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.

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For a number of reasons that I don't need to get into here, I am still finishing up some work from the Fall semester, but I will be done that by the middle of this month. And that's good, because tomorrow is the first official day of the Spring semester (and my final semester) here at Reformed Theological Seminary. In May, I'll be graduating with a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. Normally a two-year degree, I have spread it out over three. But it really is hard to believe that almost three years have gone already.

I'm looking forward to this semester. I will have two classes on campus, and two virtual classes. They are listed below, the first two being the ones I am taking on campus.

• Educational Ministry of the Church
• Exposition of Hebrews
• Systematic Theology IV (Ecclesiology and Sacraments)
• History of Missions

It will be a relatively light semester, which is good, because these next few months also require me to try and figure out what we will be doing come May. I've made mention of our plans a number of times on the old blog, and I have started to get in touch with some different people and make some contacts to get things rolling. To reiterate, what I am looking for is a position in a church where I could be involved with the educational and teaching ministry. Needless to say, it's both exciting and a little stressful. We could be in for some big changes in the middle of this year. But God has continually shown His faithfulness to us and we trust His leading. We can't wait to see what He has in store for us next.

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I really like how John Frame, in his The Doctrine of the Christian Life, calls Deuteronomy 6:6-9 the "great charter of Christian education." The verses read:

And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, an they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point here—and one that is pervasive throughout Scripture—is that the Word of God is to give shape to our whole lives and our whole being. That, too, is to be the focus of Christian education. And that is why education is something more than just the imparting of objective knowledge. Education is formation.

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As I have been reading Desiring the Kingdom, author Jamie Smith has continued to provoke me to thought with his insights. Earlier, I quoted a portion of the introduction, which had pointed to some of the questions he was setting out to answer in the book. On page 68, Smith speaks briefly about Charles Taylor's notion of the "social imaginary" (discussed in Taylor's book, A Secular Age), and then talks about how that notion can help the Christian worldview conversation. In many ways, I think this portion directly addresses some of his earlier questions.

The 'social imaginary' is an affective, noncognitive understanding of the world. It is described as an imaginary (rather than a theory) because it is fueled by the stuff of the imagination rather than the intellect: it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths, and icons. These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by 'lining' our imagination, as it were—providing us with frameworks of 'meaning' by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it. An irreducible understanding of the world resides in our intuitive, precognitive grasp of these stories.

Now, what does this have to do with a Christian worldview? I suggest that instead of thinking about worldview as a distinctly Christian 'knowledge,' we should talk about a Christian 'social imaginary' that constitutes a distinctly Christian understanding of the world that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship. Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively 'understands' the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel. And insofar as an understanding is implicit in practice, the practices of Christian worship are crucial—the sine qua non—for developing a distinctly Christian understanding of the world. The practices of Christian worship are the analogue of biking around the neighborhood, absorbing an understanding of our environment that is precognitive and becomes inscribed in our adaptive unconscious.

What Smith means with the analogy of biking around the neighborhood is that when we live somewhere, we become intimately familiar with it such that we can make our way around it and to specific destinations without even really thinking about where we are going. Another analogy could be the unconscious way we operate a car with a manual transmission after years of doing it.

Smith's caution against the concept of worldview becoming too intellectual is one I am familiar with, and I think is helpful. The aim of worldview education is the transformation of the whole person; however, there is a tendency for it to get bogged down in thought and conversation. Smith is entirely right to recognize that worship (not just our public worship on Sunday) plays an integral part—in fact, it may even be the crucial part—in forming an holistic understanding of the world.

We must look at the world through the lenses of the gospel, and that begins when our hearts are rightly ordered. What we worship shapes our hearts, dictates what we love, and fosters that intuitive know-how we operate from as we make our way through the world. That Smith should point out how important it is that education be aware of this is not surprising.

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On Monday, I walked into the bookstore and my eyes were immediately drawn to a new book on the shelf, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church, by Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang. I immediately grabbed it, scanned the back cover and the table of contents, and rather impulsively purchased it.

There is a lot to say about educational ministry in the local church. Most important, perhaps, is its declining influence. Quite a lot of churches have done away with extensive educational programs for any number of reasons, and these programs have been replaced by others aimed at things like "spiritual formation." Perhaps it is unconscious, but this fosters a sharp dichotomy between the two when, in fact, they go hand in hand. I do plan on returning to this topic more extensively here in the coming months, because it is one that I am especially passionate about. Also, as I'm considering seeking out a position in which I can be involved in that sort of ministry on a vocational level, I am frequently reflecting on it.

But for now, I just wanted to share this small portion from the first few pages of the book. Parrett and Kang begin their discussion by narrowing in on what they think should be the guiding motif or central part of a church's educational ministry. They use this brief story to illustrate:

Some years back, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee was sitting with other attendees at a workshop about the power of story. The speaker was Eugene Peterson, his faculty colleague. Peterson mentioned an episode in which his four-year-old grandson jumped onto his lap and demanded, "Grandpa, tell me a story, and put me in it." Upon hearing this account, Fee began to weep, overwhelmed by the fact that this is precisely what God has done for all of us. God is unfolding the great Story, and he has invited us to take our places in that story.

This great story into which God has invited us...is the grand drama of redemption and reconciliation. Growing in our understanding of the Story, and of our places in it, is critical for teaching and formation in the Church.

This echoes very closely something I quoted from Robert Webber a few months ago. The point of education in the context of the local church is not simply that members would download the necessary information they need to be saved, or to be able to explain various points of theology, or to answer the arguments of atheists (recall Jamie Smith's discussion on what education is all about). Instead, the goal of the church's education is one of formation, teaching those who belong to the church what it means to inhabit God's story and what it looks like to think and live rooted in that story. God has told us a story, and we are in it.

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