Religion, like other fields, is often captive to trends, and so churches reorganize and restructure and revision just like other organizations. And we rename committees and positions without it really changing anything that happens. But I don't think the idea of spiritual formation is simply a passing fad. No doubt there are congregations who rename a DCE as a DCF with no accompanying change in practices. But the name change more often reflects real changes in how churches do what they used to call Christian Education.
In the 1950s, for better or worse, many people expected that participation in the larger culture would form people both as citizens and as people of faith. The idea that America was a Christian nation, however far that was from actual truth, implied that one could learn the habits and practices of being a Christian via active participation in our society. Practices of sabbath keeping, regular patterns of worship, and shared moral standards were encouraged and enforced by cultural and governmental forces.
In such an environment, church congregations were one player among many in forming Christians, and they could focus on activities such as holding worship and teaching the finer points of the faith (and their version of it) to members. To that end, Sunday School (which itself had begun as social program to educate poor children who couldn't attend regular school) was seen as a classroom much like the ones students attended Monday-Friday. There were "text books" and various things that needed to be taught. (An unfortunate and unintended side affect of this specialized religious instruction was that religious education came to be seen as the work of experts rather than a primary tasks of parents.)
But over the last half century or so, the cultural components where a "Christian nation" formed people in faith have pretty much disappeared. The culture no longer encourages and enforces sabbath keeping or regular worship. Instead it actively works against these, creating all manner of enticements designed to draw people away from worship or treat Sabbath like any other day. Faithful participation in a religious community has gone from expected to downright counter-cultural.
In this changed landscape, many of those old Sunday School models make very little sense. Forty five minutes a week in a classroom on a less than regular basis is not likely to profoundly change how people live their lives without some other supporting structures. If the Christian life is indeed counter-cultural, Sunday School alone doesn't stand much of a chance against all the forces aligned against it.
In short, faith communities are faced with the problem of how to shape and form people for lives that exist in some tension with the community around them. And while those who want to put prayer or God back into the schools recognize this problem and likely have the best of intentions, the fact is there is no going back. We are not going to get the culture to do this work for us. The culture has too much invested in Sunday soccer, endless childhood enrichment, 24-7 efficiency and productivity, economics based on consumerism, and so on to ever fully buy into a way of life that insists on sabbath rest, on life more focused on others than self, on life lived toward God and not much worried about acquiring more.
In such a setting, the need to form people for faithful lives becomes more and more the issue. Teaching people the Bible and theology is still a big piece, but learning the basic rhythms and practice of a faithful life become critical. We still need to teach beliefs, but we also need to learn ways and habits. We need to help people be formed in ways that allow them to follow Jesus, not simply believe in him.
When I began writing this, I had no thoughts of discussing DCEs or Christian Education. I was reflecting on why Jesus had so much difficulty with the good, religious people of his day. I was thinking about formation from that standpoint, wondering about how Jesus' opponents had been religiously shaped in such a way that they saw him as a threat. This notion of formation made me think of Christian formation and led to the long tangent that has delivered me here.
But at the end of that tangent, I find myself still reflecting on how those scribes and Pharisees got off track somewhere in their religious formation. And I'm wondering what that means as we in the church face the huge challenge of forming people for Christ in our time. What does it mean to form and shape people to be like Jesus, someone who adhered to his faith tradition and taught as a rabbi in it, who learned the Scriptures and kept the Sabbath, and yet never let his faith tradition keep him from helping and caring for others.
The Apostle Paul seems to capture this pattern in his famous piece on love from 1 Corinthians 13. Too often relegated to weddings, Paul's soaring words remind us that faith and knowledge and power and abilities are all rendered meaningless without love. And of course Paul is not speaking of romantic love, but of a love that always sees the other as one deserving my care, help, etc. Jesus embodies what Paul describes. Jesus is formed through and through by and for love. Jesus taught and followed the rules, but he never succumbed to what so often happens to good people who have knowledge. Jesus never viewed those without knowledge or outside the rules as somehow undeserving. Rather he sought them out, feeling especially compelled to love and care for them.
How does one teach this? How does a class fill someone with such deep love and compassion that she would cross cultural boundaries and break religious convention to reach out to an outsider? How are we to form people by and for love?
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