The Church as Learning Community

A Comprehensive Guide to Christian Education

Abingdon Press

Contents

A Community of Teachers and Learners

Teaching and learning are all about the church as community. The words parish and congregation have different meanings in different church bodies. For some the parish is an administrative division of a diocese, an area with its own church. For some the words congregation and parish are used interchangeably. For some congregation refers to a church with its members, many of whom may live outside the neighborhood. In this book we shall use congregation to talk about the particular church with its membership, and parish as the congregation plus all people in the geographic neighborhood, whether that be city blocks, county sections or suburban subdivisions.

A community of teachers and learners has two meanings in this book. The first is the assertion that the congregation, which we shall sometimes refer to as the faith community, is in its very essence a community of teachers and learners. Although there are specifically trained religious educators who are leaders in the congregation, in some sense all members are religious educators, and lifelong learners as well. Teaching and learning take place in formal and informal settings by designated and undesignated teachers who relate to and embody the beliefs, values, and practices of the community. The second meaning asserts that no congregation is an island unto itself. Each community of faith resides in a parish, a place, a context. The congregation has at its doorstep, and needs to see and utilize, the community, the people, and the institutions, including those beliefs, values, and practices, of the entire parish.

In this initial chapter on the learning community, we will look at the church, assuming vantage points that range from a New Orleans city bus, to Paul's first Corinthian epistle. We will view the membership, the people who exercise their roles and gifts in the body of Christ. Whether it be the contemporary small town of Garner, Iowa, or the city of Corinth, how do people come to know one another? How do people overcome their ignorance of one another? In the strategies that foster personal knowledge, we will discover that the people and their parish are themselves the most basic curriculum. Two helpful tools for assessing curriculum will be given (Stokes's "Cube 27" and a versatile Resource Review strategy). The chapter will conclude in the same mode as 1 Corinthians, with a call to mutual accountability.

The Bible is not a blueprint for religious education. Ours is a different society, and the purposes of Scripture are broader. We cannot and dare not use a first-century manuscript to tell us specifically how to teach. But if we are deeply rooted in the words and situations of early Christian communities in the epistles, we will have some insights into how God is at work in our communities today. To teach the Bible, religious educators must teach in a way that will enrich people's lives. We need to regard the Bible as the Word of God, but not equate it with God, for God cannot be confined in words alone. Religious education is the ministry of all teaching activities, verbal and nonverbal, including cognitive, affective, and life activity. The Bible is a living reality which includes the account of God's interactions with people in biblical times, but also God existentially interacting with all those who encounter Scripture. What is important is not teaching about the Bible, trying to prove what it is or is not, but, insofar as it is inspired revelation and God's outpouring of love, making it the solid foundation for religious education, which is encounter with the living God. The church as learning community becomes an arena for such an encounter.

The church is always local, in this place here and now, and it is also always beyond this community, outside of our experience and beyond our comprehension. No one local congregation is capable of being a complete expression of the church; it will lack perspective, information, or resources. At times it may be embroiled in conflict. Simultaneously the local church provides the only curriculum that is real and viable for this people in this time and place. The task is to receive one another with thanksgiving even while experiencing divisiveness and frustration. There will be lack of knowledge and lack of teaching skill, but the most significant problem is ignoring the potential in learners themselves, especially those not yet present and those not yet considered significant enough to bring their gifts to the teaching, learning community.

The community engages in its ministry of re-membering the body of Christ, literally incorporating all the differently abled people in the parish. Thus the curriculum is formed, God and God's people in this time and place. All else is resource, but substantial resource it is. The community needs to learn how to utilize who they are and who they are becoming, adding appropriate curriculum resources, developing a mutual accountability to sustain and cultivate the entire community.

THE LEARNING COMMUNITY

Too often in the local congregation we separate ourselves into two categories, the teachers and the learners. There are the faithful doers and the persistently passive receivers. Such divisions do not take seriously the reality that each individual needs to be a teacher in order to be a learner, and a learner in order to become and continue to be a teacher.

Teachers and learners become gifts to one another, and need each other to complete one another's teaching and learning. An idea is not really ours until we have shared it. A learning is not really ours until we have taught it. In the Christian learning community where all become speakers of the Word as well as hearers, where the three-year-old is teacher and the seventy-six-year-old is learner, the Word comes round once more, as a gift.

Some churches have redesigned their educational ministry programs to become consciously intergenerational. Others have structured the congregation in such a way that everyone, all ages, those who live in family groupings and those who live alone, is in a small group for care and education. Small congregations have been doing this all along, at least informally. Whether such approaches are formal or informal, they can be intentional. Whatever the strategy, the congregation, and by extension the parish, is one of the few places in society where people of differing ages meet together to do something significant in their lives, and the one place where people can have the luxury of one-on-one teaching /learning relationships.

This group of people, no matter how excited about or how disappointed in them we may at times be, is a gift. Leaders in a religious community often feel lonely, misunderstood, even impatient with God, "There's not enough happening here, not enough, to show for our work." We might wish to exchange this confirmation class or men's fellowship group for more interesting and interested learners. Or they might wish to exchange us for a more effective religious educator. These people are here and call us, even in and through their reluctance to ministry, to teach and lead. The learning community is always sufficient and, paradoxically, always less than whole. In being specifically local we discover we are also part of the church universal, which becomes an impetus for ecumenism and global interdependence to ground and permeate our teaching.

Reflections on Learning Community Context

1. Take time (by yourself or with another religious educator) to describe, journal about, complain about on paper, if you wish, some group you are now teaching that causes you anxiety, or even anger. What is going on? What is the message of their behavior?

2. Now consider a religious group in your congregation that you teach or lead that is vital and growing. Reflect on why that group is going well. What are the characteristics of that learning community?

3. Where in the world are you? Is your parish learning community one block off the main thoroughfare or in the center of things? Do they consider themselves up-and-coming or down-and-out? How else might you or they describe themselves?

4. Consider a connection which could be made between a local parish learning community and the broader church, down the block, in the region, or around the globe. What learning connections have been or could be made with the church of another generation, or even of the future?

Unlikely Community: the Bus Line

Each morning, while my husband and I were visiting New Orleans, we would board the city bus to travel downtown from the guest house where we were staying to our conference meetings, which we assumed would be our primary learning community of the day. We as strangers did not at first recognize the learning community that was the 7:45 bus. But they were a community; they knew each other. They were the regulars, the people who caught that bus each day to travel to their arenas of work. Some people rode occasionally. But that is not unlike a local religious congregation, with regular and occasional attenders.

This morning on the New Orleans bus line, a woman about to exit was greeted at the door by the bus driver: "You're all moved into your new house?" "Yes, yes, I am," the woman replied. "I still have to get settled, of course." "Do you like it?" the driver continued. "Yes, very much, but I'm glad I can be on the same bus line." Being known and continuity are crucial to life and growth.

That evening, on another bus, but the same line, a woman with young children was already engrossed in conversation with the bus driver when we boarded. It was an amazingly public yet private conversation. "It's too bad that you had your purse stolen," the driver said. "The bus tries to keep a regular schedule, but it's only going to be within five minutes or so. You shouldn't be standing there alone at four in the morning. Heck, I wouldn't dare stand on that corner alone at 4:00 A.M. and I'm a pretty big guy." Direct instruction. Bus driver as teacher, beyond mere instruction to direct advice. Most of the time he merely drove the bus.

I use examples of riding a bus precisely because such a routine experience may seem the exact opposite of intentional community. But even there, people want, need, and sometimes find a teaching/learning community. The church cannot keep its people entirely safe in the world; neither can a bus, but looking out for one another was a significant part of this community.

On commuter trains from New Jersey to Manhattan people buy month-long passes. For years people sit side by side. When someone is going to have surgery or be out of town for a few weeks, the passenger feels duty bound to tell the others about it or they will worry. It becomes, strangely enough, a community of care.

Up the New England Coast, in New Haven, Connecticut, one Yale University shuttle bus driver took passengers to and from different parts of the Yale campus his entire shift. People would get on and off, but he carried on a running conversation the entire time. Who knows who or what would start it off in the morning, but as some would leave, others would carry on, adding their opinions. All day the conversation continued with totally different participants.

Holden Village is a retreat center high in the Cascade mountains in western Washington, accessible only by boat up Lake Chelan and then by bus up the winding roads to the Village. Each day during the summer months the bus comes and goes. Most people stay only a week or two. One hears many tentative "Hellos" and tearful "good-byes" as bookends to their sweet community in between. It is all too short, everyone says, but they come and go anyway. Staff wonder if they have the energy to greet one more new person. Do they have the emotional stamina to say good-bye one more time? A religious education community in a mobile society frequently wonders the same thing: Do we have the emotional strength to grieve the loss of those who move away and to welcome newcomers to our congregation? In a learning community people come and go, are born and die, but the conversation of faith moves along, rarely in an totally organized, structured way. People gather briefly on their way to work in their arenas of daily life, but on the way they care about one another, and they, for a brief while, become community.

Reflections on Unlikely Learning Communities

1. What is the most unlikely learning community you have experienced? Who was part of it? How did people learn? What could not happen in that setting?

2. Who are the teachers (guides, coaches, and so forth) of people in your congregation all week long? How might people be helped to reflect on the many learning communities of which they are a part?

3. Thinking through the various activities, formal and informal, which take place in and through your congregation during the week, what is being taught? By whom? How are people connected or disconnected from each other? How might more intentional learning be fostered? What learning opportunities exist in the larger parish neighborhood?

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ROOTS

In this chapter we look to 1 Corinthians for some ecclesiological foundations concerning Christian community. The following is not an exegesis or a commentary, but neither are we merely using Scripture for proof text or inspirational devotions. The scriptural thread of themes and images in this chapter and throughout the book informs our subject.

The church is always both local and universal. Where two or three gather in the name of Jesus, Christ is present, but Christ is never present without the companionship of all Christians globally and historically. The local church implies the universal, and the universal church implies and necessitates the local. Without becoming local, specific in a time and a place, the church does not exist.

Paul begins with this assumption: "To the church of God that is in Corinth" (1 Cor. 1:2). Religious education begins that directly and that personally: "To the church in Baltimore," "To the church in Muscatine." The church, and specifically this church, belongs to God. The church is larger than any one religious community: "together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours" (v. 2).

This perspective sets a tone for our teaching. These people in this place belong to God. They are saints, which means baptized, beloved, grace-filled children of God. They are already holy, not by their own actions, not by our correct teaching, but by the gift of what Jesus Christ has already done for them in his incarnation, death, and resurrection. The people in this learning community are gathered to be saints together with all those who in every time and place have called on or will call on the name of Jesus. Paul begins purposely, "Grace to you and peace."

This community of teachers and learners are called through their learning together to live into God's promised future. The early Christian communities may well have expected Christ to return in their lifetime. Teaching with a timeline certainly involves schedules for a particular session, plans for a year, even goals for three or five years, but the parish learning community is also timeless. We are called to teach expectantly, eschatologically, "as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 7), and "He will also strengthen you to the end" (v. 8). This does not mean to teach preparing learners only for the life hereafter. It means radical involvement in the world in which participants live (see chapters 8 and 9).

Paul's significant, substantive beginning is not mere introduction; it is a foundation stressing that everything necessary for salvation has already been accomplished. God promises to keep learners firm in the faith. A contemporary learning community may have reason to doubt that promise. Each year thousands of people leave religious education classes and faith communities. Some of the religious educator's most discouraging times are when a participant comes once and not again, or when regular attendees drift away in apathy. Trusting that God is able to keep the faith, once planted, alive and growing should not make us complacent, but assured, confident, and therefore faithfully energized for the task.