Educating Nomads

One of those “Aha!” moments came to me twenty-some years ago while staring at the blank computer screen where Sunday’s sermon should have been making its appearance.  Unfortunately, my thoughts were elsewhere; I had been dealing with the parent of one of our confirmands-to-be, who was convinced that I was not doing enough to impress on his son the significance of the rite he would soon undergo.  Sometimes his critique seemed to be that I didn’t make these 6th and 7th graders suffer enough (they thought they suffered plenty) and sometimes it was clear that the father was actually expecting the confirmation process to fill all the spiritual gaps left in the child’s life by church and home.

Against the background of this discussion, I was also pondering what I was learning in my doctoral studies in the sociology of religion about how societies formed their children into useful adults for generations.  Mostly, children came to know who they were by hanging out with the adults.  What would happen today, I wondered, if churches did Christian education differently?  What if children spent more time learning in the midst of the congregation, rather than in age-level conclaves?  Later I learned the language of formation and faith practices from Maria Harris, and discovered educators like Charles Foster and Rich Melheim who take the formational potential of congregations seriously.

Now, even as these new directions are flowering, another phenomenon is making itself known: the emerging church.  There’s a lot of “buzz” out there, not just on the web, but reaching denominational leadership circles, inducing panic among some.  Many social forces contribute to this new development and this isn’t the space to explore them; it’s already being done by others.  What I miss, however, is conversation, either spoken or written, about the issues raised for Christian education/formation in the context of emerging churches.  Is it the second generation question all over again? The current issue of the Alban Institute publication, Congregations, reports on a conference for those involved in emerging churches hosted by the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.   Titled “Church for the 21st Century: National Cathedral Event Helps Launch New Reformation’”, the article asks, “How do centuries-old institutions oriented around ‘the Word ‘ . . . respond to the needs of future generations of nonlinear, media-savvy, text-resistant Internet explorers?”  On the other hand, the conference agenda was reportedly organized around the “best practices” written about in Dorothy Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us. 

Emerging churches are made up of people who, among other things, are hungry for community, and who view traditional congregations with either cynicism or something close to disdain.  They have been called spiritual nomads.  The churches they avoid, the churches of their fathers and mothers, are aging.  Increasingly they cannot afford a full-time professionally-trained educator on staff – – or think they can’t.  What I see over and over again in my own denomination is, instead, the hiring of a person from within the congregation, a former volunteer committed to Christian education, who will be offered a part-time salary without benefits.

I find the emerging church movement fascinating and exciting; I would like to be around for the next hundred years to see where it goes.  While there are still enough large congregations here in the Bible Belt to keep some good educators employed, growing numbers are finding themselves without jobs.  I find that development enormously troubling.  How are we, as educators, envisioning Christian formation in the future?  How do we “educate” nomads?