Slapdash. Messy. Disorderly. Shambolic. Any or all of these attributes could describe it.

Gary Parrett and Steve Kang recognize this. Their recent (and excellent) book, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church, makes this all-too-obvious yet seemingly unheeded observation:

There are very few spheres in which an approach to education is as random and haphazard as that practiced in many of our churches today. If someone wanted to study toward a degree in economics, for example, it would be most unlikely that the college would let her choose all her own courses or choose simply not to take classes at all. If we wish our child to learn to play an instrument, we would certainly hope to find an instructor who has some idea and plan about what particular things really must be learned and when and how. When we look at the medical school diploma on the walls of our doctors' offices, we probably assume—and gratefully so—that our doctors actually attended (in the full sense of the term) all the required classes in the curriculum and not only those that suited their fancies at the time. How strange it is that, in this matter of Christian education and formation, we have come to adopt so very different a scheme.

Indeed.