Stone Pillows

Well, I teach my students that everything can be and should be Christian to the degree that it reflects and points to the Kingdom of God. As I understand it, that is what Jesus meant when he prayed “may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  Of course, then there is the challenge of trying to determine how that plays out in real life.  So I guess that puts me right back where I started a couple years ago with all this.

Back in my early days of becoming a teacher in a Christian school, I engaged in some vigorous debate with a couple of my colleagues (one in particular) about whether or not the school was in fact church or not. I had the idea that somehow it was, that somehow by attaching the word “Christian” to our formal name and by including a statement of faith in our defining documents, we had allied ourselves with the mission of the church (Good News).  But most did not share this position.  One of my friends affirmed rather sharply that our job was simply to teach children like any other school, while supplementing our teaching with a few good doses of Christian faith from time to time (school chapel, “devotions,” prayer, gathering “at the pole” on the feast day of Saint Betsy Ross, etc.) Our main role, as one school leader actually defined it publicly many years ago, was to oppose secular humanism (does that mean anything you can’t find in your Scofield reference Bible?), bring “little souls to Christ,” and loudly refute the “heresy” of evolution (yikes for me).  Other than that, we just needed to make sure that the test scores were high enough (and really, they should be higher than those in the public schools, for heaven’s sake). I was, and probably still am, naive enough to think that we might be required to do a bit more for the Kingdom, and so I continued to lobby along those lines whenever the opportunity presented itself.

But now, after almost thirty years of teaching in that kind of setting, I’m not so sure any more.  It feels like institutions  have so much more to worry about than the gospel.  I may see an action or read a response that rattles me – it is usually something I cannot imagine is healthy for a Christian community to embrace or acquiesce to. But I’ll be assured that it was in fact a sound and necessary business decision and that as responsible stewards of the institution, we need to make sound business decisions. Hmmm. I think my friend might have been right – maybe we can’t be the church.

Bonhoeffer wrote “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”  Is that true for institutions and communities as well? Are institutions willing to die out of faithfulness to Jesus and the life he calls us to? Probably not. We seem to labor under the overarching premise that the institution MUST survive indefinitely. Rather than continuing to pay attention to and revisit the foundation of “being Christian” we have focused our energy upon all of the floors and walls and ceilings that have been flimsily constructed, some of them far-removed from the foundation itself. A community that is rooted “in Jesus,”   considers itself called “by Jesus,” and claims to aspire to being “wholly Jesus”  would find its actions, words and very ethos defined by those propositions.  But perhaps that is not at all realistic for an organization as diversely constituted as a school.  The fact that there are so many varied reasons for folks being there in the first place, many of those reasons having little or nothing at all to do with faith, creates an irresistible current we can make little headway against.

So what is the best we can hope for? I hope it’s more than teaching “the right things”  or having children memorize the right verses. I hope it’s more than filling a child’s head with what Richard Rohr in his blog today calls “a set of mental abstractions we had to believe that would make God love us or that would ensure that we would go to heaven.”  I hope it’s more than creeds and formulas and dogmas. If I can borrow from and paraphrase Haim Ginott, I am suspicious of Christian education, if its aim is to produce merely a  new generation of acculturated church-goers  whose faith is confined to a convenient and user-friendly formula. Can we in fact use reading, writing, arithmetic  “to make our children more human” (Ginott) and more godly?

So many folks have already written about an authentically Christian way of life. I’m not inventing anything new, nor can I really elaborate on what has already been said. My question is, can any of this be done intentionally in a Christian school?  Or, perhaps a better question, what is the role of Christian schools in this process of formation? Or is there a role? For myself, I have been wondering a lot lately about whether it might be better to step outside of the Christian school community and seek this work in the public school (though as far as I know, they are not hiring Bible teachers right now).

I have no idea who is reading this blog aside from my faithful friend Stephanie. But, if you have thoughts about Christian schools, experiences in them (good or bad), or just some great stories about them, I’d love for you to share them.

I spent my young and perhaps most formative years as a farm boy. Most of my friend’s fathers didn’t drive anywhere to work except maybe moving the tractor from one field to the next.  If they did drive to work, it was somewhere close by – a downtown store or shop, the feed co-op, the mill or factory.  Perhaps it is a childishly naïve memory, but somehow it seemed like life had a certain wholeness to it, a sense of place within which almost every single aspect of daily living took place. When we did forage out to a big city, it was always as a visitor with a sense of urgency about doing what had to be done and getting quickly back “home.”  “Church” was close, “school” was close, and we often saw the same faces at both, adult as well as child.  Life did not seem compartmentalized or fractured.  We often ate what we raised (even a pet cow, which probably in itself ought to be the subject of its own blog on childhood trauma) and got our clothes from the Hendrick’s store or  Montgomery Ward catalogue.  Sometimes an interested student asks me now if that sort of life wasn’t lonely and isolated. For most of them, such a lifestyle seems tedious and boring. It probably was, or seems that way from our current vantage point.  There were no neighborhood friends to play with or hang out with. But I like to remind the students that there is a wide difference between a neighborhood and a community.

Of course, that way of life seems quite archaic and has largely vanished. Undoubtedly our memories of it romanticize the whole notion, and when we dig deep enough we sometimes uncover appalling amounts of dysfunction and isolation and pain.  But despite that, there was at least the beginning of a sense of connectedness. Community is much harder to establish or build or maintain in a society where the operative word is “commute.”  Commute-ity defines who we are and how we think. In commute-ity we move from one space to another, leaving very few traces of our selves behind. In commute-ity, what happens is what happens to me regardless of who else things happen to.   In commute-ity, we have houses, not homes, churches,  not Church. In commute-ity, education is assessed by how much information we can puke up on a piece of paper.  In commute-ity no one seems to care much about what we know, how we know, or what we want to know. Is it even possible to talk about justice in commute-ity? Justice seems to mean a level of engagement with others and the Other, something that commute-ity mitigates against.

I suspect that most of us are spiritual commuters or at least ecclesiological commuters. We move easily to and from these places or times we designate as “sacred” back into a world we designate as “real.”  We “go to church,”  “go to school,”  “go to work,” all of that implying some sort movement from one thing (whatever that is) to something else completely different. And in all of that we have a hard enough time establishing connections with the people we like and “go” with.  Who has the resources or even the awareness to include the Other or others in that? Who even thinks about them in the various daily and weekly commutes?

We spend a lot of time, energy and money on making those places we “go” to habitable and comfortable.  We groom them attentively. It has become increasingly important for us to grow and groom  a church. We can even hold seminars and engage “experts” to tell us how to do that better, even though we may not be entirely clear on just what it is we are growing. Because it is a place that we regularly commute to, it is really the idea of a church captures our energy. The idea of Church? Well, that seems ethereal and mostly illusive. We are pretty good at commute-ity, and that will do for now.

So where does Christian education come into this? What does this mean to me today as I face my students?

I came across a sobering quote from Denise Pope’s book, “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students.”  In her book the quote is attributed to a high school sophomore named Kevin, who says “[p]eople don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades, which brings them to college, which brings them the high-paying job, which brings them to happiness, so they think. But basically, grades is where it’s at.”   The only words here that give me hope are “so they think.”  That possibly redeems the quote. Maybe Kevin believes there might actually be more to it. As for the rest of it, is he very far off the mark?  I suspect that a lot of us who teach hope this isn’t true. But I bet we know better. Doesn’t it often seem like this is “where’s it’s at?”  What do most parent conferences center around? Academic progress. Being at grade level. Something better than a meager “satisfactory.”  What we observe and assess needs to fit into the categories we create for the acquisition of skills. And that is what everyone wants to see. We are back to Martha.

“How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students.”  What an indictment. But I can’t disagree with it, not even within my tiny little Christian school community. I’m not sure just how successful we are in resisting this ourselves. It is safer to teach Martha. We have state and national standards and frameworks for that. The desired outcomes have all been plotted out and all we need to do is to plug in the formulas that will get all of the students there. And there are plenty of formulas. You need them all because you have to get everybody “there.” There are so many formulas that we don’t have any time for much else in our teaching. Mary doesn’t stand a chance here.

It feels like we in Christian education ought to feel sharply the sting of Dr. Pope’s indictment of what she sees to be the systemic failures of current education practice. It feels like we should be resisting this system hard.  Instead we baptize the system in the name of God by adding the “Christian” somewhere either in the name or the mission statement. And has the system been redeemed before this baptism was applied? Does this system begin the long journey in the direction of sanctification – the sense of being made Holy and God-ly – after the baptism has been applied? What makes our education different? Counter-cultural? Prophetic?

What would happen if we did shift our thinking? Would parents still send their children to us? Or would they look for places that offer greater guarantees of success and the ever important “edge?” Can any Christian school afford to be counter-cultural?  Who wants to pay hard tuition dollars for that?

I know those are not easy questions. But I have this nagging conviction that raising up Marys is the way to go, that defying the conventions is the right thing to do in the name of God and His Kingdom, that living out the Gospel and the Torah within the structures, practices and routines of education is what it means to be called to this work.

Can we talk about this? Dare we?