Okay, so now that grad school's over, I'm kind of in the process of really assessing where I'm at vocationally, and trying to get a bigger picture of what's going on in our church. It looks like there are some areas that have been outside of my youth ministry domain that I'm going to be more involved with in a leadership sense. One of those areas is the big tent we call "Adult Education".
Adult Ed really includes all the stuff we do to help people grow and mature. Sometimes it's a gloss for the official, set times of bible study that we've committed to as a community, and you can see how "education" is our choice term as opposed to "discipleship". That language actually says something about our approach, and that drives me a little nuts, but for now it's the terminology we've got. I'll have to save my beef with the terminology, and the priorities it betrays, for another day.
Tonight what I want to write about is our need to develop clear, attainable, measurable goals for our discipleship process, even if we leave it in educational terms for the moment. Right now what we have by design is a perpetual curriculum, one that rotates through the canon on a set time frame (six years), and then begins the rotation again. Other items are thrown in as needed in between the canonical series, and there are occasional elective classes as well, but the rotating curriculum is the heart of the program.
It seems that there are some assumptions that go along with this. First of all, it seems to assume that you never really master the subject. Now I think there may be a place for balance here, because I know that there is some truth to the thought that there's always something else to lear, other levels of meaning to grasp. However, I think that as it stands, part of what we communicate realistically is that we don't really expect learners to, well, learn. We rather expect that six years from now they will likely need just what they are studying now, and again six years after that. Now that's not completely true...in reality each section of the canon isn't necessarily touched, so there would be some variety next time around.
However, I still think there is an important issue with the church where we become so fixated on our imperfections that we forget to make room for the possibility that God can actually do something with us, so that over time we do actually become different. So we do become more virtuous, we do become more wise and understanding, our knowledge of the scriptures does grow. When we insist on remaining self-effacing and allow our pessimistic anthropology dominate our theology of sanctification, then we become content with the status quo. "We're not perfect" becomes an acceptance of the status quo rather than a statement of intent.
Our failure to assess movement and growth is somewhat rooted in this issue. We don't really expect there to be much growth. We almost assume growth to be impossible.
More later.
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