The Church's philosophy of education has always been :
- mono-directional (one to many)
- concerned with truth/certainty
- focused on abstracts and post-worldly issues
The effects of these are:
- Christians remain dependent on the pastor (and his views!)
- Christians are VERY uncomfortable in the face of ambiguity and pluralism
- Christians feel they have to 'fight' for the truth all the time (which is often counter to learning of the rich and fun kind)
- Christians remain 'irrelevant' because our theology is so 'stratospherical' and we have no resources to make an impact on the world
Therefore, we need to transform Christian education to become more (though not solely):
- multi-directional (many to many)
- concerned with practice/service/diversity
- focused on hands-on / high-tech / this-worldly issues
- Christians more concerned about learning and exploration rather than 'knowing the correct things to believe'
- Christians more concerned with 'winning friends' than 'winning arguments'
- Christians more concerned about practical service/giving rather than abstract hair-splitting
- Christians more in-tuned with what's happening in and with the world and constructing Christ-inspired solutions
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2 comments:
hi,hv been reading the book 'church on the other side' by brian d. mclaren. talking abt post-modern church. some quote:
'in old apologetic, we acted as if we had easy answer to these questions, as if they were math problem.our easy answers wore pretty thin pretty fast, in the new apologetic, we offer the faith, not because it has easy answers to the big questions, (that is, shallow answers to deep questions), but because the faith is the context in which one can explore the mysteries that is underlie these questions.
(page 82)
i think sometime we are as christian are a bit defensive. mayb we should be more offensive and be willing to be open that sometime we still cannot comprehend fully
Hi Timothy, yes in fact I think 'defensive thinking' has characterised much of Christendom for the past coupla hundred years...I feel it's very closely related to our concern with 'truth', which is of course a VERY different 'form' of thinking compared to exploration, creativity, diversity, etc.
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