Educating Congregations: The Future of Christian Education

Rating:
Summary: Helpful anaysis of the state of religious education .
Review: Charles R. Foster, Educating Congregations: The future of Christian Education, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994. 160 pages. ISBN 0-687-00245-1

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Educating Congregations is a hopeful voice for a Church that could easily lose its way in the "pluralistic and technological global village". (p. 11) It begins by acknowledging that the cup which used to hold the future of the Church is cracked. Foster argues that church education needs to be corporate, because it is only in community that we can nurture Christian faith, identity and vocation. He advocates an "incarnate" style of education.

I found helpful Professor Foster's analysis of contemporary flaws in Christian education.

1. We do seem to have lost our corporate memory, and are increasingly paralysed in our attempts to make connections with the next generation. We share too tiny a story of background with young people for them to explore with us.

2. Our Bible teaching does seem irrelevant, in the sense that many people have been part of our churches and their educational programmes for decades and yet they have not had their real questions answered.

3. Our Christian education goals do seem to have been subverted for therapeutic or even marketing purposes. The most severe implication of this is that Christian education has come to mean providing "programmes" for the children and a narrow group of adult "learners", rather than fostering the growth of all the congregation in the love and knowledge of God.

4. It does appear that the Church continues to be held in "cultural captivity", subtly endorsing conventional secular values or political correctness, unable to make a Gospel critique of the culture.

5. And in the past few years, we do seem to have seen the church's educational strategy collapse. Times have changed: computers and television have brought about systemic changes in our lives; in al denominations, the central support of congregations for Christian formation has been drastically curtailed, and market for! ces drive curriculum choices and changes.

Into this challenging scenario, Charles Foster brings hope. Education, he says, consists in preparation for events, engagement in them, and critical reflection on them. He discerns different kinds of events in a congregation's life suitable for this "event-full" education. He names them paradigmatic (those that pattern the basis of our common life), seasonal, and occasional.

Foster makes an attractive case that if a congregation attends seriously to the normal events in its life, it will be engaged in effective education of its members. It may well choose to continue to use existing programmes and processes, like EFM or set Sunday School syllabuses, but not as an end in themselves.

Foster cites a church in which the members prepare for the seasons by extensive study of pertinent biblical texts and the traditions. This exhaustive process lasts months. This strategy can help a congregation build community, make meaning, and nurture its hope for its future.

As I read this reader-friendly book, my hope was nurtured too. The US context translates only too readily into our own, and both the analysis presented and the strategies suggested are easy to appreciate and follow.

My fear is that the title, Educating Congregations will put people off a resource that will have broad value in supporting the whole ministry of a congregation. This is one of a series of recent books which put education back into its proper rôle, as an enabler of the total life of a congregation.