Four separate recent incidents have got me thinking about the issues of faith, learning, and educating in faith. In the first incident, a seminary student shared with me her experience at a “contemporary worship service” at a local church. She shared that after the service she was talking to a member of that church. The church member (also a denominational worker) shared that the minister of the church, and at other “contemporary or postmodern churches” are ‘dumbing down’ the worship service and messages.
The second incident was a conversation with a pastor who shared about needing to ‘dumb down’ (not his words) how he communicates to his members (he pastors a large church). This is an intelligent, well-educated, and well-read pastor who has come to terms with the pragmatic necessities related to communicating to the “average church member.” He cited the fact that two-thirds of the population is “concrete thinkers.” As an example he shared about a recent sermon series titled something like, “Seven Things God Wants You To Do.” And while he grates against that approach and the simplistic nature of that directive message, he shrugs, admitting that most of the people in his congregation want to be told what to do.
The third incident is an item from an article by Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, from a January Wall Street Journal series on education “Intelligence in the Classroom.” Murray states that “half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.” Given that intelligence is an attribute (“g”), argues Murray, there’s only so much a teacher or the schools can do to make students “smarter.”
We’ve long known that one’s faith is tied to one’s intellect and to one’s affect (emotion). Put another way, spiritual maturity requires a critical intellect and emotional maturity. Or, as I’m fond of reminding people, “Don’t expect spiritual maturity from an emotionally immature person.”
The fourth incident involves the on-going diatribe among seminary faculty and administration about the quality of students in seminary. This is not relegated to just seminaries, of course, the same rants can be heard in faculty lounges and gathering of academics across the land at all levels of the educational enterprise, from junior colleges to graduate school Ph.D. programs. The litany often is couched in the language of needing to “recruit better students” for the seminary. All well and good, recruitment is necessary and a few more elite Lake Wobegon overachieving pupils in the student body population raises the atmosphere for all involved. But, remember, the article says that at least half of children are “below average” (and always will be) and two-thirds of the adult population will always function at the concrete-operational level—challenged by their inability to process abstract concepts (it helps, at least, to explain television, pro-wresting, and NASCAR).
As Murray Bowen said, “You can’t make a bean plant grow by pulling on it.” Perhaps the job for those of us in the seminary isn’t to “get better students,” but rather, to make better students of the persons we get. If we really believe that God calls everyone to ministry, and a few actually answer the call and as part of their faithfulness go to seminary, then I suspect our focus needs to be that of being responsible stewards of those who answer the call and come to us for preparation for ministry—regardless of intellect, ability, or perceived potential. God uses whom God calls.
And for those of us in churches, it may be well to remember that despite the need to be responsible through challenging, prodding, and cajoling people toward a more mature faith by practicing effective educational practices, God’s call has more to do with being faithful in obedience—which is the universal call to both strong and weak, smart or average.
<%image(20070217-IGMatrix100.jpg|100|131|Stuck in the matrix in my own head.)%>
