Song: Redemption Tattoo | Red Letter Christians Blog |

Friends,

I spent time last week learning how Committees on Ministry can help candidates for ordination follow alternative paths to get the education they need. Changing with the times is hard work, and the road never seems quite as clear as we'd like.

-Liz

Sunday School?

A significant role of the church is education. In Episcopal circles we call it formation to distinguish it from the simple passing on of knowledge.

We call it "Sunday School" but I'm talking here about all education programs, on any day, within worship, small groups, and elsewhere.

While in recent history much focus has been on learning important facts of our faith--transmitting the credo--that is, the information we as Christians believe. And yet what our youth remember the most is the sense of pistis--the trust of the people engaged, which grows into a trust in God.

From my DMin advisor, The Rev. Dr. Russ Dalton, I learned to focus instead on whether our religious education is transformative. Are people changed by what they are learning at church?

John Wesley started modern Sunday School because he literally created schools that met on Sunday--because that was the only day off the children had from work. He taught bible as a strategy for these children to learn to read. We might think he was merely imparting information, but we must recognize the radicalness of this idea. Sunday School was providing opportunities, hope, a way to create a new future. He was insisting that everyone has a vocation given by God.

It is a justice-practice to find a way for each person, of every age and stage, to discern how God is calling them in this time and place. In each age and stage that calling may be different, so this learning continues throughout our lifetime. Our faith matures, but also changes. We develop new skills, and let go of old goals.

In this season of chaos and unrest, of injustice and violence, I feel an urgency to help Christians to discern their next vocation. Their calling. Where and how they might speak good news to the shadows of our culture.

Formation, education, it happens in many places within the church community. The sermon is a didactic learning time. The children's moment aims to be a little more dialogic. In our classrooms, for adults and for children, I hope that we building a network model where the learners speak with, engage with, and argue with each other; the leader is more a facilitator of discussion and less the answerer of all questions. We need information to find God's call: bible, theology, ethics, and history.

But finding vocation requires more than group instruction. Our personal development grows with inward work on our own, and with mentoring. Leaders of each congregation help discern their vocation in their connections to each other, in their one-on-ones with the pastor or lay leader, in their speaking in the community, in the work of reflecting on what they have done and want to do, and in recognizing their passions.

We also find vocation in our social interactions. What do other people notice about us, what role do we play at parties and potlucks? Are we more interested in finding everyone a seat at the meal program, or in starting up conversations, or figuring out the volunteer schedule? It is in our connection to others that we learn how we are called to help others.

I think we have lost some of the point of Wesley's Sunday Schools. Education and vocational discernment is a process of liberation. The earliest Sunday Schools were not just one more thing for a child to do after a long work week. These schools provided the potential for each one to be freed from the path that was set before them.

Jesus declares that his ministry is to free the captives. Finding vocation is liberative action, finding how we captive to what was, and being freed to the next new thing where God calls us. Jesus modeled living out God's path, we are being freed to do the same.

Tell me about your congregation's education activities? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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Through Red Letter Christians, Stephen White offers: Comfortable and Compromised: The American Church in the Mirror of the Early Church, a challenge for church to be more distinct from the world around us.

Redemption Tattoo by one of my beloved singer-songwriters, Beth DeSombre. (3:54) "Whether you seek delight or damnation, there's hope for eternity here."

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