One of the continuing paradoxes of Christian education in congregations (and in most seminaries, admittedly) is that the ways we’ve chosen to go about teaching for faith is actually inimical to how people need to learn it.
Here are some basic pedagogical concepts:
- Things need to be learned in the modality in which they need to be acquired, and not a different way (process matters)
- You learn to do what you do and not something else (no “pretend learningâ€)
- Most things need to be learned in the context in which they are applicable and intended
- Meaningful learning is acquired through experience (phenomenology)
- Intellectual activity anywhere is the same (Bruner)
- Learning requires readiness.
The dilemma for church members (and learners in any other context that do not follow rigid pedagogy) is that we seem to insist on breaking all of the pedagogical rules when it comes to teaching for faith. Here is a quote from The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner:
“What a scientists does at his desk or in his laboratory, what a literary critic does in reading a poem are of the same order as what anybody else does when he is engaged in life activities—if he is to achieve understanding. The difference is in degree, not in kind. The schoolboy learning physics is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than doing something else. The “something else†usually involves the task of mastering what came to be called . . . a “middle languageâ€â€”classroom discussions and textbooks that talk about the conclusions in a field of intellectual inquiry rather than centering upon the inquiry itself. Approached in this way, high school physics often looks very little like physics, social studies are removed from the issue of life and society as usually discussed, and school mathematics too often has lost contact with what is at the heart of the subject, the idea of order.†(p. 14).
Might not the same be said of what passes for “education†in most churches? I suspect we spend too much time teaching “about†the practices of faith while offering little opportunity for people to actually learn those practices by practicing them. We spend more time telling people “what the Bible says†and offer them little opportunity to actually study the Bible for themselves in order to discover what the Bible means. We attempt to “teach†people about relationships in family and marriage at the church building, when those things actually are, and need to be, learned in the context of the family and home.
One evidence of this may be the unspoken but evident assumption on the part of both clergy and laypersons that when it comes to matters of the Spirit or faith, clergy and laypersons “learn these things differently.” Witness the way clergy go about learning the subjects of concerns at the heart of faith, and contrast that to the way they go about atttempting to teach those very same things to the laypersons in their church. That is a puzzling phenomenon given the fact that these subjects (concepts, disciplines, practices, knowledge, etc.) are acquired and need to be learned the same way by all persons. Again, as Bruner put it, “Intellectual activity anywhere is the same.”
We have become enamored with the “middle language†we have created and have come to believe that it is equivalent to the language of the Spirit. And the problem is that the “middle language†we use is inimical to acquiring faith.
“The Divine is experienced by the heart. The intellect, at best, can only trail behind and take notes.” –Ivan Granger
