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STONE PILLOWS
The teaching life of a syncretic guerilla
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CAN EDUCATION EVEN BE CHRISTIAN?
Posted on August 10, 2011 by Larry Kamp
Well, I teach my students that everything can be and should be Christian to the
degree that it reflects and points to the Kingdom of God. As I understand it,
that is what Jesus meant when he prayed “may your will be done on earth as it is
in heaven.” Of course, then there is the challenge of trying to determine how
that plays out in real life. So I guess that puts me right back where I started
a couple years ago with all this.
Back in my early days of becoming a teacher in a Christian school, I engaged in
some vigorous debate with a couple of my colleagues (one in particular) about
whether or not the school was in fact church or not. I had the idea that somehow
it was, that somehow by attaching the word “Christian” to our formal name and by
including a statement of faith in our defining documents, we had allied
ourselves with the mission of the church (Good News). But most did not share
this position. One of my friends affirmed rather sharply that our job was
simply to teach children like any other school, while supplementing our teaching
with a few good doses of Christian faith from time to time (school chapel,
“devotions,” prayer, gathering “at the pole” on the feast day of Saint Betsy
Ross, etc.) Our main role, as one school leader actually defined it publicly
many years ago, was to oppose secular humanism (does that mean anything you
can’t find in your Scofield reference Bible?), bring “little souls to Christ,”
and loudly refute the “heresy” of evolution (yikes for me). Other than that, we
just needed to make sure that the test scores were high enough (and really, they
should be higher than those in the public schools, for heaven’s sake). I was,
and probably still am, naive enough to think that we might be required to do a
bit more for the Kingdom, and so I continued to lobby along those lines whenever
the opportunity presented itself.
But now, after almost thirty years of teaching in that kind of setting, I’m not
so sure any more. It feels like institutions have so much more to worry about
than the gospel. I may see an action or read a response that rattles me – it is
usually something I cannot imagine is healthy for a Christian community to
embrace or acquiesce to. But I’ll be assured that it was in fact a sound and
necessary business decision and that as responsible stewards of the institution,
we need to make sound business decisions. Hmmm. I think my friend might have
been right – maybe we can’t be the church.
Bonhoeffer wrote “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Is that
true for institutions and communities as well? Are institutions willing to die
out of faithfulness to Jesus and the life he calls us to? Probably not. We seem
to labor under the overarching premise that the institution MUST survive
indefinitely. Rather than continuing to pay attention to and revisit the
foundation of “being Christian” we have focused our energy upon all of the
floors and walls and ceilings that have been flimsily constructed, some of them
far-removed from the foundation itself. A community that is rooted “in Jesus,”
considers itself called “by Jesus,” and claims to aspire to being “wholly
Jesus” would find its actions, words and very ethos defined by those
propositions. But perhaps that is not at all realistic for an organization as
diversely constituted as a school. The fact that there are so many varied
reasons for folks being there in the first place, many of those reasons having
little or nothing at all to do with faith, creates an irresistible current we
can make little headway against.
So what is the best we can hope for? I hope it’s more than teaching “the right
things” or having children memorize the right verses. I hope it’s more than
filling a child’s head with what Richard Rohr in his blog today calls “a set of
mental abstractions we had to believe that would make God love us or that would
ensure that we would go to heaven.” I hope it’s more than creeds and formulas
and dogmas. If I can borrow from and paraphrase Haim Ginott, I am suspicious of
Christian education, if its aim is to produce merely a new generation of
acculturated church-goers whose faith is confined to a convenient and
user-friendly formula. Can we in fact use reading, writing, arithmetic “to make
our children more human” (Ginott) and more godly?
So many folks have already written about an authentically Christian way of life.
I’m not inventing anything new, nor can I really elaborate on what has already
been said. My question is, can any of this be done intentionally in a Christian
school? Or, perhaps a better question, what is the role of Christian schools in
this process of formation? Or is there a role? For myself, I have been wondering
a lot lately about whether it might be better to step outside of the Christian
school community and seek this work in the public school (though as far as I
know, they are not hiring Bible teachers right now).
I have no idea who is reading this blog aside from my faithful friend Stephanie.
But, if you have thoughts about Christian schools, experiences in them (good or
bad), or just some great stories about them, I’d love for you to share them.
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education,
education, Kingdom of God, teaching | 1 Comment
BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND: BEING, KNOWING, AND TRASH IN THE PARKING LOT
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Larry Kamp
I’ve been reacquainting myself with Shane Claiborne and “The Irresistible
Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical” (2006). There is a passage about a
third of the way in that I’ve read and re-read: “[F]olks were asking me what I
was going to do when I graduated from college. People always want to define you
by what you do. I started by saying ‘I’m not too concerned with what I am going
to do. I am more interested in who I am becoming.’ ”
What a great response! I certainly wish I had thought more like this so many
years ago. I’ve come to it late perhaps. I wish more of our Christian schools
also thought like this. They usually don’t. In most ways we are not all that
different from any other school, public or private. Our bottom line is
essentially the same – determining what the students know and how successful
they might be in parlaying what they know into avenues of success. If they all
read at the researched and acceptable levels of words per minute, if they all
get higher and higher scores on the standardized tests, if they all ingest
information and puke it back up “successfully” on the plethora of assessments
that clog the system, then we have been “successful.” The papers they get each
June tell them so.
Those people whose job it is to market our Christian schools and colleges
regularly seek out lists of successful alumni so that they can paste their
success stories into the sound bytes that will woo the masses and say “see how
good we are?!” Whenever I get asked for lists like that, I know what they want
– the power people, the alums who have the important jobs (and the money that
goes with all that), the folks who have “done” something. But there are quite a
few I know who wouldn’t necessarily fit the bill, and yet whom I consider to be
immensely “successful” people – they have been the dropouts drifting into lives
of chaos and confusion who somehow end up washed back up on shore at the feet of
the One who has pulled them out out the depths. You can see it in their eyes,
hear it in their voices, and feel it in their hugs. There is nothing like it!
But I know these aren’t the stories that the spinners are looking for.
As I have tried to grow in my understanding of and closeness to the God of
Creation, the God of the Fall, the God of Redemption, I find myself as a teacher
striving and wondering more in the direction of who the students might become.
And that is something that really can’t be measured in an achievement test or
inferred from a diploma. Still, it seems like this is the vocation of being a
Christian teacher, at least as I understand that vocation. This year at our
graduation ceremony, I tried something different for myself. I really
participated much more deeply in what was going on. As I shook hands with(or
hugged) each one of the graduates in the faculty reception line, after the kids
had received their diplomas, I looked right in the eyes of every student as they
came to me. I tried in those brief seconds to think about who that student had
become and who they might become. I tried to go for as deep a look as I could
manage in that brief time. It was a transforming experience for me to see them
this way in that moment. There really wasn’t time to play the “Who Might They
Be Ten Years From Now?” game, but I couldn’t resist trying. I spent a lot more
time at that reception than any one I had ever attended before. Wish I had
thought of this years ago. Weighty questions for a joyous occasion – looking at
these kids and wondering: what claims has the Kingdom made on their lives and
how faithful have I been as a teacher in representing this Kingdom to them?
But I guess the question at a more foundational level is, can Christian schools
really afford to educate for the Kingdom? Can Christian schools afford the
“cost of discipleship” that Bonhoeffer challenges us to consider? Can
Christian schools dare to embrace Kingdom values and ways of seeing that almost
certainly set us at direct odds with the cultures we live and move in, the
cultures we are are supposed to be preparing our children to move into
“successfully?” Can Christian schools cross the lines and step into the
“Irresistible Revolution” that Shane Claiborne proposes? Can Christian schools
lead corporate lives immersed in “Wholly Jesus” as Mark Foreman invites us to
consider? (Mark Foreman – Wholly Jesus: His Surprising Approach to Wholeness
and Why It Matters Today; 2008). Whose accreditation do we covet and pursue?
What approbations will make us more marketable and thus more “successful?” Whose
“well done” are we really waiting for and how does that longing play out in the
ways we do everything in our Christian schools?
Actually that was a lot of questions, wasn’t it. But they’re all spinning around
as I, alongside lots of scattered colleagues, face a new year of teaching and
learning. We are all pretty certain of our role in our students’ knowing. But
what is our role in our students’ becoming?
So, I can look at their transcripts and final grade reports and find out how
well these students did or didn’t do. I can check out their standardized test
scores. But how will they live in light of what we’ve tried to teach them? What
values will they embrace and conserve? How will those values inform their
individual choices and actions? A few days ago, I saw a young guy doing
something that was at the same time fascinating and alarming. I was in the
parking lot of a large chain store, watching him “clean” the lot with a leaf
blower. He looked sullen and unwelcoming – not a chance in this lifetime of his
returning my greeting or friendly nod. The store is located on a pretty busy
street in town, so it won’t take much to imagine how much human detritus had
been generated and abandoned there.
What was fascinating and alarming was watching the guy aiming withering blasts
at the soda cans, water bottles, Doritos wrappers and cigarette excrement,
cutting huge swaths in the chaos. The sections of pavement behind him were
pretty clean, as he drove his wasteful herd forward. But at no point did it ever
get cleaned up or picked up. He simply blew it from one end to the other until
it was all safely corralled onto an island of grass and dying lilies towards the
back of the store, with a good deal of it ending up around the corner (out of
sight) in the next parking lot. I really wanted to ask him how in fact he was
actually “cleaning” the lot. I wanted to ask him about his sense of the common
good and whether his actions were contributing anything towards that. I wanted
to ask him if he had any sense of a moral problem here. But he did not look like
he would like to be asked those questions. In fact, he looked like the sort of
fellow who would probably offer me an intimate acquaintance with his leaf
blower if I did ask him those questions.
What made him think this was okay? What was it in his learning that allowed him
to make that kind of a choice? What has he encountered in his learning that
helped him to understand justice, relationships, and the common good? At an
even more basic level, what he he known of civility? I’m drawn back to a letter
written by Haim Ginott. I keep a copy of it on my teaching podium at school all
year. The last line is always instructive and cautionary for me:
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human.
Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated
Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our
children more human.
So what to think about the trash in the parking lot? Is it about being, or
knowing, or both? Did the trash blower’s actions make him more human? Presumably
he sat in a bunch of classrooms during his life – what did we miss? In a lot of
ways this parking lot cleaner reminds me a lot of our government leaders who
just “solved” our debt crisis – blowing a bunch of junk around, but not really
cleaning up the mess. Were they acting in “more human” ways? Ginott seems to
think that this work of making folks more human is the business of all schools
and their teachers. Well, then it would certainly seem at least to be the
business of Christian schools and their communities. Are we there yet? Probably
not by a long shot. So, when someone asks if we’re “on the same page” these
days, I’m inclined to answer that I’m not even sure we are in the same library.
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education,
education, Kingdom of God, Mark Foreman, shane claiborne, teaching | 4 Comments
LOSING WEIGHT
Posted on July 16, 2011 by Larry Kamp
Remember him? A favorite movie. But this image has stayed with me since I first
saw it on the screen. Its a great image and a hilarious scene. But it also seems
right on the mark, as least as far as what he has become for so many. I’m afraid
that its how I think my students see him.
In all the time that has passed since I last wrote here, I have been thinking a
lot about the God discussions. Angry God, grace-filled God. Judging God,
forgiving God. Hell God, Heaven God. A God who on one hand could be seen to get
excited by the idea of bashing out the brains of Babylonian babies against
stones, or on the other hand invites folks carrying around loads of baggage to
“come and be refreshed.” There is certainly a plethora of biblical evidence for
a lot of this. All the denominational biases and their concomitant
hermeneutical machineries, the comfort pillows we seem to cherish or cling to
doggedly, will lead us in either direction, or down some other equally
convincing path. As my very first, and perhaps most influential Bible teacher,
Irwin Reist, taught us in our first classes with him, in hermeneutics “ya pays
your nickel, ya makes your choice.” Within the institutional church, and the
para-institutional church, and the extra-institutional church, there are as many
conceptions and claims about the who and what of God as there are people eager
to talk and write about that. (Which, blushingly admittedly, is what I’m doing
here.) It is hard to thread your way through this as a teacher. But these are
exactly the kinds of questions the students want to know about, often because
they are aware of the complexities of all the various answers, each answer
claiming that THIS is what you have to believe. It’s no wonder that many of
them are sleeping peacefully on Sunday mornings once they get to the age when
they are allowed to.
It’s all just too heavy.
Doctrine is fat. Dogma is fat. Theology is fat. And it all makes God very fat.
Our sacred texts often seem to seem to point us in the direction of a journey.
Doctrine tells us we have arrived. Jesus proclaims that we are blessed when we
are hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Dogma prepares a table before us,
announcing that there is plenty to eat, and then stuffs us senseless. Saul-Paul
invites us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Theology
offers us the job already done. And, for me at least, it all makes God seem
very fat. A lot like the image above
This wild, desert God, hovering over the face of the waters ( I love the
mystical energy of that word “hovering”), who opens what cannot be shut and who
shuts what cannot be opened – this immense immanence, transcendently mysterious,
wilderness-abiding God has been domesticated. Chained. Chained by 10,000
religious ideologies passing as “churches,” 100,000 doctrines claiming
truth,500,000 dogmas demanding allegiance or wielding the threat of exclusion.
Most of us (assuredly not all, though) who are in this business of God are a
part of that system. This is where education in a Christian community joins the
fray. We are always facing the God question if this is the vocation we choose to
embrace or somehow feel “called” to (though I like that particular language less
and less as I age.) I like to begin my classes with our older children with a
wonderful quote from “A Christmas Carol” – a scene early on in which Scrooge,
confronting the specter of his old partner, asks “who are you?” and “what do you
want with me?” These are questions I have been asking God for a long time. It’s
as good a place as any to begin the journey with these children. I cheerfully
invite them to ask them.
Once the discussions begin and the questions start coming, it is pretty clear
that these students are, like me, also confronting an overweight God and
wondering how in the world they are going to be able to wrestle with him. We
have done a very good job of teaching our children-students to fear God, in the
worst sense of the word. What we have not done is express an image of God that
offers the possibility of relationship. Heavy on judgment and jumping through
various hoops. Very light on grace.
So, is weight loss for God a starting point for Christian education? Can I
really talk to the students much about the Kingdom of God, while they are still
harboring this grossly overweight idea of the God who inhabits this kingdom? I
know that some of you are entering this idea as students, others as teachers,
and many as parents. It feels like an important idea to talk about.
I answer student questions about judgment and God with words I always found
reassuring, words I again learned from Irwin Reist: ” We will leave that in the
hands of a kind and loving God, which is where I want to be left, and where I’m
sure you want to be left.”
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education, Kingdom
of God, teaching | 5 Comments
REDEEMING RATS (AND OTHER CREEPY STUFF?)
Posted on April 20, 2011 by Larry Kamp
Last week in a group meeting, at school a student asked “that question” – does
God hate Satan? For me, it is pretty easy to answer (a resounding NO!) and yet
maybe I know what the student is really trying to find out – “who DOES God hate?
Does God hate me?” . . .because there seem to be so many hateful people in the
world, so many hateful things. Because we often end up hating ourselves at one
time or another. And that idea of being hated is too hard to imagine or bear.
The children really need to know who is worthy of being hated. So, after the
God-hating-Satan question come the inevitable questions about Hitler and the
9/11 terrorists and child molesters. And rats.
I have been thinking about rats a lot lately. I live in a city with a serious
rat problem. But then what city doesn’t have a serious rat problem? Be that as
it may, I am trying to reconcile prevailing views of rats with what we claim to
believe about the created order. I doubt that rats will ever make it onto
anyone’s endangered species list, even if their population plummets to a mere
two or three. In that event, it seems more likely that folks will be high-fiving
exterminators rather than lamenting the loss of a species or two. Even saying
the word “rat” conjures up something evil, despicable, worthy of every effort to
exterminate. Yet here they are, created, having design and purpose, occupying
some essential position in the created order, if we even believe in a created
order in the first place. The reality is that rats don’t fit so well into our
notions of that created order. It’s okay to hate them. Redeem them? Not part of
the plan.
But I’m intrigued by rats and find them actually pretty lovable and cute. Okay,
nothing like the sweet little baby penguin being tickled – a video making its
way across Facebook this morning. But still, for me there is something charming
about the little buggers. I like watching them. I like seeing them eat and
forage. I admire their ingenuity. I’d like to figure out ways to co-exist, but
the deck is pretty stacked against that. I even envy their ability to survive
being one of the most hated creatures on the planet. They have plenty of
company. There are hateful people who do hateful things. A few weeks ago I
attended a conference that included a group conversation with author Daniel
Goldhagen (“Worse Than War” and “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”) who was
speaking about his latest book dealing with genocide. I came away from that
meeting stupefied again by the enormity of genocidal hatred. But what do we
teach about that as educators? What do we teach about that as Christian
educators? What do we do about our hate for the haters or the hateful? Is it
okay to hate them, to wish them evil or harm? Do we have an idea of what justice
looks like for Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Milosevic, Lt. William Calley, Jared
Loughner? Redeem them? Part of the plan, or not? Leave Rob Bell and Love Wins
out of this for the moment – I have the feeling I don’t need that kind of
additional trouble. But the standard answers, the standard options for
appropriate justice don’t work for me. They miss the point of redemption.
On my teaching lectern at school I have the Chaim Ginot letter to a teacher
permanently affixed to the table. On the page, I embedded an image of Hitler.
Not one the well-known images of the salute, or pumping fist or dark mien – the
photo is of him as a baby or toddler, probably around the age of one or two.
There is no hint of hatred or prejudice or genocide attached to Hitler’s image
yet. No camps, no Blitzkrieg, no air raids. Just a little kid, like all the
millions of little kids whose parents dress them up for a photograph that will
capture a single moment of love and care. I’m no Calvinist. I don’t think
Hitler was predestined to advance murder at horrendous rates and volumes. I
don’t think Jared Loughner was predestined to kill six people at a grocery store
in Tucson. I don’t even think that rats were predestined to become vermin. There
is something more to creation than that, for people and for rats. I get a hint
of that from gazing at the photo. I also get a strong scent of that kind of hope
from God, from what I fond in the pages of the Bible, from the strong and
ecstatic proclamations of redemption and resurrection. There is a whiff of
intoxicating air from The Garden.
John places the story of Lazarus’ restoration to life just before the Passion
narrative. There’s nastiness all over this story. Four days dead. What would
that look like? We get a good idea from Lazarus’ sister Martha what it would
smell like. That is someone far gone, way past the hope of a changed life or
destiny. Decay and corruption – nothing really to work with. But evidently
not. Evidently there is enough to work with. There always is. For me, that is
what redemption is about. No one is that far gone. So when I look at Hitler’s
baby picture, I wonder what someone missed, when someone gave up, when someone
decided he was past hope, why someone stopped seeing potential and promise. And
then I look up from that image to the rows of children in front of me and
hoping/praying that I will not make the same mistake. It is touchy work, but
filled with such hope and promise. Kind of like Lazarus?
Now, should I look for a safe place to offer the neighborhood rats peanut
butter?
Posted in Christian Education, Education, Uncategorized | Tagged Christian
education, Kingdom of God, Lazarus, teaching | 3 Comments
INVISIBLE NEIGHBORS
Posted on November 13, 2010 by Larry Kamp
About a month ago, I stood at the podium of our school’s Annual Fund-Raising
Dinner. My job was to focus the guests’ minds upon the stated purpose of the
evening – to raise much-needed money for the community. I never feel very good
at it myself, but I get asked and so I comply. But I’ve had a lot on my mind
lately, especially about the nature of what exactly we are doing or ought to be
doing as Christian educators. It all goes back to some of the questions I asked
in this space back when I first opened all of this up – what is the purpose of a
Christian school? I had some idea of what I wanted to say to the dinner guests,
but when I got up to the front of the room, I was very distracted by the long
row of waiters and servers off to one side of the room, waiting for all of us to
finish our cake and coffee. They were very much in the room and hard to miss in
their neat rows of white shirts and black pants. Yet as I looked at them before
I began to speak, it hit me just how much they were not in the room. They were
not a part of this at all. They were simply the ones who brought us water or
sliced our beef or slapped on the pasta – nameless and completely separate from
“us.” They were not people with stories, with hopes and dreams, with crushing
failures and daunting challenges, with remarkable gifts and capacities for
friendship. Yet they were/are people whom God loved and calls. In those seconds
as I looked at them, I saw them standing there. And yet they were invisible. I
wondered to myself how my being Christian was possibly going to make any
difference to them, what difference a Christian education was going to make for
them. And it sure seemed like it should make a difference.
So my talk began to go in a direction I had not planned. I thought to myself,
and probably out loud as well, that if a group of Christians gathered together
ostensibly in the name of Jesus to support His work and calling for us, could
actually ignore such a prominent group of people standing right next to us, why
should we be surprised that we find it so easy to ignore the people in the next
town, the next state, the next country, the next continent? We become so
addicted to the bumper sticker idea of “bringing others to Christ” that we have
completely forgotten how to bring Christ to others.
Do you remember those old “Four Spiritual Laws” booklets we were supposed to
hand out back in the day? I remember that first Law very well: “God loves you
and has a wonderful plan for your life.” All true, all well and good. But just
how does anyone know that God loves them? How do they experience this love?
Simply by reading a little booklet? I doubt it. What I am trying hard to
communicate to my students in this Christian school is that we become the
expressions of God’s love, we become the carriers of this truth, not with our
words by with the ways we establish contact and connection with “the neighbor.”
Bishop John A.T. Robinson stated that folks would never find a gracious God
until they had found a gracious neighbor. Did we serve as vessels of God’s grace
to those waiters? Doubtful. And this led me to state an improvised vision of
what a child could become in the kingdom, educated to see and understand the
neighbor through the eyes of Isaiah 58 or Matthew 25. What would happen in an
unknown future if even a few of our presidents, corporate executives, bus
drivers, waiters, store clerks, police officers, mail carriers – even our
fellow drivers – saw the world this way? What if we as Christian educators could
help that vision begin to materialize?
I have been quoting to our older students the words attributed to St. Francis to
“preach the Gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.” Did we preach to
those waiters? I am sure that we did not. I didn’t, anyway. So, now I’m
thinking out loud a lot with our students about neighbors. Who are the Lazaruses
at our gates, who are the bloody and beaten souls on the road? And, probably
more importantly, how do we learn even to see them? Is this a goal of Christian
education? Can we teach our students to walk the Jericho Road with eyes that
are wide open and sweeping back and forth to find our neighbors?
Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion
looks out to the earth,
yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good
and yours are the hands by which he is to bless us now.
Teresa of Avila
Posted in Christian Education, Education | 2 Comments
COMMUTE-ITY
Posted on September 13, 2010 by Larry Kamp
I spent my young and perhaps most formative years as a farm boy. Most of my
friend’s fathers didn’t drive anywhere to work except maybe moving the tractor
from one field to the next. If they did drive to work, it was somewhere close
by – a downtown store or shop, the feed co-op, the mill or factory. Perhaps it
is a childishly naïve memory, but somehow it seemed like life had a certain
wholeness to it, a sense of place within which almost every single aspect of
daily living took place. When we did forage out to a big city, it was always as
a visitor with a sense of urgency about doing what had to be done and getting
quickly back “home.” “Church” was close, “school” was close, and we often saw
the same faces at both, adult as well as child. Life did not seem
compartmentalized or fractured. We often ate what we raised (even a pet cow,
which probably in itself ought to be the subject of its own blog on childhood
trauma) and got our clothes from the Hendrick’s store or Montgomery Ward
catalogue. Sometimes an interested student asks me now if that sort of life
wasn’t lonely and isolated. For most of them, such a lifestyle seems tedious and
boring. It probably was, or seems that way from our current vantage point.
There were no neighborhood friends to play with or hang out with. But I like to
remind the students that there is a wide difference between a neighborhood and a
community.
Of course, that way of life seems quite archaic and has largely vanished.
Undoubtedly our memories of it romanticize the whole notion, and when we dig
deep enough we sometimes uncover appalling amounts of dysfunction and isolation
and pain. But despite that, there was at least the beginning of a sense of
connectedness. Community is much harder to establish or build or maintain in a
society where the operative word is “commute.” Commute-ity defines who we are
and how we think. In commute-ity we move from one space to another, leaving very
few traces of our selves behind. In commute-ity, what happens is what happens to
me regardless of who else things happen to. In commute-ity, we have houses,
not homes, churches, not Church. In commute-ity, education is assessed by how
much information we can puke up on a piece of paper. In commute-ity no one
seems to care much about what we know, how we know, or what we want to know. Is
it even possible to talk about justice in commute-ity? Justice seems to mean a
level of engagement with others and the Other, something that commute-ity
mitigates against.
I suspect that most of us are spiritual commuters or at least ecclesiological
commuters. We move easily to and from these places or times we designate as
“sacred” back into a world we designate as “real.” We “go to church,” “go to
school,” “go to work,” all of that implying some sort movement from one thing
(whatever that is) to something else completely different. And in all of that we
have a hard enough time establishing connections with the people we like and
“go” with. Who has the resources or even the awareness to include the Other or
others in that? Who even thinks about them in the various daily and weekly
commutes?
We spend a lot of time, energy and money on making those places we “go” to
habitable and comfortable. We groom them attentively. It has become
increasingly important for us to grow and groom a church. We can even hold
seminars and engage “experts” to tell us how to do that better, even though we
may not be entirely clear on just what it is we are growing. Because it is a
place that we regularly commute to, it is really the idea of a church captures
our energy. The idea of Church? Well, that seems ethereal and mostly illusive.
We are pretty good at commute-ity, and that will do for now.
So where does Christian education come into this? What does this mean to me
today as I face my students?
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<!–[endif]–>We spend a lot of time, energy and money on making those places we
“go” to habitable and comfortable.
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education,
education, Kingdom of God, teaching | Leave a comment
FACING MY CLASSROOM: THE ENDGAME
Posted on August 23, 2010 by Larry Kamp
In two short days, all the teachers return and I’m fretting a bit over leading
the group worship time. I feel like my ideas about teaching from a biblical and
theocentric perspective have been changing and leaning towards this direction
for a long time. But somehow this summer, I’ve felt those ideas shifting in
seismic ways, thanks in no small part to the ministrations and musings of so
many people – Henri Nouwen, Joel Anderle, Beth Maynard, Walter Brueggemann,
James Smith. It is a little dizzying and disorienting, like the roller coasters
I avoid so vigorously. I feel like I’ve experienced my own
theological/pedagogical version of the movie “2012” (which was actually pretty
insipid with some great visuals thrown in). And yet it is exhilarating and
energizing. I know that the routines and rigors of starting a school year will
take their toll soon enough, but right now I am pretty jazzed about hitting the
classroom.
I’m drawn ever more fixedly to the Mary/Martha text as a starting point for
thinking about education in a Christian community. I’m also drawn to James
Smith’s idea of an essential and vital identification of education with liturgy.
So I think I’ll just turn the rest of this space over to him today. I’ve read
the following paragraph about a dozen times over the past 8 hours . . . sort of
shakes the foundations of one’s thought about the year (or years) ahead.
“What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the
absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and
desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our
head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut – what the New
testament refers to as kardia, “the heart”? What if education was primarily
concerned with shaping our hopes and passions – our visions of “the good life” –
and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our
thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our
imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as
much to do with our bodies as with our minds?
“What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what
we love?”
(Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p. 17)
“Martha, Martha you are anxious and troubled about many things; there is need of
only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away
from her.” (Luke 10:41 – 42)
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education,
education, Mary & Martha, teaching | Leave a comment
WHAT ARE WE TEACHING FOR?
Posted on August 22, 2010 by Larry Kamp
I came across a sobering quote from Denise Pope’s book, “Doing School: How We
Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated
Students.” In her book the quote is attributed to a high school sophomore named
Kevin, who says “[p]eople don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good
grades, which brings them to college, which brings them the high-paying job,
which brings them to happiness, so they think. But basically, grades is where
it’s at.” The only words here that give me hope are “so they think.” That
possibly redeems the quote. Maybe Kevin believes there might actually be more to
it. As for the rest of it, is he very far off the mark? I suspect that a lot of
us who teach hope this isn’t true. But I bet we know better. Doesn’t it often
seem like this is “where’s it’s at?” What do most parent conferences center
around? Academic progress. Being at grade level. Something better than a meager
“satisfactory.” What we observe and assess needs to fit into the categories we
create for the acquisition of skills. And that is what everyone wants to see. We
are back to Martha.
“How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated
Students.” What an indictment. But I can’t disagree with it, not even within my
tiny little Christian school community. I’m not sure just how successful we are
in resisting this ourselves. It is safer to teach Martha. We have state and
national standards and frameworks for that. The desired outcomes have all been
plotted out and all we need to do is to plug in the formulas that will get all
of the students there. And there are plenty of formulas. You need them all
because you have to get everybody “there.” There are so many formulas that we
don’t have any time for much else in our teaching. Mary doesn’t stand a chance
here.
It feels like we in Christian education ought to feel sharply the sting of Dr.
Pope’s indictment of what she sees to be the systemic failures of current
education practice. It feels like we should be resisting this system hard.
Instead we baptize the system in the name of God by adding the “Christian”
somewhere either in the name or the mission statement. And has the system been
redeemed before this baptism was applied? Does this system begin the long
journey in the direction of sanctification – the sense of being made Holy and
God-ly – after the baptism has been applied? What makes our education different?
Counter-cultural? Prophetic?
What would happen if we did shift our thinking? Would parents still send their
children to us? Or would they look for places that offer greater guarantees of
success and the ever important “edge?” Can any Christian school afford to be
counter-cultural? Who wants to pay hard tuition dollars for that?
I know those are not easy questions. But I have this nagging conviction that
raising up Marys is the way to go, that defying the conventions is the right
thing to do in the name of God and His Kingdom, that living out the Gospel and
the Torah within the structures, practices and routines of education is what it
means to be called to this work.
Can we talk about this? Dare we?
Posted in Christian Education, Education | Tagged Christian education,
education, Kingdom of God, teaching | Leave a comment
“MARY WENT TO SCHOOL ONE DAY?”
Posted on August 15, 2010 by Larry Kamp
So, what is it about Mary? For me it is somehow about her single-mindedness.
All she can see is God/Jesus/The Kingdom. This way of seeing (can we call it a
world-view?) determines her actions, her responses, her choices. It necessarily
excludes any other way of seeing things, even to the neglect of participation in
actions that seem to be socially and culturally required of her. Those alleged
requirements are completely at odds with the way Mary sees things, and she
discards them without seeming to think about it much at all. Mary’s way of
seeing under-determines the single action and thought of her life, at least in
this moment. There is nothing that this way of seeing does not take in or
affect in profound ways. This way of thinking is decidedly counter-cultural,
decidedly daring, and decidedly risky. But not to Mary. I doubt that she sees
it that way at all. For her, it is the most natural and logical place to be –
sitting at the feet of Jesus. I can almost imagine Mary turning to Martha with
the hint of a smile on her face and saying something like “why Martha, what an
odd thing for you to say! Don’t you know who this is? Don’t you see? ” It is an
act of worship. It is a liturgical response that I aspire to, something I so
much want to feel and experience. It is so authentic, so completely natural for
her. But all I can do is stand dumbly at the side and watch this tableau unfold
before me, filling me with feelings of shame, remorse, conviction, confusion. I
want to see Jesus this way. But .. can’t I? I mean, I want that “better part”
that Mary has chosen…don’t I?
My friend and pastor, Joel Anderle preached a powerful sermon this morning to
our community that has seared me like this story sears me. He reminded me again
about the possibility of seeing things from a different vantage point – the
Kingdom of God and a complete sense of what it means to be God-ly, a vantage
point that will call into question every single aspect of my life from the
crudest and most mundane to the most elevated. My friend Beth Maynard who is
also a minister, a priest of the Anglican Communion, sent me one of her recent
sermons…again, a prodding to think seriously about what it is I sow, what it is
I hope to harvest, what is it that I desire. My commitment to Christian faith
means (supposedly) that I’ve decided that the Kingdom is what I desire. But is
that the truth? Is that obvious from the various aspects of my life? Is that
truly how I see everything?
So, you see how this story scares me? And it’s not just about me and how far
off the mark I might be. It’s me as a teacher, as a leader in a Christian school
charged with overseeing and developing the curriculum. It’s about me leading the
children in worship every week. Where am I leading them? Toward what? How should
we be measuring success in a Christian community of leaders? What
under-determines our teaching? My friend Stephanie, a teacher and school leader
who responded to an earlier posting said “[p]art of it I think is about making
reflection (Mary’s part) and daydreaming part of the adult school community too!
Teachers have to love it and model it. Teachers have to see beyond OUTCOMES as
the big goal. It’s a challenge.”
My head is spinning from all of this. But before I k nock off for the night, I
want to mention a book that Beth referred to in her sermon. I’m not sure if any
of my teacher friends or teaching friends even look at this blog or follow the
link. But just in case, the book is by James K.A. Smith and is entitled
“Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation.” Here are the
opening sentences from his Introduction (p. 17):
What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a
distinctively Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when
appended to education?
Yes, indeed. And where do our Mary and Martha students fit into this inquiry?
Posted in Education | Tagged Christian education, education, Kingdom of God,
teaching | Leave a comment
RAISING MARTHAS
Posted on August 14, 2010 by Larry Kamp
It feels to me that education is about raising Marthas. They are the ones who
get the job done. Marthas embody those characteristics that show up on the plus
side of the progress report. Marthas:
are responsible…
are reliable…
fulfill their obligations…
get their work done on time…
are focused…
do what’s expected of them…
I could go through my own school’s character assessment section on the report
cards and find nearly everything on the list is for Martha. Marthas do stuff.
And most of the time we either admire or envy them for it. Marthas make the
honor roll. We dream about classrooms full of them.
But now I’m bumping into Luke 10: 41 & 42 and discovering that Marthas are
missing the point. So, how does this inform my teaching? How does this inform
my educational leadership in this little community? More to the point, what in
the world have I done about raising Marys?
Posted in Education | Tagged Christian education, education, teaching | 2
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