A Philosophy and Design for Christian Education

A Study Paper for the Curriculum Consultation Committee

Prepared by the Department of Religious Education
September, 1967

How shall we determine the role of Christian education?

In attempting to make some defining statement concerning the role of Christian education we shall necessarily be guided by our understanding of the nature and function of the church. We shall define the church as the historic and contemporary community of faith brought into being by God, committed to witness and communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ in the world for which Christ died. In the light of this description we may identify two major areas of significance in the life of the church; first, the nurture of the community of faith, and second the fulfillment of the ministry of reconciliation in the world.

Clearly the role of Christian education will be informed by the nature and mission of the church. It will be appropriate to suggest, therefore, that Christian education will serve a two-fold purpose, introducing and equipping. Roger Shinn draws attention to these functions in defining Christian education as “the effort to introduce persons into the life and mission of the community of Christian faith” (The Educational Mission of Our Church, p. 20). As such, Christian education is to be construed as both education in the Christian faith and education for the Christian mission. In terms of the first aspect of this statement, Christian education means learning the nature of the Christian faith and learning to participate in the Christian community and its way of life with the (assumption ?) that the community will provide the appropriate ground upon which a faith relationship with God may be evoked.

In terms of the second aspect, education for Christian mission simply emphasizes the fact that membership in the community of faith constitutes a unique [word missing] or vocation.

Faith in Jesus Christ means a belief that God himself is not willing to stand aloof from the world he has created. He exposes Himself to the world, risks its scorn and cruelty, enters into its life for the purpose of reconciliation. A Christian educational ministry that is unconcerned for mission is a contradiction in terms. This may be described, then, as the equipping role of Christian education. Relating these two functions, we may say that the church’s educational ministry must be so designed as to aid the church in its task of nurturing persons in the faith, thus preparing them for the mission of the church.

Finally, the informing relationship between the church and its program of Christian education should be reciprocal. Not only will the purpose of the church continue to inform Christian education as to its distinctive and particular role, but the curriculum should constitute a persistent reminder to the church of its life and mission. (In the broader sense, of course, curriculum may refer to the person’s total experience in the community of faith. For the purpose of this paper, the more specific meaning will be employed having to do with an overall design for particular experiences in a structured program.)

When the church speaks of Christian education it must be prepared to push its thinking up against a set of insistent questions. While it is possible to imagine such questions never being explicitly set forth, any curriculum design will imply answers even if they are unconsciously rendered. It seems better to state the questions initially, and deliberately attempt answers to them so that the curriculum will be shaped around a rational philosophy than to leave the primary questions unasked and risk an unsystematic and perhaps incompatible set of assumptions.

Therefore, the basic questions pressing upon us are:

1. What is the purpose of the curriculum? To what end is Christian education directed? (Objective)
2. What is to be taught and what is to be learned in order that this objective be achieved? What are the various areas of learning-the range of subject matter and the experiences to which subject matter is related? (Scope)
3. Where does the curriculum function? What is the learning environment in which it will operate? (Context)
4. How does learning take place? When is it believed that learning has taken place? (Learning tasks)
5. How are the components of a curriculum design or program related to on another and to the learner?

Thus four components of the educational task are identified-Objective, Scope, Context, Learning Tasks, which are to be related together by an organizing principle inferred in #5.

1. How Shall We Define the Objective of Christian Education?

A statement of the objective of Christian education should suggest the intent of the entire process, the achievement toward which all the experiences of Christian education, comprehended in the curriculum, are directed. In its simplest form such a statement could will be “to produce good disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ,” for this is the intent of the entire process. But such a statement lacks the clarity and precision necessary to shape a perceptive and responsible curriculum.

Several comprehensive yet succinct statements were studied and considered, but the following appears to us to speak most illuminatingly and directly:

“The objective for Christian education is that all persons be aware of God through his self-disclosure, especially his redeeming love as revealed in Jesus Christ, and that they respond in faith and love-to the end that they may know who they are, what they are and what their human situation means, grow as sons of God rotted in the Christian community, live in the spirit of God in every relationship, fulfill their common discipleship in the world, and abide in the Christian hope.”
A Design for Teaching–Learning
The Bethany Press, 1967, p. 8

Two significant characteristics emerge:

• The statement displays the life-long nature of the objective. There will be differences of awareness and response at various ages and stages but the differences will be in terms of maturity and of appropriateness of expression. The person may achieve the objective and continue toward it at the same time. This is the experience of becoming in the Christian faith and life. It is proper to point out here that the process of Christian education will acknowledge a balance between growth and rebirth, for while it is true that personal growth involves gradual and continual development, the Christian life also calls uniquely for continuing rebirth which is characterized by the radical disruption of one’s present being. Such a radical disruption is inherent in the process of becoming a new man in Christ.
• The statement is firmly rooted in the Christian perspective, thus it is expressed in a theological framework. Christian education is possible because of what God has done and what he continues to do, that is, his action in creation, the relationship he sustains to the world, and the nature of the persons he has created in that world. Christian nurture at its base is rooted in the Christian gospel.

At this juncture a crucial point emerges for those involved in curriculum development. The new Church School Handbook calls attention to this question in the following terms:

If the goal of Christian education is the shaping of a new kind of manhood, to initiate and guide changes in the way people relate to God, to the church, to others, and to themselves, then the program of Christian education cannot be centered solely on justifying the existence of a church or providing an encyclopedic knowledge of secondary matters. Rather must the program focus on bringing men into a vital encounter with God which will accelerate their growth in newness of life.
We are needing to come to the understanding that religious education is not disseminating information. Rather, it is the process of creating new persons in Christ Jesus. Such a process may well include careful consideration of our traditions and history, but not as ends in themselves. Such material must be a tool facilitating the personal encounter of the learner and God in an experience of revelation.
Church School Handbook, Chapter 1

A further observation deserves careful attention. Quite frequently, and properly, the objective of Christian education is described as a nurturing process. Indeed, the particular historical heritage of the Christian community of faith does constitute a body of information in which the learner may be said to be nurtured or indoctrinated. However, as Roger Shinn has pointed out, (The Educational Mission of Our Church, Chapter 5),

nurture stands in polar relation to exposure…. If Christian education emphasizes nurture apart from exposure, it misses its mission…. Part of Christian education, then, is exposure of persons to the demands of God and rigors of life. The Church must speak to the tragedy, lostness and disorganization of the modern world. It must confront its members with crisis…. A genuine community of faith is a community of revolt.

The curriculum will come nearer fulfilling its purpose when it is informed by this critical need, even at the discomforture of many who may wish to exclude the bewildering world of our time.

2. What is the Scope of Christian Education?

We ask here, what should appropriately be dealt with in the curriculum of Christian education? In addressing ourselves to the scope of the curriculum we shall be describing the field over which the church has legitimate purview for its educational ministry and from which the church may appropriately draw the content for its curriculum.

The scope of the curriculum is coextensive with what God has revealed through his redemptive action and the implications of this redemptive action for man in the whole field of relationships-God, man, nature, and history. The scope of the curriculum is thus identical with the scope of the church’s educational concerns.

Such a concept of the scope is based on the conviction that God comes to man in the world, calling men into relationship with him. Thus the Christian faith is not to be thought of primarily as a body of fact or belief. It is rather a living relationship with God, within which man is transformed and brought into a completely new way of life. Teaching about the Christian faith can provide a context in which faith can develop. Faith does not arise in a vacuum, and the church cannot separate its faith from the record of the events which called forth its faith. Thus the content of Christian education will include both information and experience. Traditional approaches to Christian education that took as their starting point either the data of Christian faith (e.g., the Bible, Church History) or the experience of persons to the exclusion of the other have been shown to be deficient.

This paper adopts the conviction that the content of the curriculum is best derived, not exclusively from either a “scripture-centered” or “life-centered” approach, but rather from the interaction between the gospel and the lifelong persistent concerns of the learner. The gospel comes alive and is recognized by the learner as relevant only when he sees the gospel in connection with his persistent lifelong concerns. Thus the description of the content of the curriculum delineates as comprehensively as possible the points of dynamic interaction between the gospel and the concerns of the person in his whole field of relationships. Here the emphasis lies upon the gospel as the “given” in Christianity and therefore becomes the “given” in the church’s educational work. All is to be seen in the light of or from the perspective of the gospel-God’s whole continuous redemptive action toward man, known especially in Jesus Christ. All of life’s experiences and relationships fall under the jurisdiction of the gospel and thus a point of interaction occurs where the “giveness” of the gospel meets the continuous concerns of the person in the whole field of his relationships.

In considering the range of man’s relationships we may identify (a) the Christian experience of man under God, (b) the Christian experience of man’s relation to man, and (c) the Christian experience of man within the natural world. The scope of the curriculum must reflect these three elements as three dimensions of reality with which every man is continuously concerned-the divine, the human, the natural. Together, these elements comprehend the entire scope-God’s redemptive action and its implications for man in the whole field of relationships.

In affirming that the scope of the curriculum is as broad as the entire range of life’s relationships, it yet remains to become specific as to how the curriculum design is broken down into areas of learning. The clue to such a breakdown is found in the statement of objective. When it is analyzed, five major facets emerge as distinctive areas of learning, yet integral to the whole:

God’s self-disclosure
Man’s human situation
The Christian’s response to God as a son
His life of discipleship resulting from his acceptance of himself as a son of God, and his response to God in faith and love
His experience in the church in community with fellow Christians

Each of these five facets reflects the three elements of the scope as demonstrated below:

God in his self-disclosure calls to man in his human situation and as he is related to other men and to his setting in the natural world.
Man’s human situation embraces his relationship to God, to other men, and to the natural order (space-time).
When man accepts himself as God’s son, the experience has meaning for his relationship to other men and to his space-time orientation.
Man’s answer to God’s call through Christian discipleship is in terms of his personal and social involvements including those of his setting in the natural world.

The community of Christians (gathered and dispersed), the church as a divine-human institution, in but not of the world, becomes the company of those who hear and heed God’s call.

Applying the three principles embraced in the scope (divine, human, nature) and using the five facets of the statement of objective, one could construct a curriculum design composed of five major areas of learning as follows:

Life and Its Setting: The meaning and Experience of Existence
Revelation: The Meaning and Experience of God’s Self-Disclosure
Sonship: The Meaning and Experience of Redemption
Vocation: The Meaning and Experience of Discipleship
The Church: The Meaning and Experience of Christian Community

Such an ordering is illustrative of how the components of Objective and Scope can be woven together into a curriculum design. It also is illustrative of the principle of intersection where the “giveness” of the gospel as content is brought to bear upon the learner in the context of his life experience.

Such an approach stands in contrast to a thoroughly content-centered approach which may simply ask, What topics do we have to teach? In such an approach the topics (Book of Mormon, Church History, Inspired Version of the Bible, or Doctrine) are largely sheared away from life-concerns of the learner and thus, more generally result in the accumulation of information than in the changing of life.

3. What is the Context for Christian Education?

It is clear that the Church teaches, for good or ill, not only through its formal structures and programs, but through its total life. The context or environment for Christian education is therefore the Christian community, the fellowship of persons confessing allegiance to Jesus Christ. The curriculum becomes a reality through the action of the worshiping, witnessing, nurturing community. The church provides the context in which human relationships may be marked by humility, acceptance, forgiveness, active good will and creative responsibility. It is important to make the distinction that the context for Christian education is not simply the class room, but further, and critically, the whole range of experience provided by the community of faith including the Christian family. This community not only provides a particular historical heritage, but constitutes itself so as to be an avenue for expressing commitment in the world.

4. How Does Christian Learning Take Place?

Certain learning tasks will be delineated at this point, based on the assumption that learning is a process of human change which can be ascribed to experience in the whole field of human relationships as described in the treatment of the scope of the curriculum. Recalling the earlier comment on the character of growth and resurrection, the process whereby the learner makes real in his life the objective of Christian education may be identified as the process of human becoming.

It is necessary to bear in mind that a certain modesty is becoming of the Christian educator. Christian education cannot make Christians. As the Church School Handbook has pointed out, “Christian education . . . does not carry the full burden of educating men into newness. . . . Rather it cooperates with the activity of God and facilitates the experience of encounter or revelation. It proceeds with a deep faith in the ability of God to change men.” (Church School Handbook, Chapter 1). While Christian education will take advantage of the best insights in learning theory, it is obvious that faith cannot be exclusively communicated by the process we normally speak of as educational process. Teaching is concerned with providing a context in which faith may be stimulated and nurtured, and the challenges of faith equipped and directed.

Here we will identify learning as involving exploration of the field of relationships and the consequent discovery of meaning and value which are internalized and appropriated within the life of the person and may lead to the assuming of responsibility in light of the objective of the church’s educational ministry. The curriculum needs to be designed to provide experiences in which the person gains insight into what he might become, and establishes for himself suitable goals to move him in the direction of God’s will as he perceives it. Here it is emphasized again that Christian education is not so much concerned with arming the individual with a body of information for its own sake as with providing insight or self-understanding.

Related to the foregoing is the recognition that the content of Christian education is not only in the subject matter employed, but also in the interpersonal relationships in the teacher-learner situation. Thus education takes place in the context of genuine dialogue. The teacher is not an answer-dispenser but a crucial part in a relationship which may itself be vital to the awakening responsiveness of the learner.

It is well to identify, for the sake of clarity and the purposes of evaluation, certain learning tasks. These offer practical handles for analyzing the experiences of the learner in any teaching-learning situation, and serve to remind us of the distinctive character of the task of Christian education. The major overall learning task involves listening with growing alertness to the gospel and responding in faith and love. Categories of this overall task include:

• Exploring the whole field of relationships in light of the gospel.
• Discovering meaning and value in the field of relationships in the light of the gospel.
• Appropriating personally these meanings and values in creative response.
• Assuming personal and social responsibility in the light of the gospel.

These tasks are intended to provide experiences by which the person comes into relationship with God, understanding and becoming committed to him as Creator, Judge and Redeemer. In this relationship he learns what it means to live as a free person under God and in responsible relationship to his neighbor.

5. Organizing Principle for the Curriculum

In designing a program of Christian education we have affirmed the need of four basic components; Objective, Context, Scope, and Learning Tasks. While these components are separable in the sense that they can be individually discussed, in reality they are dynamically interrelated forming together the process which is called Christian education. In a dynamic teaching-learning situation they all come to focus in a unified process within the learner where the operation of each component is dependent upon the others and all contribute vitally to the outcome of process itself.

Thus the four basic components are brought to a state of wholeness and interdependence by a principle of organization which demonstrates that none of the components can claim undue priority over another or insist upon an independent place in the teaching-learning process. That the components are so inter-related is demonstrated in the following diagram.

Some Implications for the Curriculum

1. Christian education acknowledges Jesus Christ and his gospel as the prime focus of human commitment. Therefore, it concerns itself with producing committed disciples, not simply “faithful church members.”
2. Christian education is directed toward changing men rather than rationalizing a sectarian viewpoint.
3. The response of faith is to be taught as the acceptance of discipleship, not simply as assent to a body of doctrine.
4. The debate over “content-centered” vs “person-centered” Christian education is misplaced. The content to be taught is the gospel. It has relevance through the fact that it intersects all of life’s experiences. Thus the curriculum will focus on the intersection of these two realities.
5. The curriculum will distinguish itself not in the volume of information it will disseminate, but in the quality of experience and encounter it can help the teacher-learner group achieve.
6. The curriculum will acknowledge that it is only the present age in which we can possibly live. Therefore, the life issues of contemporary man will constitute the focus, in the faith that the revelation of God is to be discerned in the events of contemporary life.
7. The style of life in the congregation is intimately related to the educational program since learning is not confined to the classroom. Reinforcement of the curriculum comes through congregational life which is characterized by servanthood, humility, forgiveness, acceptance, active good will and creative responsibility.