It takes practice
In my first call as a pastor, I inherited a confirmation program in which 25 teenagers would sit in a church basement with no windows for three hours weekly and silently fill out workbooks while a few church elders supervised them. After two years of this disciplined, disembodied study these future leaders of the church were confirmed. Halleluiah! But despite knowing how many Midianites Gideon smote at Moreh, most of these kids never found their way back to church. Brett Webb-Mitchell, a professor of Christian nurture at Duke Divinity School, helps us understand why.
Christian education, Webb-Mitchell argues, is not simply Sunday school, catechetical instruction or memorization. It is also made up of worship, prayer, healing services, ritualistic rubrics, potluck dinners, coffee and juice hours, social-justice activities and even administrative board meetings. For various reasons the church has grown too disembodied, too cognitive, too solely intellectual in its teaching.
In a long discourse on the history of philosophy, Webb-Mitchell outlines the systematic compartmentalization and individualization of our Christian lives. First Kant was to blame, then Descartes, then Freud. Educators like John Dewey also make the list. The net effect is that Christian education has been compartmentalized into "Sunday school," where the teaching is often lifeless, treating students like piggy banks that need to be filled. It nurtures neither relationships nor community. Webb-Mitchell quotes David James Duncan's novel The Brothers K: "After a hard week of real school, the last thing a person needs first thing on Sunday is some goody-goody mom or dad grilling them on the Sunday school lesson."
