Photo by Aída Besançon Spencer
When
A
da was a little girl, she was sent to “Fun to
Learn,” the name by which kindergarten was being disguised and promoted by the
excellent Carol Morgan School of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where
my wife was born. She thought this name was one word: “Funtolearn.” She enjoyed
that day and felt complete satisfaction with her experience. Imagine her shock,
when, waking up the next morning, she found herself expected to go back again.
What for? Hadn’t she been there and done that? Why would parents and teachers
expect her to go back? She was obedient but baffled. How could she imagine what
would follow? A lifetime of “going back” to grammar school, junior high school
(aka middle school), senior high school, college, and several seminaries for an
M.Div., Th.M., Ph.D., and a post-graduate year, ending up in school permanently
as a professor. “Fun to Learn,” for her, became a lifetime task.
Today, learning has indeed become a lifetime experience, perhaps more intensely than ever before, since, not just content, but learning paradigms themselves are continually changing. How and what one learned in an analog world has changed dramatically in style and content when one’s context has become a digital world, constantly shifting at every level. Such change alters the style(s) of learning. And, as new content is introduced, Christian teachers wonder how that affects a curriculum that is itself timeless, since its core content is the study of the eternal unchanging God.
These questions came to me with the force of collision by a tailgating tractor trailer. Both learning style(s) and the content valued by my students had been swiftly altering behind my back. This truth suddenly jolted me when I realized students were starting to skip much of the three-plus hour lectures I had posted on the net and were chafing at the size of the reading list for my course. Professor (and now Dean) Dr. Gerry Wheaton had warned us in an eye-opening lecture to the faculty that the attention span of students had plummeted. I looked around, and there was his proof – right before my eyes.
When I taught my first three decades at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I was expected to lecture. Content was key. Evangelical scholars have always believed there is a kerygma – a core message at the center of the Christian faith. But this was not a doctrine taken for granted in most of my education in more liberal institutions. In the basic seminary training to which I was sent by the presbytery under whose care I had been entrusted, we students were asked if the gospel was an apple or an onion. We invested an entire class session grappling with this issue. I opted for an apple: there was a core – a message that was central – God coming to earth to rescue humans from eternal destruction.[1] The professor turned out to believe the answer was an onion. One peels each layer away until there is nothing. Our beliefs are refined in the process of peeling. In that sense, the Christian endeavor, we were informed, is the application of faith to the layers of questions that comprise our religion. Theology, we were told, is not giving answers but “asking questions.” This was our oblique introduction to the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Enlightenment into Post-Enlightenment thinking, which, we students were to discover eventually spawned the God is Dead Movement. This sorry result comprised our entire introductory course in theology.
Recently, I visited that alma mater after fifty years and, in a general presentation, before all of us alumni, we were informed that the core of ministry was not to try to fix anyone or anything. I was shocked and so were my former classmates. Fixing is what we do, as we assist God in reconciling the world with the good news of Jesus’s rescue plan (2 Cor. 5:18-20). But, I suppose, if one’s view is there is nothing to teach, there may be nothing to do. If faith is about the process, a journey with no destination, then the search itself provides the meaning. The implication is that ministry is comprised of suffering along together with our fellow searchers of all faiths, since there is no balm in this Gilead to apply.
When I was first confronted with this type of theological thinking, I was in the halcyon days of my faith, when the Jesus Movement was flourishing. We were living in a climate of cultural conflict, amid protesting against the Vietnam war, campus student unrest, violent response from campus security, and, in one lethal case, the National Guard. We young Christians were just as bold, confronting the world with the liberating message of Jesus. Pursuing the food imagery noted above, the response we would have given to the idea that God, if God should God happen to exist, is inaccessible, and the Christian faith is but one of many pious activities seeking to make the world a better place, would have been to summon up the old traditional reply that had served us so well even earlier in our youth: “Baloney!” In the Jesus Movement, we would have accompanied that brief critique by a bold proclamation to get right with Jesus, the true liberator, and source of peace, and provider of life’s meaning, perhaps accompanied in illustration by an index finger pointed up to the sky in the famous one-way sign, endemic as it was to the Jesus Movement.
Today, however, the social climate has changed. Jeffrey M. Jones on the Gallup Wellbeing website tells us, “Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups,” so that only “Three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services regularly,” the only exception being “Mormons at 67%.”[2] The perks, of course, are high for Mormons, for, as their Journal of Discourses 2:1 explains, obedience to the Mormon Church is one of the requirements to continue to retain their salvation (along with faith in Christ, good works, baptism, and “keeping the commandments of God [which] will cleanse away the stain of sin”[3]), as they work their way toward achieving deification in the afterlife and power to rule as gods themselves.[4] Christians are not under such a rigorous set of rules, but are urged not to neglect attending church in Hebrews but to meet to encourage one another, which is the freedom of grace that runs through the Christian faith (Heb. 10:24-25).
Today, I can adopt a more irenic and scholarly vein and simply say to my non-fixing, onion-oriented denomination-mates: “I disagree.” And I believe the Scriptures and the entire history of the Christian Church back me up. As an historically orthodox, evangelical Christian, I believe emphatically there is a dogma to learn, a central belief to study and to share, a revelation from our Creator and Recreator that connects everything and by which we will be rescued to transcend death and gain eternal life.
In the meantime, we can visit another set of folk sayings about these traditional images: if the nourishing apple keeps the doctor away, and the onion keeps everybody away, maybe that explains why so many churches are increasingly alone. People are starving for what God has to offer, and an onion by itself is a meager meal.
As for the application to learning, yes, it is obvious that attention spans are shrinking because the net demands more short-term focusing. Websites that share information, but feature advertisements, particularly demand a more intense search among distracting images to glean out the information being sought. This usually needs to happen within seconds. End result? The long lecture has gone the way of all flesh. So, I have reduced my three-or-so hour lectures into a series of short films full of salient pictures that illustrate the data I need to share. Lists are in. Long explanations are out. Students love to talk, so breakout groups on key issues are essential for a learning strategy that works.
Their questions and applications are excellent. I organize both these categories separately and build each class out of them. The course meets every other week and I group all the questions into sections and assiduously search out each one. The first part of class is my presentation on what they asked from the readings and my videos with an opportunity for input by each student author or any other class member. Then, after a break, I have organized breakout groups centering around each set of similar applications. I have two able colleagues, both seasoned educators, Rev. Jeanne DeFazio and Rev. Dr. Wilma Faye Mathis, one for each section, who help me make these happen. This produces a very orderly class structure, addressing what the students actually want to learn, based on what I was required to teach. The term paper is the final key to ensure student success.
We teach how to answer all ministry questions from the nature of God. For those who might be interested to see how it’s done, we and a variety of international scholars explore the attributes of God in our book The Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God, and I have detailed my teaching methodology with a book I edited with Jeanne DeFazio, Empowering English Language Learners. I also allow all students to redo their papers until they have raised the grade to their desired level – or the course time runs out. The payoff for them is they have the opportunity to earn the grade they want to receive. The payoff for me is that, when they raise their grade to an A, they have mastered the content of the course. Sometimes it has taken eight versions of their term paper to get it all right, so they learn perseverance in their scholarship as well.
In short, the content of what I am teaching is eternal. While this earth changes, the Lord does not change (Heb. 1:10-13). The teaching strategies with which we nourish each new generation of our students may alter with the times; the nourishment itself will always be the faith once given to the saints (Jude 3). And when one is studying about the wondrous God who loves us, it is fun to learn.
Bill
[1] Aída offered a mango as an alternative to an apple and Bill added an avocado. Both have a large central pit. The image of an onion was popularized by Rudolf Bultmann who believed that form critical study, distinguishing “the various levels of tradition,” cannot define “with certainty the extent of the authentic words of Jesus,” yet also it is not, “like the peeling of an onion, a reduction to nothingness.” “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” in Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, trans. Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962 [1934]), 60-61.
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx, posted, 3/25/2024.
[3] See Journal of Discourses: Public sermons by Mormon leaders from 1851-1886, Vol. 2 (Oct. 23, 1853): 1-10, Brigham Young, ”The Gospel—Growing in Knowledge—The Lord's Supper—Blessings of Faithfulness—Utility of Persecution—Creation of Adam—Experience,” https://jod.mrm.org/2.
[4] For an explanation with a Christian response, see Walter Martin and ed. Hank Hanegraaff, “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (The Mormons), ch. 6 (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1997), pp. 233-35.
