Education & Formation Reflective Essay
Reflective Essay[ Five (5) page reflective essay about key elements, components, people, events that have contributed most to your education and formation as a Christian.
There was never any question if, whether, or which of the evening leftovers would go into the stew pot. In my six-person family of origin, everything that wasn't eaten for dinner got absorbed into the big stewpot in the freezer, waiting to be thawed, reheated, and reclaimed at the end of the week. The only real question was how this particular addition would affect the taste and character of the stew when the pot was full. Thinking of this family tradition provides an apt enough metaphor for my education as a Christian through the years -- mixed up and messy, formed in community, experimental, more concerned with input than outcome, while still intensely practical and sustainable at the end of the day (or week, rather).
Let me say at the outset that I have a hard time differentiating my "Christian education" from my "non-Christian education." Each has influenced and informed the other, and often my pedagogical context has influenced both. My Christian identity is wrapped up in my baptism as an infant, and the commitment of my parents and the church to raise me as such. Therefore, starting with my baptism, I consider all educational experiences to have been part of my education as a Christian. Taking this a step further, I tend to consider all experiences to be part of the educational process, whether intentionally so or not. Life is education, and I often suspect that the majority of our formative experiences actually occur outside of the classroom, unscripted, and quite often unintended by student or teacher alike. Everything goes into the stew, for better or worse.
However, some ingredients in the stew stand out more than others. At an early age I had a difficult time with formal, institutionalized schooling, until my parents placed me in the local Montessori school. To this day I'm not sure whether it was the unique Montessori approach that shaped my learning habits, or if it just happened to be the ideal complement to pre-existing ones. While the non-structured, self-directed, experimental environment of the Montessori school did not have an immediate connection with my faith development, it would later come to influence not only my approach to my personal spiritual formation, but also my thoughts on how spiritual formation in the church might be approached in new and experimental ways.
My family's limited income, among other considerations, meant that for my younger siblings to enjoy a Montessori education, I needed to return to public school. Throughout late elementary school and middle school, I continued to struggle with curriculum that was not of my own interest or choosing, and spent more time with the set of Encyclopedias in our living room than doing assigned homework. In my church Sunday school classes and youth program, I tended to gravitate toward teachers and programs that were more conversational and open-ended.
-Encyclopedia
-Academic Decathlon
-Oral Roberts University
-Sunset High School
-University of Dallas
-Emerging Church
Oral Roberts University — with all of its fundamentalist fervor, 1970s futurist architecture, and the fading gleam of tent-revivals and televangelists — hardly seems a likely place to begin an autobiographical essay for an education and formation class at a Presbyterian seminary. In truth, it is not the beginning of my spiritual formation, but rather the point at which my experience diverges from the more typical story of one baptized and raised in denominational churches, steeped in Sunday school and youth group meetings, more or less familiar with protestant doctrine and theology.
Upon my arrival at ORU for my freshman year of college, I would not have considered myself pentecostal, charismatic, or even evangelical. Unlike most of the students I would soon encounter there, I wouldn't have even understood the meaning of those terms as religious labels. Very early on, however, mandatory chapel services that featured (among other things) healing, jumping, shouting, and speaking in tongues made for an eye-opening "crash course." This and other challenges to my beliefs threatened to overwhelm me during my first year.
The small, quiet, United Methodist church down the road was my proverbial shelter in the storm. Regular one-on-one sessions with my pastor became a self-imposed complement and balance to the pentecostal-based theology courses I took in fulfillment of general education requirements. In a right-leaning school, I gravitated to the left-leaning English department for my undergraduate major. Through Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor, I found a complement and balance to the fundamentalist interpretation of scriptures espoused in chapel services and student bible studies. I even met a few closet moderates. Nevertheless, after two years at ORU, still frustrated and uncomfortable, I left. I transferred to McMurry University — a Methodist school that was closer to my home, as well as to my theological and cultural heritage.
That might have signaled a return to a more typical story, except that after only one semester at McMurry, I returned to ORU. While away, a strong sense of unfulfilled purpose, of something unfinished and abandoned, drew me back. Though ORU was still a square hole to my round peg, I could no longer simply ignore or compartmentalize the evangelical zeal and fundamentalist dogma that permeated its culture. I still embraced neither the theology nor the culture in their entirety; it was the people I could no longer dismiss, mock, or deride. Fundamentalism was now forever attached to human faces and cherished friendships. What I did eventually come to embrace was the concept of living in the tension between my own expressions of faith and those of my peers. Surprisingly, ORU bore no great influence on my still-developing understanding of theology. Instead (and equally surprising), it influenced the application of my theology, challenging me to love my neighbor despite our passionate differences.
Although I have always been drawn to intellectual pursuit, my time at ORU was not a period of great academic growth or achievement. I was interested in student government, building social communities and relationships, and my studies soon became secondary. Upon graduation, I wandered aimlessly between jobs, finding employment in the business sector to be unfulfilling. My greatest fulfillment came from a part-time job working with adolescents at my church; this realization led me to apply for a full-time position teaching high school English. Under a provisional certification program, I was able to begin teaching, while concurrently enrolling in graduate education courses at a private Catholic university nearby. My experiences in the classroom each day as a teacher gave me perspective and motivation each evening for my classes--as a student. I was able to bring an eagerness and focus to my studies that resulted not only in high achievement, but a renewed lifelong commitment to the educational process and to the world of academic study.
Meanwhile, the contrast between faith and environment that began at ORU continued in my professional and personal life. The school where I taught English literature was an inner-city public high school fraught with poverty, low expectations, and gang violence. At the end of each day, I would return to my suburban house, surrounded by the affluence and indifference of white, middle-class society. Even more than the liberal/conservative dichotomy of my undergraduate years, the socioeconomic disparity between my two worlds was a source of spiritual confusion and pain. As my passion for social justice and ministry among the poor grew, so did bitterness and resentment toward my suburban neighbors.
In a community of evangelical megachurches and bible-belt Baptists, my wife and I were fortunate to have stumbled into a small, Presbyterian new church development still in its first year of existence. It was through my involvement and eventual employment with this church that I began to reconcile my two worlds, even bringing them together in ministry for the benefit and spiritual enrichment of both.
Reflecting on my spiritual journey through college and career, I can identify with Jonah--I see God's hand leading me to places and people I would not have gone of my own accord. More and more, however, I'm also beginning to see at every turn potential to bring unlikely people together for the advancement of God's kingdom. Both this and my work in urban education have led me to seek a dual degree program in divinity and Christian education. It is my profound hope that whether I find myself among liberals or conservatives, the distinguished or the outcast, the rich or the poor, baby boomers or millenials, God will continue to use me as a bridge, teaching, ministering, but most of all loving all of God's children. This, perhaps, is a "big tent" even Oral Roberts could be proud of.
