The Ministry of Education

The control of educated clergy and the dominance of certain classic but highly limited forms of doctrine have combined at most times to distance the common people from presuming to have any claim to understand Christianity (John Vincent, ‘People’s Church’, in Willmer ed. 1992:68-9)

Introduction

Some time ago in my capacity as diocesan officer responsible for Lay Education and Training I offered a new five-session course entitled Believing Behaving Belonging. In part it was designed to link in with the appointment of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury and to include along the way an introduction to some aspects of his theological thinking. The course was also intended to offer some fresh avenues of approach to the familiar contents of Christian faith: believing in God, the historical Jesus, the authority of the Bible, Christian lifestyle, the nature of the Church. These ‘fresh avenues’ could best be described as those influenced by post-modern culture and thought, although the term postmodernism was generally avoided in the actual presentation of the material. People were (for the most part fairly gently) challenged to ‘think outside the box’: to try to get under the skin of all-too-familiar Christian beliefs from the point of view of how they might look to people who do not come to them with all the baggage of an inherited church background. At the end of the course, I was surprised to discover that the evaluation sheets returned by the participants (a group of twenty or so people from several church congregations) showed an unusual spread of responses. The question, ‘how would you rate the course overall?’ invites people to respond along a six-point scale from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. I had been accustomed to responses clustering around points 4 and 5, with a few on either side of these. In this case, instead of the more typical pattern, every single response was at either point 3 (fair) or point 6 (excellent). I had never before had such a polarised feedback.

The further comments of participants on the forms backed up this division. Fifty per cent of participants found the course liberating and refreshing, speaking to their condition and their questioning. The other half, while not hostile for the most part, felt uncomfortable; this course was not what they had expected, they feared that if the church ‘went down this route’ it might risk losing its hold on the Gospel as they had always understood it. It seemed to me that this group of twenty people were a microcosm of the church. Today, this is where we stand: the future direction of mission is a disputed issue. Some say, people outside see the church as controlling, authoritarian, pretending to reach out with an open welcome but in reality waiting to suck people in to the ecclesial system, demanding professions of orthodoxy and stifling honest doubt and dissent. They insist that we desperately need a model of mission that escapes from this deadening drive to conformity. Others, however, do not distinguish between the life-giving power of the Gospel and the truth as they have received it. They remain convinced that what has sown, watered and nourished the growth of living faith for them must surely do likewise for others. They are deeply suspicious of ‘revisionism’. And these two positions are held with equal passion. Christian Education in the churches today must facilitate understanding; we need to hear each other and acknowledge why we feel as we do.

At the time of writing, the Church of England is discussing the implementation of an important report, Formation for Ministry in a Learning Church, which proposes far-reaching changes to the design and delivery of education and training for the Church’s ordained and lay ministries as well as for what it calls ‘education for discipleship’. Critics of the Report express a number of concerns. It relies too heavily on a questionable assumption of equivalence between education for ministry and for other professional occupations. It represents a worrying shift towards academic criteria for assessment of knowledge and competence for ministerial practice. It points towards a bureaucratic standardization which reduces the scope for local variation and contextualization of both styles and content of theological education. Although this chapter is not directly concerned with Ordination Training, these three issues are nonetheless relevant to the question of church-based lay theological education. What is such education actually trying to deliver? What models and methods are appropriate for this? And how can this be context-sensitive? Can we, indeed, develop a ‘learning church’ in a way that could address the worrying divergence uncovered so clearly in the feedback responses to my course?

The Purpose of the Ministry of Education

I have deliberately chosen the expression ‘ministry of education’ in preference to the more usual ‘biblical’ term, ‘teaching ministry’. In the New Testament, the lists of ministries given to the church by the Spirit include teaching, notably in Ephesians 4 where teachers appear alongside apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastors. The writer sees these ministries as fleshing out the charismatic endowment of the church for the accomplishment of its mission. The Evangelical tradition in particular has tended to privilege the teaching ministry as the especial domain of those in ordained leadership. But the appropriate term for the creative interaction of teachers and taught must be education. The Ephesians 4 passage supports this with its depiction of the process:

so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ…speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ (Eph. 4 vv. 12b-13, 15).
This is a fitting description of the ‘ministry of education’. For some the term ‘formation’ would be preferable, but although sympathetic to that I want to stay with ‘education’ for now, because the term ‘the ministry of education’ has the merit of also suggesting an organised dimension of church life. Churches are not only engaged in an educative function as a kind of by-product of other activities, an optional extra or a discrete component of a programme. Rather ‘the ministry of education’ looks to the educative purpose of the whole of church life, intertwined with other purposes, because the whole of church life must be oriented to growth in Christian discipleship, as the Ephesians passage depicts it. And the purpose of this ministry must be to determine and seek to deliver what that ‘maturity in Christ’ entails for faith in the contemporary context: which implies a missionary thrust. What is required today in order to be a ‘grown-up believer’ equipped with a Christian faith that can engage with the questions put to it by the world?

Of course, such education must supply basic knowledge about the inherited traditions and content of orthodox doctrinal faith. The problem is that, perhaps because in the past the church has neglected to do this adequately, levels of ignorance are so high that the entirety of a good church educational programme could be taken up with this task alone. However, there is a deeper difficulty in that popular approaches today frequently assume that this delivery of basic information is the whole of what a Christian teaching ministry is about. The typical pattern is, first learn the basics, then put them into practice; first doctrine, then application, or Christian living. The combination of basic, largely uncritically presented teaching about the intellectual contents of faith, followed up by guidance about practice, is very limited in its missionary potential. It can be successfully employed to recruit those people who, for various reasons to do with personality, present stage of life, context and so on are amenable to this approach (like the person who commented that the best thing about the Alpha course was that ‘it makes Christianity so easy to understand’). However, a much greater number of people are left unmoved by it; and even those who are recruited this way need to move on in due course to other approaches unless they in their turn are to end up as part of a church which still cannot really communicate with the world.

At this point some people will object that surely the ‘growing churches’ are the ones that use precisely the methods I am criticising. There is already a body of sociological material studying the patterns of this growth, how it levels off and what happens to people who come to faith within such growing churches as they move on in their personal faith journeys. But the brute fact is that even these growing churches are only contributing to a total ‘reach’ of all churches of no more than 10% of the population, as far as active, practising, churchgoing Christian faith is concerned. Among that other 90% there must surely be plenty of scope for trying other methods! We know that there is widespread ignorance about the Christian faith and alienation from the church as an institution. This is combined with considerable interest in spiritual questions and a chaotic spread of involvements in an enormous variety of alternative spiritual and religious practices and belief-systems, often on a pick and mix basis. It follows from this that those within the church and those new to Christian faith do need a basic acquaintance with the historic contents of that faith. However, they also need the resources for engagement with the social and cultural context. Neglect of this latter requirement will mean that those within the church gradually become more marginalized over against the surrounding culture. Through conservative methods and teachings, a small number are won over newly to Christian faith, but once socialized into it, are themselves cut off from the cultures from which they came in and are no longer able to speak into them.

The conservative view of equipping people with resources for engagement with the current context amounts to apologetics: that means equipping people with arguments designed to demonstrate that the Christian faith provides a superior answer to the questions being raised within the culture. But a genuine missionary engagement with the context also requires a critically reflective ethos and practice within the household of faith itself. The theologian Werner Jeanrond argues that today, appeals to sheer antiquity, continuity of tradition, pronouncements by bishops or synods and so on, can no longer carry weight as criteria of truth for the wider world (Jeanrond, 1994:173). He goes on:

If the Christian tradition is not to end soon altogether, a critical theology and a critical faith-praxis are urgently demanded. While it is the task of theologians to reflect upon the tradition and the present praxis and to develop proposals for a better praxis, it is this actual praxis, i.e. the life and thought of the Christian communities, which decides about the future of Christianity’s role in this world… (op.cit:174).
It is no use just furnishing Christians with watertight reasons why the Christian faith is best; rather the local church needs to work out a critical praxis that wrestles with what it means to realise Christian community and discipleship in its particular context. And this in turn will have repercussions for how the content of Christian belief is understood and professed.

Dave Tomlinson in The Post-Evangelical says that ‘the mind which is being renewed’ will be open, creative, reflective and holistic (Tomlinson, 1995:58-9). The purpose of Christian education will be to facilitate the move from what Scott Peck has called the ‘conformist’ stage of faith through the ‘individualist’ to the ‘integrated’ (op.cit:48ff).  In this model the ‘individualist’ phase is characterised by questioning, rebellion, rejection of the recognized authorities in favour of the drive to discover ‘what I can believe’. ‘Integration’ comes when this quest reaches a kind of resolution-in-tension, characterised by ‘living with questions’. (This is the title of a book by David Jenkins, whose whole approach to doing theology manifests this process very well.) As believers, we embrace the totality of the spectrum of faith with the recognition that the whole picture requires the contribution of partners in dialogue. Rather than being ourselves already in possession of the truth pure and simple, we press ahead towards a completeness that can only ever lie ahead of us. Tomlinson illustrates this by way of a quotation from Walter Brueggemann: ‘Rather than offering truth in the form of a dogmatic grand scheme, we must offer “a lot of little pieces out of which people can put life together in fresh configurations”’.

Models and methods

To help us explore some of the issues further, I will draw upon an interesting book published by Pete Ward when he was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Adviser for Youth Ministry, entitled Growing up Evangelical: Youthwork and the Making of a Subculture. It contains some observations about Christian education that resonate beyond the specific context of evangelical youthwork in which Ward made them. First, Ward argues that educational methods must be responsive to the needs and assumptions of different cultures. Second, Christian education must guard against the creation of a sub-culture essentially designed to keep people safe from the world. Third, churches ought not to use the ideology of ‘family’ as a means of suppressing genuine enquiry and enforcing conformity.

During the 1960s, the evangelical youth organizations (Inter-School Christian Fellowship, Varsities and Public School Camps) attempted to broaden their work from their traditional base of public school and Oxbridge educated young people. They soon found that this demanded different educational methods. But tensions arose over the ‘open-ended’ discussion-type Bible Study groups pioneered in schools by the ISCF. Some VPS staff thought these ‘too vague to be effective…what was starting to emerge from those working in state schools was a shared and more experiential approach to Christian truth’ (Ward, 1996:57-8). The debate centred on young people from non-academic backgrounds, for whom ‘serious problems’ were posed by an approach ‘where a conceptual presentation of the faith has been regarded as the norm’ (op.cit: 60-1). This is far from being only an issue for youthwork. But it has often been an eye-opener to those within the evangelical tradition that this ‘conceptual norm’ is neither culturally universal nor true to the fundamental nature of faith. As Graham Tomlin has put it, speaking of his own early unsuccessful attempts at explaining the Gospel:

These experiences opened my eyes to the possibility that responding to God was not only or primarily a rational and intellectual thing…that it was possible for a person to respond to God in other ways than the primarily rational and cerebral (Tomlin, 2002:97).

Let us reiterate the points drawn from Ward’s analysis and apply them to the ministry of education. First, there is still tension between those who are committed to a model of teaching that emphasises delivery of authoritative information (however accessibly and popularly this is done), and those who promote participative styles of learning drawing on experience. Of course the two need not be mutually exclusive, but there is often anxiety if the group-based discussion style appears not to be delivering the ‘official’ content. For example, in the Church Times for 20 April 2001, reviewing Peter Ball and Malcolm Grundy’s book on the Adult Catechumenate, Stephen Cottrell comments that they seem over-reticent about admitting that group leaders should actually teach anything; ideas for group activities and discussions are fine but what is needed is good, clear presentation of basic Christian teaching.

Next, the preferred models of education in the church tend to correspond to the preferred option for the relationship between the Christian community and the unbelieving world. The implied message is often that Christian teaching is designed to equip the believer for survival in a hostile environment. The aim is to impart to the believer the propositional resources he or she needs in order to be able to give a rational account of what Christians believe. This, of course, is no bad thing. But the underlying motif appears to be ‘keeping safe’. The assumption is that the church culture needs to be one in which people’s questions are satisfactorily answered and an all-sufficient worldview is embraced. This is, in fact, a highly instrumental view of Christian education: in furnishing the tools and instruments by means of which to maintain the social construct of faith against the opposition, it is a kind of technology of Christian identity. It says: here is the material from which you are to construct what you are as a Christian, and you must subordinate your personal inclinations to it. There is a pathology about this that has driven some Christians to acute psychological distress as they have sought to suppress doubts and questions and conform themselves to official expectations.

But the rationale for Christian education is not primarily, ‘what do you need to know in order to accomplish a particular task?’ (for example, holding out as a Christian believer against an unbelieving world, or convincing an unbeliever by force of argument). It is rather, ‘how are you growing in understanding?’, i.e. how are you learning, learning how to think, learning how to be? In more technical terms, Christian education aspires not chiefly to instrumental but to communicative rationality. Communicative rationality facilitates mutual understanding and personal growth; and from this platform it is possible to launch the critical rationality that puts the question ‘why?’ and thereby opens up the possibility of critique and change. It is not possible to do this from the platform of instrumental rationality alone. Christian education should be subversive, i.e. oriented to critique and transformation. It aims to develop the critical rationality that is always exercised in dialogue, not just assertion. It must therefore firstly facilitate communicative understanding. But within the churches, there can often be vested interests in preventing this, arising from fundamental issues of authority and control.

The ‘family ethos’ of church criticised by Ward can militate strongly against the communicative process. ‘Family’ is not in itself a bad or invalid metaphor for church life, but it is not at all suited to become the controlling one. Families can be terminally dysfunctional, especially where honest and open communication and learning from experience are concerned. There is too much opportunity for collusion, concealment and manipulation. ‘Family’ is not the most appropriate carrier of dialogue. As Julie Hopkins puts it:

Truth is best grasped by the weaving together of diverse experience and praxis through a process of dialogue…That process is one of listening honestly and with respect to the other and then through discussion, criticism and evaluation finally reaching a temporary consensus and acting upon it until new experience requiring new criteria engenders further dialogue (Hopkins, 1995:103).
Rowan Williams gives three reasons for the necessity of an educational process in the church that insists on wrestling with difficult issues of doctrine (‘Teaching the Truth’, in John ed. 1992:32f). First, there is no intrinsic merit in ‘keeping it simple’ if the reality is complex. Second, it is patronising to tell someone that something is ‘all they need to know’ and all they need to do is just believe it. Third, doctrine can all too easily be pressed into the service of oppression, and this is far more likely to occur where it is kept in the hands of the elite few.

The style of Christian education needed can be well illustrated from the way in which churches attempt to handle the discussion of moral issues. For example, James Hopewell (1988:144-5) notes the challenge of getting congregations to engage in what he calls ‘corporate moral enquiry’. The implied agenda of church teaching sessions is often that of ‘establishing the right answer’: an approach that Hopewell says has several handicaps, ‘including the implication that some people present, notably the pastor, probably know the answer and that those who do not know it are there to be taught’. In a similar vein, Rowan Williams suggests that ‘a lot of our moral talk goes on as if the world were meekly waiting for Christians to tell them what to do’(op.cit:36-7); whereas the reality is that people are not passively waiting but making moral choices and acting all the time. Consequently, in wrestling together with moral issues we would do better to ‘recognize the reality and dignity of another…in the degree that we pause to look and to hear before we impose solutions, interpretations, condemnations or whatever’. And Richard Holloway (1997:121-2) argues that Christianity ‘will not commend itself to troubled and confused men and women if it hectors and condemns them.’ Rather, ethical learning can only take place as people come together with openness and honesty to share experience as they wrestle with the sources of moral insight, guidance and authority the tradition offers them.

Churches need models for Christian education that encourage questioning, help to foster a critically reflective spirit, and keep open the channels of communication between Christian people and the world context and surrounding cultures. Such models will not enclose believers in their own hermetically sealed world in order to keep them safe, and will refrain from closing off the exploration of issues by resorting to authoritative pronouncement. What kind of educational practices that can be tailored to the needs, aptitudes and cultural styles of local church communities could help to achieve all this?

Doing Theology Together

For the first let us turn to the work of Nicholas Healy in his Church, World and the Christian Life, and the approach he rather technically terms ‘ecclesiological ethnography’. Very much the same thing is described in a more practical way by James Hopewell in Congregation. Ecclesiological ethnography means, of course, ‘writing the church story’. It is about church communities learning theology, in the broadest sense, by telling their story and identifying their culture. In this process the church community comes to an explicit appropriation of truths about its core beliefs, values and cultural styles which have been arrived at over time in a less conscious fashion. Healy quotes Alasdair MacIntyre to develop this point: ‘Over the course of its history…the community develops sets of practices and institutions, rules and dispositions, by which its members live out their commitments. That is, they develop…a concrete identity. This identity provides the kind of normal everydayness, the taken-for-granted set of ways of thinking and acting that those who are new to the tradition must learn in order to be competent members of its community’  (ibid:118). The educative process is designed to make the implicit explicit, and so open the way to critical reflectiveness about it. The moment when, as Ian Ramsey used to put it, ‘the penny drops’ or ‘the light dawns’ is when people can say, ‘so that’s what’s going on…that’s why we do that…that’s what that bit of our church life means…that’s why this works, and that doesn’t…’, and begin to draw conclusions from this learning. In my work with the diocesan Local Ministry Scheme we encourage churches to engage in precisely this type of exercise as a means of opening up fresh pathways to growth.

Healy coins the interesting term ‘ecclesial bricolage’ to describe this relationship over time of the local church to its traditions: ‘The practices and institutions, and the beliefs and valuations that together constitute the church’s present identity are the product of past ecclesial bricolage’ (ibid:110). The idea of bricolage suggests the assembling of assorted bits and pieces in a creative way. Churches by this process construct their own local redaction or edition of Christian faith, culture and praxis. This redaction will take its place within the spectrum of catholic Christianity in virtue of a whole series of family resemblances. What the local church is, and does, and believes, will be recognisable as authentically Christian, but not identical in every particular with each and every other church: the weighting given to different elements in the tradition will vary, as to some extent will what is judged to be essential and what peripheral. For example, some churches have a central place in their faith identity for (say) the transcendent holiness of God, while others form their identity more distinctively around the intimate closeness of the Holy Spirit, or the Kingdom proclamation of Jesus, and so on. In the practice of ‘ecclesiological ethnography’ the congregation identifies this culture and learns from it with consequences for ministry and mission.
 
Hopewell describes a practical process for engaging in corporate learning about an issue that is open to contention within the life of the church: ‘People’s understandings of their own viewpoints are recorded on newsprint. The ideas they offer are set down as statements, not, in the first instance, as arguments. Discussion is directed towards clarification and implication rather than persuasion.’ The process is managed by a moderator. It is more important to get the measure of the range of values held by members of the church than to achieve a consensus at this stage (Hopewell, 1988:145). This type of educational process is difficult, but pays dividends not only in the quality of learning but also in the development of the relational aspects of the church’s life. Dave Tomlinson describes a similar exercise of ‘Communal reflection on issues raised by contemporary culture…allowing Scripture to fund our deliberations…[taking] all care to maintain uncompromised integrity’ (Tomlinson, 1995:136f.)

Learning through decision-making is another approach closely related to the preceding one. Bishop Penny Jamieson describes it in some detail in her book Living at the Edge: ‘I have learnt that in the interchange of ideas the wisdom of the Spirit can be found’ (Jamieson, 1997:41). A group is meeting with a specific end in view, a decision to be made. But rather than treating this as a purely pragmatic exercise, the need for decision is seen as an opportunity for discerning spiritual wisdom in which everyone can learn, over and above the practicalities of the decision itself. Sitting together with the resources of Scripture, tradition and contemporary knowledge at their disposal, people listen for God’s word. She says:

In many ways, I act as a facilitator…It is my job to assist the group members to get in touch with their own religious experience by creating an atmosphere in which they can, at ease, share their faith…It is also clearly my role as spiritual leader, when the group does not seem to be listening either to the wisdom of the Spirit or to each other, or perhaps even to themselves, to recall them to quiet, prayerful reflection… (op.cit:45-6).
But, she insists, this must not be merely a longer drawn out way of ensuring that she gets her own way in the end! (ibid:45-6).

Local cultures will shape the mutual learning context in different ways. Gibbs and Morton over thirty years ago (1971:143-4) expressed the hope that ‘the local church can be the place where people can study the meaning of their life and of their faith today, freely and openly and with the intention of acting as a result of this study’. They acknowledged that this involves asking questions freely and seeking honest answers; but ‘in many churches this is not easy because people think that to ask a question is to confess to doubts of the faith’. Open discussion therefore demands not only a willingness to hear opinions from all sides but also a supportive environment of trustful relationships and the granting of permission to ‘step out of line’. John Vincent gives a lengthy list of ‘characteristics of a people’s church’ as manifested in an urban working-class environment which would create considerable difficulties for many middle-class church cultures (Vincent, ‘People’s Church’, in Willmer ed. 1992:75-7). For example: ‘Events are often spontaneous, quickly arranged, and chaotic…speech between people is almost always stories, anecdotes, gossip concerning experiences and happenings’. Vincent says that people visiting from outside often feel uncomfortable; the gathering seems raw, ragged, and risky. But these are the characteristics the setting needs to have in order to provide a fitting matrix for growth and development in a cultural context which is profoundly suspicious of the formal, the official, the professional and the orderly, which smack of ideological control.

Conclusion

Elizabeth Varley (Varley, 1993:72-3) lists six types of engagement with the faith of the church community that might be practised in the ministry of preaching; but they could well be applied across the range of educational activity. In ascending order of critical potential, they are as follows:

·Collusion. Here the teaching is designed to be ‘safe’ and (although it may deliver fresh information) essentially reflects back to the community what it already believes
·Affirmation. The emphasis is put on valuing the faith of the community in order to boost confidence and open up the way to the reception of new truth
·Expansion. The aim is to help people explore wider possibilities and push back the frontiers of their faith vision (including those of the educator)
·Challenge. The faith community is enabled to look seriously at ways in which the present grasp of the faith is incomplete, and commit to moving on
·Confrontation. Here people may need to be brought face to face with areas where, in all good conscience, they should radically rethink their position
·Undermining (or subversive). Varley asks, ‘how will you respond if people tell you that your preaching has caused their faith to collapse from under them?’

Adult Christian Education that is subversive will only be experienced as constructive and liberative, rather than undermining, where the educational ethos of the whole church has laid the foundations upon which the subversive approach can be properly practised. There is no short-cut to this; but the ministry of education will not deliver faith maturity without it. And it is the only way that will ‘equip the saints’ for today’s missionary engagement if the church is not to settle for a sectarian future.

Bibliography

Gibbs, M. and Morton, T. Ralph, God’s Lively People, Collins 1971
Healy, N.M. Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Cambridge University Press 2000
Holloway, R. Dancing on the Edge: Faith in a Post-Christian Age, HarperCollins 1997
Hopewell, J. Congregation: Stories and Structures, SCM Press 1988
Hopkins, J. Towards a Feminist Christology, SPCK 1995Jamieson, A. A Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches, SPCK 2002
Jamieson, P. Living at the Edge: Sacrament and Solidarity in Leadership, Mowbray 1997
Jeanrond, W. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance
John, J. ed. Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, DLT 1992
Percy, M. Power and the Church: Ecclesiology in an Age of Transition, Cassell 1998
Tomlin, G. The Provocative Church, SPCK 2002
Tomlinson, D. The Post-Evangelical, SPCK Triangle 1995
Varley, E. Catching Fire: Christian Adult Education in the Local Church, Bible Society 1993
Ward, P. Growing up Evangelical: Youthwork and the making of a subculture, SPCK 1996
Willmer, H. ed. 20/20 Visions: The Future of Christianity in Britain, SPCK 1992