-called oracles believe the hype and even fan it into flame. That’s got to stop, on all counts.
We’ve made the Faith either too complex or too rudimentary. – It seems we can’t find the balance. We either make the faith into an intellectual exercise of splitting infralapsarian and amyraldian hairs (or whatever esoteric argument floats your ark) or we make it a brain-dead exercise in being nice to people. Well, shame on us—all of us. So parents think they either have to possess a seminary degree or else they think they can skate because there’s nothing to “this Christianity thing.” Either mentality jumps the educational tracks.

So how do we get parents into the right mindset and smarts-set to do this important job?

We emphasize the importance of the work—and our willingness to help. It seems to me that part of the problem of Christian education today stems from either asking for the world of parents or asking nothing at all. We need to find a solid middle ground. But more than that, churches need to understand that they must partner with parents to ensure the next generation gets some theological smarts. Not by being condescending. Not by dumping all the load on parents. Not by pointing a rifle at anyone’s head. But by walking alongside parents and helping them learn how to teach their own kids. (I’ve long contended this should be the primary role of the youth minister!) The Christian education conducted by the church should always be viewed as a gap-filler, not as the primary source of education. That’s the parents’ job.
We teach the parents what they need to know. As I’ve noted, kids will only be as smart as the parents. If the parents can’t grasp the atonement or what it means to die to self, there’s not a chance their kids will. If the parents won’t talk about those topics outside church (where the greatest growth occurs), their kids won’t hear it. Churches, this is your core emphasis in Christian Ed: Instilling a solid Christian worldview and theology in your adults, particularly those adults with children.
We set attainable educational goals. Every child the age of seven should know why it was necessary for Jesus to come. That should be right on their lips if asked. Littler ones should at least know who Jesus is. A solid Christian curriculum should not only repeat the basics at every age level, but also add onto the previous age level. There’s no reason our teens can’t be asked the differences between the different views on the atonement. Or to explain covenant theology. Or to be able to stand up and expound a rational pneumatology. (In my Lutheran catechism, I got a one hour grilling on theology in a private session with the pastor and youth leader.) But to get there, set appropriate, attainable goals.
We work to counter culture. Our society is in the brink of disaster with our busyness. Sadly, modern Evangelicalism contributes to our harried schedules by adding more and more things we MUST do that, in the end, aren’t necessary. Educating the next generation about the Lord is about as necessary as it gets. Getting your kid into a time-intensive soccer program that will score them a spot in an Ivy League college DOES NOT MATTER ETERNALLY. Yet this is what too many Christian parents want. A recent Barna poll, one of the most disturbing I ever saw, showed that Evangelical parents thought getting their kids into elite colleges outweighed whether those same kids knew Jesus Christ or not. God help us! We have to start demolishing these strongholds that entrap us if we’re to be a vital Church.
We stop the school choice derangement syndrome. Homeschooling parents must desist in their schismatic, judgmental, and outright wicked accusations against non-homeschooling parents. This is not just an issue of “secular” education. If we wish to utterly negate the truths of the Gospel in front of our children and nullify Christlikeness in them, then by all means, let all sides on the school choice issue treat each other like vermin. That’ll teach the little ones the right people to hate and for the correct reasons. We all know that’s why Jesus came, right?

So yeah, it IS all about the parents. If we want smart kids, we better make smart parents. And there’s no better time to start on that path than today.

Mastering the Faith

Teaching it old school... Today, my son got his report card from our online school. Most of us are used to an “A-F” grading system, but this school used “M” for mastery as their highest grade. Included in the idea of mastery is that he fully understood the topics at hand and worked at them until perfect (or very close). A student couldn’t move on to the next course until he mastered the previous one.

We completed the basic requirements plus a little bit more, so my son got straight M’s. Sounds like a hum, I guess—”Mmmmm….” A happy sound, for sure.

Can you imagine what our Christian education in our churches would look like if we taught the Christian faith to mastery?

Actually, I can. And I don’t understand why we don’t teach the principles of the faith that way.

I graduated from Wheaton College in 1992 with a degree in Christian Education. My profs were some of the smartest and most innovative guys to tackle that subject who ever walked the face of the planet, but we never talked about teaching the faith to mastery.

I believe part of the problem comes from an unwritten rule in too many of our churches that we can’t make people hew to a certain standard against their wills. Nor do we want to make distinctions between successful disciples and unsuccessful ones. In some ways, Christian education in American churches resembles a politically-correct version of Little League, where—despite how many runs one team scores—every game is played to a tie and everyone wins.

But that’s a lie. Unfortunately, we believe it to the core of our educational processes in the American Church and its damning all of us to a lowest common denominator belief. Any off-handed perusal of any of the Barna Group’s stats on discipleship and belief in this country should show us how corroded simple knowledge of the Faith has become.

It didn’t used to be that way, though. A couple hundred years ago, even the rankest sinner in a church could give you an acceptable outline of the tenets of Christianity. Most people could recite a basic systematic theology, even if they weren’t regular attenders.

Contrast this with today. I once offered to teach a basic theology course (though I was told I couldn’t use the word theology in the course title—too off-putting, too high and mighty) at a large, fast-growing church I attended. The class was one of about a half-dozen offered on Wednesday night.

Though new converts comprised a healthy portion of the church, only five people attended my class. The vast, vast majority went to the associate pastor’s teaching on how to maximize the power of the Holy Spirit in one’s life. Me, I started off with more elementary teachings like “Who is God? What is He like?”

So we tramped through ten weeks of courses about the basic tenets of Christianity, and though all the students came up to me after class and told me how much they appreciated learning the basics and my gentle way of teaching them, I finished that course with one student left. The others had drifted into the “Walking in the Power of the Holy Spirit” class.

As the last class ended, I remarked to my lone remaining student that I’d not seen her in church before. That’s when she told me she didn’t even attend this church. She went to another church nearby. She’d visited once, saw the class offered, and thought it a good idea.

Great for her, but I’ll tell you, I was beating my breast when she walked out of the classroom.

I look back at that class and I see the microcosm of the problem. We’ve got nothing in place to teach to mastery. We encourage people to jump into topics they can’t handle because we “sexy” up those teachings. It’s the age old story of handing someone a Bible and them saying, “Cool. When are we going to study Revelation? All that Armageddon stuff rocks!”

Is it any wonder that people aren’t growing in our churches? How can they when there’s no comprehensive, cradle-to-grave educational strategy? (What church anymore even has a Christian Education Director?) We can’t begin to talk about mastery because we can’t get the basics into people in a coherent fashion.

In many churches, the bulk of educating adults falls on small groups. I’ve written on this before, but small groups are a terrible way to educate adults. They can be fantastic for relationship building, group worship, and group prayer, but they’re lousy for actually instilling the principles of Christ’s teachings. Most small group leaders themselves can’t articulate a systematic theology, so how can they teach one? This leaves the most educated teachers in the churches, the pastors, out of the educational equation because they’re typically teaching “Gospel-lite” in the Sunday messages so as not to put off the “Seekers.” That’s totally backward.

Before we can begin to teach the tenets of Christianity in our churches, we need to rectify this lack and put a comprehensive educational strategy in place. We need to

Identify gifted teachers in our churches.
Ensure those teachers know the Faith enough to teach it. (Pastors, this is your primary audience for teaching, your identified teachers within the congregation.)
Create a cradle-to-grave educational strategy that teaches an age-appropriate overview of Christianity’s principles “from milk to meat.”
Weekly teach that strategy so that all ages within the church receive the same basic teaching. This allows parents to know what their children learned because they received the same age-appropriate teaching.
Teach to mastery. People don’t move onto the next class unless they can show mastery of the material. This method may mean that primary teaching occurs in classes rather than from the sermon messages, but it ensures people get the basics before they move on. And yes, people will need to prove they know and practice the material.
Stress that everyone in the church must participate in the classes as part of his or her membership/affiliation with the church. No one opts out if they wish to receive the benefits of the church Body as a whole. This expectation must be hammered home till it sinks into every person who crosses the threshold of the church building.

Let’s also understand that mere academics and head knowledge aren’t going to cut it. People must be able to combine knowledge with praxis if they’re to prove themselves able disciples.

One of the most intriguing trends in seminaries is the idea that academics cannot trump servanthood. I believe this is a sea change concept that bodes well for the Church in the future. Honestly, what good is a pastor or bishop who may be able to parse every Greek verb known, but who can’t (or won’t) wash the feet of the folks he’s called to serve? So the pastoral intern can tell you the finer points of distinction between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism, but doesn’t that all go out the window if he has a basic contempt for those who don’t?

Some seminaries now require that their students participate in programs geared to evaluating a student’ s ability to serve humbly. Group living practices that serve as testing communities emphasize this new desire to turn out men and women who not only know the material, but live it day in and day out. Kudos for those seminaries who get it! They understand that mastery means developing servants, not academicians.

The final cog in the mastery machine may prove the most difficult to implement, but we must.

No true mastery of the faith exists apart from committed community. Examples of how to live like Christ absolutely require that we be intimately involved in each other’s lives. For growing in Christ must mean that we see each other growing, that we meet together more than one or two days a week, that we see learning as surrounding ourselves with those who get it and live it. It means those with the most finely honed minds and spirits find ways to break the Church out of the hellish culture we’ve wrapped ourselves in, the culture that separates us rather than binds us together. That means rethinking how we work, play, and live in a way that makes community a priority. There can be no shortcuts around community if we wish to achieve mastery.

Jesus is our Master. If we are to be like Him, shouldn’t we be methodically growing into His fullness? How will we if we don’t teach to mastery?

More Cowbell Award V

More Cowbell! I don’t normally begin a week with a More Cowbell Award, but I spent most of last week ruminating on the topic, then spoke to someone who totally agreed with the need to give out an award for this. So the award that no one wants to win returns to smiting duties.

For those following the scorecard, the More Cowbell Award is Cerulean Sanctum’s virtual stoning of stupid, vacuous, and over-the-top trends in modern American Christianity. Previous More Cowbell Awards have gone to the Church Growth Movement, children’s choirs in adult CCM, Christian conspiracy theorists, and Christian adware.

What makes this fifth edition of the More Cowbell Award so unusual is that I have nothing funny to say about the award recipients. Truth is, I’m continually appalled by them. Worse yet, I don’t read a lot of Godbloggers blogging about this issue. And unlike some other More Cowbell Awards, I have professional training and experience that may actually qualify me (GASP!) to speak on the subject.

And what would that subject be?

Well, this More Cowbell Award is given to that sound and fury that signifies nothing, yet is remarkably prevalent in our churches on Sunday, and well known throughout the summer. In other words, the fifth installment of the More Cowbell Award is presented to

Children’s Christian Education Programs
(including Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and Summer Camp)

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Let’s face it: most Christian education programs for kids are little more than babysitting functions wrapped in a Christianized veneer ultimately devoid of the Gospel message.

I don’t know the people designing the curricula used to teach kids about Christ, but all I can say is those folks are doing a horrendous disservice to the parents of those kids and the kids themselves. I used to design curricula for camps and was routinely horrified at the assumptions the curricula designers made about a child’s eternal state.

Somehow we’ve created this sheen about kids that says that all of them are flesh-and-blood Precious Moments figurines. That bedrock assumption fuels almost all learning materials aimed at little kids. But here’s the truth: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Unless someone is born again, they have no relationship with God. Yet all of the Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and Summer Camp curricula I’ve ever come across overlooked that truth and naturally assumed that somehow every kid got magically saved by little fairy evangelists that hovered around their pillows for ten years and whispered the Gospel in their ears.

Is there anything more tragic than a kid who’s heard every “Bible story” in the world, but never once got a real Gospel presentation aimed at their age group? By the time they’re teens, I suspect most kids can recite the stories of David & Goliath, Moses & The Burning Bush, Joseph & His Coat of Many Colors, and any other “X & Y” story we can give them each Sunday, but they don’t know the Lord and they have no idea how to be saved.

Some reading this will yell, “Well, where are the parents?” and that’s a great point. But on the other hand, the parents are assuming their child is getting a “Christian Education” from “Christian Educators,” only to find out too late that this education never went beyond the crayoned picture their child brought home captioned with the message, “God made a rainbow!” God made a hell, too, and we certainly don’t want anyone to end up there.

Too harsh? I think we parents need to get more harsh. Yes, a child may get the Gospel message at home, but until it sinks in and makes a difference in his or her life, I don’t think we should encourage Christian educators to waste time on “Jesus wants me to be good” stuff that has no effect on an unregenerate soul.

When I worked in Christian Camping I automatically tossed all the curricula the camp gave me and went back to a clear presentation of our sin nature, our separation from God, our eternal destiny, Christ’s atoning work, and our need to die at the cross in order to be born again. Anything else was gravy, but at least the kids got the basis of the Gospel.

While we’re at it, let’s also clarify that “Ashley, did you ask Jesus into your heart?” coupled with little Ashley’s head nod does not equate to knowing that Ashley is born again. In fact, what’s the deal in so many churches with cajoling kids into asking Jesus into their hearts? My Bible doesn’t list that as being the mechanism for salvation. We know what the Bible says about leading a little one astray, don’t we? Well, evidently not.

Is it any wonder that 85% of kids drift away from church between the ages of thirteen and sixteen? They’ve been David & Goliath’ed and Noah’s Ark’ed to death, but they never heard about their own need to die at the cross and be born again. Again, am I being too harsh? Well, I double-dog dare you to find any presentation of the Gospel in this popular VBS program. Evidently, asking teens how they feel about Ashton Kutcher is more important than being saved and growing in knowledge of Jesus Christ.

I’m disgusted by the throwaway junk I see kids coming home with from Sunday School. Makes me sick to see the content of the typical VBS program. And don’t get me going on the stuff they teach kids at camp.

Am I the only one that feels this way? I guess I am, because I see little uproar from parents over the vapid Christian education their kids are getting outside the home.