Education & Formation: First Case Study
You have recently been called as pastor of a local church in Atlanta. The search committee was articularly interested in your interest in Christian education and formation as they think that you will help bring young families into the church. This urban, struggling church has approximately 200 members on the rolls and averages 75 members in worship on most Sundays. The average age of the congregation is 62.5 years of age. Though there are a handful of families with school-aged children, several of them leave and join churches with large youth programs as soon as their kids enter middle school. At the previous meeting of the congregation’s governing board, you promised to lead a discussion at the beginning of the next meeting about envisioning new directions for the church’s programs for children and youth. After you provide a dazzling ten minute Augustinian mini-lecture on the central importance of love in the church’s ministry of education and formation, several people raise their hands to express concerns or disagreement. Here are a few of the more forceful comments:
“That all sounds, nice, pastor; but it is too abstract. We have kids all around us who live in broken homes and are tempted by drugs, sex, and crime. We need a plan that deals with the hard realities that the kids in this city are facing every day.”
“My neighbors up the street go to Grace Church. They have a huge youth group. Every other weekend they go on a ski trip or a trip to the beach. My daughter has been begging me to let her join that youth group because it is so much more fun than ours. What are you going to do to make this church fun for the kids?”
“Atlanta has become such a diverse place culturally and religiously. We have so many languages and ethnicities here now and more are moving in all the time. The city now has as many Muslims, Buddhists, Bahai, and Wiccans as Lutherans or Jews. My family is religiously mixed and I know we aren’t alone in that. It would be irresponsible for us to ignore this reality. We have to prepare the children of this church to function as good neighbors in this increasingly diverse religious situation in which we live.”
After providing sufficient time for everyone to share their views on the proper aims of education and formation for that congregation, the attention turns back to you. Everyone wants to know what you will say and how you propose to move forward.
As you develop your two-page "initial response" to this situation, make sure that you both identify and discuss the most salient or important issues related to the ministry of education and formation in this situation and frame the key features of an initial possible response to the situation. Make sure that your strategy is theologically informed, contextually sensitive, and faithfully effective.
Each of the three church-member comments referenced in the case study acknowledges a different, and valid, aspect of the context in which the congregation exists. The church member seeking a "plan that deals with the hard realities" of urban life is identifying the specific demographic context and resulting challenges. The member who wants to "make this church fun for the kids" is pointing to a larger social context of a culture that places a high value on entertainment and social engagement (especially for children and adolescents). The final member comment points to a rising generational context where spiritual diversity is the norm, and where Christianity perhaps no longer enjoys the favored status that it once did.
As a pastor, I would first acknowledge each of these perspectives as valid and important to understanding our context. I would ask some questions aimed at eliciting ways in which these concerns are all interconnected, and at finding common ground on which to "move forward." All of the commenters seem to share a yearning for education and formation to be "relevant" to children and youth--relevant to issues they face, relevant to their own interests, and relevant to their relationships with the community. At this point, I would weave Augustine's concept of the "centrality of love" back into the picture, not merely as an abstract sort of solution, but rather as a rationale for how and why we can all understand and relate to the concerns raised by the three commenters. It is often a misguided search for absent love that drives urban youth to sex, drugs, and crime. It is love for life and social interaction that attracts youth to ski trips and beaches. It is love for God and the sacred that underlies the growth of diverse spiritual pursuits. And it is because we love both our children and our God, that we want them to be actively and happily engaged in education and formation within the church.
Fusing these two ideas together--one laid out by me as a pastoral vision, and one arising organically from the group discussion-- "Love" and "Relevancy" then become the twin poles by which we balance our ministry, evaluate our current and future education and formation opportunities, and understand our context.
Once enough people are on board with these two concepts (and it might take some one-to-one personal conversations outside of the "meeting" environment) I would suggest that it isn't enough to merely understand our context. Any programs, curricula, or events that I, as pastor, or the governing board might propose on our own would fail to meet the "relevance" criteria unless we are actively engaged with our context. In order for our church (and by extension, the gospel) to be relevant, engaging, and "fun" to younger church members, their opinions would need to be solicited and given voice, especially in the leadership of the church. In order for us to be relevant in the midst of spiritual and religious diversity, we need to enter into loving conversation and service with our brothers and sisters from different faiths, and in "religiously mixed families." This in particular would have the added benefit of helping us (as children and adults) to better understand our own faith and its place in the community. Finally, in order to be relevant on tough, urban issues facing our children (and adults), we need to be active in the places of our community where "drugs, sex, and crime" are prevalent. For through personal experiences and deep understanding of these challenges, not only can we offer relevant education and formation to our children, but we will also then be in a position to offer the healing power of love to our community, teaching our children by example, and ultimately renewing our own spiritual development and the life of our "struggling" congregation.
