The Church As Learning Community: A Comprehensive Guide to Christian Education

By Norma Cook Everist

Norma Cook Everist contends that it is meaningful to say that in ministries of administration, outreach, and pastoral care, the church is functioning as a learning community. Whenever and wherever Christians are being formed into the image of Jesus Christ through ministry, there Christian education is taking place. Christian education is the name we give to that process of formation.

Building on this central insight, Everist has written a major new introduction to the tasks and practices of Christian education. Part 1 of the book focuses broadly on what it means to be the church in the world. Part 2 shows how being a learning community requires ongoing growth in faith throughout the span of life. Part 3 shifts focus to the church as it moves into the community and world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426729201

Norma Cook Everist

Norma Cook Everist is Professor of Church and Ministry at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa. She also has served as guide and mentor to many pastors struggling with conflict. She is author of The Church As Learning Community and editor of Ordinary Ministry, Extraordinary Challenge, published by Abingdon Press.

Book preview

The Church as

Learning Community

The Church as

Learning

Community

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A Comprehensive Guide to Christian Education

Norma Cook Everist

Image1

ABINGDON PRESS

Nashville

THE CHURCH AS LEARNING COMMUNITY

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Copyright © 2002 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37202-0801.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Everist, Norma Cook, 1938-

    The church as learning community: a comprehensive guide to Christian education / Norma Cook Everist.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 0-687-04500-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    1. Christian education. I. Title.

    BV1471.3 .E44 2002

    268—dc21

2002003212

ISBN 13: 978-0-687-04500-6

All scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved

08 09 10 11—10 9 8 7 6

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In appreciation of

Marie Schalekamp

Gaylord Noyce and

William Weiblen

for their invitations to teach

CONTENTS

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Figures

Preface

PART I: GATHERED TO LEARN

1. A Community of Teachers and Learners

2. Creating Effective Learning Environments to Be Different Together

3. Eight Facets of Learning: Methodologies for a Diverse People

PART II: CHALLENGED TO GROW

4. Lifelong Learning in the Faith Community

5. The Congregation as Confirming Community

6. Equipping the People for Their Teaching Task

PART III: SENT TO SERVE

7. From Learning to Mission to Learning

8. Connecting the Learning Community with Vocation in the Public World

9. Parish Education in a Pluralistic World

Notes

FIGURES

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Figure 1     Cube 27: An Assessment Tool

Figure 2     Learning Arenas Grounded in the Creed

Figure 3     Eight Facets of Learning

Figure 4     Faith Development in the Adult Life Cycle

Figure 4B   Developmental Stages of Children and Youth

Figure 5     Three Confirming Community Models

Figure 6     Six Stages of Planning

Figure 7     The Learning Leads to Mission Spiral

Figure 8     Religious Education Arenas in Daily Life

Figure 9     Parish Education in a Pluralistic World

PREFACE

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John Wesley said not to make the parish your world but to make the world your parish.¹ This book poses many questions related to that statement. What is the task of the faith community when we assume that the curriculum is the entirety of the world in which we live? How can we equip each person in the Christian learning community to become a teacher and a learner? The world challenges us: How do we deal with diversity in a pluralistic culture? How can religious educators lead faith communities in growth and clarity of identity and mission, to live hospitably in a culture of many faiths?

In a time when many appear apathetic toward education in the church, religious leaders grow weary. No one has time to teach; our imaginations wither. What if we could expand the horizons of our teaching/learning endeavor? How differently would we set about our task if we believed that everyone in the faith community is already a teacher and a learner? In a culture that nearly worships individualism, people still hunger for values and communities of meaning. Religious educators grow frustrated that people seem to be looking everywhere but to the church for identity, continuity, and challenge. And yet on September 11, 2001, after terrorist attacks killed thousands of people from many countries around the world in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, people knew where to find nouses of worship. The faith community's curriculum is much more than material on paper to be read and recited; it embraces all of the people in this time and context as well as people in God's global and historic community. People need to understand one another and one another's faith. The entire parish is already a learning community. To broaden our concept of the church as learning community will challenge us, but need not overwhelm us.

We use church in this book in its broadest universal sense, and also in its local reality. Universally, the church as a learning community includes all those members of the body of Christ historically and globally. Locally, the learning community includes not only people gathered in the church building on Sunday, but all the arenas of their daily lives all week long. Congregation refers to the organized entity of the local church. We use parish in this book to mean the entire neighborhood of a faith community, whether that be a few city blocks or an entire county. Education is parish education if one sees that teaching as a complex series of interactions. It involves not only the teacher and the learners and the subject matter, but also our environment and all of the people who touch our lives throughout the entire week. With this perspective, even with limited budgets, a congregation is never without potential learning resources. As we explore learning communities we will see that in some regards an entire church body, the nation, and the globe itself are all one's parish. While taking this broad view, we shall maintain a focus on specific application to the local congregation as it strives faithfully to carry out its religious educational ministry task.

The goal of education is to facilitate learning experiences. This book does not debate doctrine, nor does it engage in extensive biblical exegesis. It does not present a history of the church. If one begins and ends with biblical and theological content, the educational process is seen merely as the delivery system for doctrine. But to focus on the whole faith community is to present a holistic ecclesiology of religious education. This book presumes that the way we teach teaches as powerfully as what we teach. Method is extraordinarily formative and has lifelong consequences. To begin from the perspective of community and educational method is to raise theological questions inductively.

Sometimes religious educators in the congregation feel they cannot teach because students won't sit still long enough to absorb biblical truth. But that is to slip back into the view of theology as merely content. Likewise professors of religious education at colleges, universities, and seminaries may feel their subject is treated as merely a delivery system for the other real subjects of Bible and theology. That, too, misses the concept that religious education is itself a challenging intellectual discipline, raising profound religious and theological issues. In either case, we miss the questions of the encounter itself.

In this book we shall focus on the act of teaching, the procedures we use, and the realities of the learning environment. We shall continually look at the people, at what is going on in their lives, and seek to help religious educators in their task of shaping educational encounters. We will provide practical examples to instruct readers in fully utilizing their own context. How do we measure learning encounters which engage as resource all members of a faith community and the entire parish? Although we engage in formative and summative evaluation of the religious education activity, evaluation does not conclude at the end of the session; it begins there, taking us full circle out into the parish community. Feedback comes when the faith we have been fed feeds back to the worlds in which people embody the faith in their mission and ministry in daily life.

The nine chapters flow from inward to outward, safety to risk, identity to mission, beginning in the basic community of faith yet always mindful of our connections with the daily world where parishioners live. Community themes from the New Testament epistles and stories from American congregational life punctuate the discussion.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this book is threefold: to put forth a vision of the entire parish as a learning community; to help faith communities create and maintain learning environments that facilitate us being different together in a pluralistic world; and to provide a comprehensive guide for religious educators leading a congregation toward fully becoming a learning community. The book provides resources for many types of religious educators: directors of religious education, pastors, lay leaders, and those preparing for these vocations in college, divinity school, or seminary. The book might be used by the reader for individual growth. A group of religious educators in a congregation could read this book together chapter by chapter as part of their ongoing teaching enrichment. The book may serve as a text in college or seminary classroom or in a lay school of religion. The intention is to provide a comprehensive theoretical approach to religious education with practical application.

I write from a Christian perspective; however, in keeping with one goal of this book—to create safe places for us to be different together—I trust religious educators from many faith traditions might find parts of this book useful. One thesis of this book is that in a pluralistic culture we come together in more authentic, healthy, and helpful ways when we come in our particularity. When, through knowing and practicing our own faith traditions well, we are secure in our own religious identity, we are more able to learn about the faith traditions of others, and unafraid to receive and respect each other in our differences. We will need to do so if we are going to be able to live together in the global community. We therefore encourage readers to use this book in ecumenical and interfaith groups.

LITERARY STYLE

The theme of the church as a learning community is present throughout the book, but each chapter becomes an entity unto itself, not only in specific topic, but also in style. Just as I advocate using a variety of methods in teaching, each to be congruent with the subject, goals, and setting of a session, so I purposely use many different styles of writing within the various chapters. Readers, like participants in a class, enjoy and learn better through some methods than others and are invited to engage these various styles, perhaps stretching beyond their own favorites, just as one would challenge the people in one's own learning community.

The book presents stories, descriptions of individuals and faith communities, questions for reflection, discussion, case study, and accounts of expeditionary learning, as well as the more familiar literary mode of didactic presentation of theory. For example, chapter 1 uses stories and questions for reflection. It begins with a seemingly mundane—but true—story of a bus to show how broad the scope of learning community can be. Later, the reader will discover that chapter 4 presents developmental theories, but moves quickly into examples of actual people at various stages of the life cycle. Chapter 5 gives models for confirming community, but also an extensive case study of an actual community struggling toward change. In chapter 9 one finds some history, setting the background for exploration of religious education's place and vocation in a pluralistic culture.

The New Testament epistles provide one constant thread throughout the book. The biblical material appears at differing places within chapters and has a greater or lesser role, just as in a religious education event one may begin with Scripture, weave it throughout the session using various methods, or conclude a discussion forum with a text. The biblical material is not presented to provide a specific reference for religious educational theory, and certainly not as a proof text, but more as a conversation partner from the early church's life together in community.

Throughout the book the reader will find invitations to reflect on the principles as they apply to the reader's specific context, whether that be small or large congregation, rural, urban or suburban parish, old or young, an established or transitory community. I have served in a wide range of such communities, but do not presume to know the readers' specific context. We are always called to teach beyond our personal experience; therefore, I write intending no one to find himself or herself outside the perimeters of this book. That is congruent with another thesis of the book—no one is outside the boundaries of a parish learning community. Readers are not only invited but strongly urged to be conversation partners with the author, bringing their rich and diverse backgrounds to the text. Individuals and religious education communities will find not only theory, but also reflection and discussion opportunities integrated with each chapter, with suggested approaches and strategies to analyze, challenge, and guide. Footnotes, congruent with the book's premise that resources for religious education are from a broad array of sources, are intended not only as references but for further exploration.

PART ONE: GATHERED TO LEARN

The entire parish community becomes teacher and learner to one another, whether or not a faith community truly realizes it. Each person is growing and changing—cognitively, affectively, physically, psychologically, and existentially in one's specific context. The faith community is greater than a quantitative collection of individuals. We need to explore that potential and create healthy places for us to come together in our diversity. Once such hospitable boundaries are set and maintained, we can use a vast variety of methods to engage people in learning at their growing edges.

Chapter 1, A Community of Teachers and Learners, builds on the premise that while the church is universal, historically and globally, it is also always local. We shall reflect upon the people— all people—present in the parish community. We look in unlikely places where people gather regularly and do teach and learn with one another, however informally. An extensive reflection on 1 Corinthians provides material for re-membering the body of Christ. After considering what it means to know and be known, we provide strategies for expanding the range of teachers within the parish. Building on the definition of curriculum as God and God's people in this time and place (with all else being curriculum resource), we present two tools, one for assessing learning opportunities in the congregation and one for reviewing curriculum resources. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on mutual accountability for the teaching task.

Chapter 2, Creating Effective Learning Environments to Be Different Together, considers the importance of setting and maintaining a hospitable balance of structure and spirit within the community. Learning environments include the entire range of settings, from family and classroom to neighborhood, nation, and the global village. In order for religious educators to facilitate an effective teaching/learning encounter, they need to first of all use their teaching authority to set safe, trustworthy, and healthy boundaries. We consider the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the learning environment as well as issues of authority, time, and relationships. We devote an entire chapter to learning environments because if they are not effectively tended, very little positive learning will occur. Colossians and the Creeds ground the topic of creating trustworthy learning environments.

Chapter 3, Eight Facets of Learning: Methodologies for a Diverse People, examines the fascinating differences among people in the ways they learn. In a healthy learning environment, teachers will be able to use any number of methods well. In this chapter, readers can explore methods which are already their basic, preferred approaches, and can also stretch to new possibilities. The eight general categories that will be explored in chapter 3 are: community, presentation, discussion, study, individual, confrontation, experience, and reflection. By becoming adept at using the entire range, teachers can choose methods not merely on the basis of those with which they feel comfortable, but according to ageappropriateness and, most important, in congruence with teaching goals and content. The chapter provides brief examples of the combination of methods and touches on minds ready for action in 1 Peter.

PART TWO: CHALLENGED TO GROW

With the community gathered, the learning environment set, learning can take place. The local faith community holds in its hands a comprehensive task, spanning the entire life cycle and encompassing the entire congregation with its surrounding parish. The teaching church will need to be equipped for this challenge; therefore, religious educators will want to grow in their leadership skills.

Chapter 4, Lifelong Learning in the Faith Community, surveys the life cycle and stages of faith. While continuing to be in the community, each individual needs opportunities to grow at his or her learning edge. The chapter sketches basic developmental theories and moves quickly to descriptions of specific individuals at various places in the life cycle. First John's emphasis on Christ's abiding presence accentuates God's unchanging nature in the midst of people's growth and development. Chapter 4 concludes with three session plans (incorporating methods outlined in chapter 3), using one basic text to show how religious educators might help learners engage biblical material at different stages of the life cycle.

Chapter 5, The Congregation as a Confirming Community, presumes that the entire congregation is charged with confirmation ministry. The chapter uses the book of Romans to explore the nature of growth in faith. Congregations are called not to merely nurture their own, but to be engaged in outreach. In living their faith, people also confirm what they believe, individually and as a community. Three examples of confirming community models are followed by a longer case study of actual small congregations going through a process of growth in claiming and carrying out its confirming ministry.

Chapter 6, Equipping the People for Their Teaching Task, presents a number of specific tools for helping develop and strengthen leadership within the church. Building on the concept of equipping the saints in Ephesians, the chapter explores using each one's gifts to build up the body of Christ. The chapter examines people's different perspectives of planning, and delineates six specific planning stages. The chapter presents a plan for ongoing teacher education. Religious educators are encouraged to reflect leadership, power, and partnership, and to lead with vision.

PART THREE: SENT TO SERVE

The congregation's attention moves outside the doors of the building into its mission in the world. Parish educational ministry needs consistently to be engaged in arenas of daily life, not just as an afterthought or product of the educational endeavor. Religious education arises from and results in Christian vocation in a pluralistic world.

Chapter 7, From Learning to Mission to Learning, explores the symbiotic relationship of learning and mission. Moving beyond a limited view of evaluation that focuses merely on teaching effectiveness, we assess the learners' own abilities to understand, to incorporate learnings, and, even further, to be able to carry out their vocations of discipleship in the worlds where they live. Learning actually begins in the many missions in which people are already engaged, so this chapter presents strategies for beginning with the daily experiences of people living in a pluralistic society. We shall see stories of three faith communities re-examining their goals. We then provide two methods of theological reflection. The chapter concludes with that little-used epistle, James.

Chapter 8, Connecting the Learning Community with Vocation in the Public World, builds on chapter 7, using images which lay a theoretical basis for incorporating people's ministry in daily life into religious education. We briefly explore the nature of the church. Congregations often assume they should teach children, so as adults they can then live the faith; children, too, are ministers. Hebrews, an epistle written for those inside a religious community, surprisingly moves the reader outside the camp. The chapter includes more methods for helping people connect their faith and daily life. As in chapter 4, true stories prompt reflection, this time on the links between daily ministry and learning.

Chapter 9, Parish Education in a Pluralistic World, looks at the competitors for one's fidelity to one's belief in action. It traces the history of American civil religion as the other faith, which has a powerful formative influence in the lives of all who have grown up in this nation. The chapter takes a look at the public school with its unstated but presumed role to shape a people by inculcating the civil faith. The chapter concludes with the paradox of pluralism: a faith community can take its appropriate place in the parish and in the nation not by being less of who it is, but by being more clear in its identity. Rooted and grounded educationally, people are equipped to be open to learn from other faith communities.

APPRECIATION

I bring to this work forty years of being a religious educator shaped by the people I have been privileged to teach. During seventeen years serving congregations—large and small, thriving and struggling, inner city and suburban—and many more years of speaking at religious education conferences and workshops across the country, I have interacted with and learned from thousands of people. They always have taught me one more new insight or nuanced a theory I held. Thank you to all.

I am grateful to teaching colleagues both at Yale Divinity School, (where I first became involved with professional colleagues in the Religious Education Association and the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education), and, for the past twenty-three years, at Wartburg Theological Seminary. Healthy partnership in education is a joy! I am grateful to be able to interrelate with students; I draw on their energy and creativity. One never teaches the same lesson twice, because the community is always new. I continue to learn from them as they go forth to serve in church and society.

At home, I wish to express my appreciation to those who provide continuity in my life, and therefore are very formative teachers: my family, particularly husband, Burton; sons, Mark, Joel, and Kirk; daughters-in-law, Rachel and Rebecca; and grandson, Gwydion Drew. Thank you for faithful love and companionship on the journey.

In preparation of this manuscript, I am very grateful to student research assistant and editorial partner, James W. Erdman, and to student assistants Renee AuMiller, Leta Arndt Behrends, and Connie Rieger for their faithful service. Thank you to Mark D. Everist for designing the figures for each chapter. Thank you to faculty secretaries who helped with various stages of this project: Patricia A. Schmidt, Kris Vanags Rilling, Cindy Bauer, and Denise Anderson for their competent work and patience. We never learn or work alone.

Part I

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GATHERED TO LEARN

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A Community of Teachers and Learners

Teaching and learning are all about the church as community. The words parish and congregation have different meanings in different church bodies. For some the parish is an administrative division of a diocese, an area with its own church. For some the words congregation and parish are used interchangeably. For some congregation refers to a church with its members, many of whom may live outside the neighborhood.¹ In this book we shall use congregation to talk about the particular church with its membership, and parish as the congregation plus all people in the geographic neighborhood, whether that be city blocks, county sections or suburban subdivisions.

A community of teachers and learners has two meanings in this book. The first is the assertion that the congregation, which we shall sometimes refer to as the faith community, is in its very essence a community of teachers and learners. Although there are specifically trained religious educators who are leaders in the congregation, in some sense all members are religious educators, and lifelong learners as well. Teaching and learning take place in formal and informal settings by designated and undesignated teachers who relate to and embody the beliefs, values, and practices of the community. The second meaning asserts that no congregation is an island unto itself. Each community of faith resides in a parish, a place, a context. The congregation has at its doorstep, and needs to see and utilize, the community, the people, and the institutions, including those beliefs, values, and practices, of the entire parish.

In this initial chapter on the learning community, we will look at the church, assuming vantage points that range from a New Orleans city bus, to Paul's first Corinthian epistle. We will view the membership, the people who exercise their roles and gifts in the body of Christ. Whether it be the contemporary small town of Garner, Iowa, or the city of Corinth, how do people come to know one another? How do people overcome their ignorance of one another? In the strategies that foster personal knowledge, we will discover that the people and their parish are themselves the most basic curriculum. Two helpful tools for assessing curriculum will be given (Stokes's Cube 27 and a versatile Resource Review strategy). The chapter will conclude in the same mode as 1 Corinthians, with a call to mutual accountability.

The Bible is not a blueprint for religious education. Ours is a different society, and the purposes of Scripture are broader. We cannot and dare not use a first-century manuscript to tell us specifically how to teach. But if we are deeply rooted in the words and situations of early Christian communities in the epistles, we will have some insights into how God is at work in our communities today. To teach the Bible, religious educators must teach in a way that will enrich people's lives. We need to regard the Bible as the Word of God, but not equate it with God, for God cannot be confined in words alone. Religious education is the ministry of all teaching activities, verbal and nonverbal, including cognitive, affective, and life activity. The Bible is a living reality which includes the account of God's interactions with people in biblical times, but also God existentially interacting with all those who encounter Scripture. What is important is not teaching about the Bible, trying to prove what it is or is not, but, insofar as it is inspired revelation and God's outpouring of love, making it the solid foundation for religious education, which is encounter with the living God. The church as learning community becomes an arena for such an encounter.²

The church is always local, in this place here and now, and it is also always beyond this community, outside of our experience and beyond our comprehension. No one local congregation is capable of being a complete expression of the church; it will lack perspective, information, or resources. At times it may be embroiled in conflict. Simultaneously the local church provides the only curriculum that is real and viable for this people in this time and place. The task is to receive one another with thanksgiving even while experiencing divisiveness and frustration. There will be lack of knowledge and lack of teaching skill, but the most significant problem is ignoring the potential in learners themselves, especially those not yet present and those not yet considered significant enough to bring their gifts to the teaching, learning community.

The community engages in its ministry of re-membering the body of Christ, literally incorporating all the differently abled people in the parish. Thus the curriculum is formed, God and God's people in this time and place. All else is resource, but substantial resource it is. The community needs to learn how to utilize who they are and who they are becoming, adding appropriate curriculum resources, developing a mutual accountability to sustain and cultivate the entire community.

THE LEARNING COMMUNITY

Too often in the local congregation we separate ourselves into two categories, the teachers and the learners. There are the faithful doers and the persistently passive receivers.³ Such divisions do not take seriously the reality that each individual needs to be a teacher in order to be a learner, and a learner in order to become and continue to be a teacher.

Teachers and learners become gifts to one another, and need each other to complete one another's teaching and learning. An idea is not really ours until we have shared it. A learning is not really ours until we have taught it.⁴ In the Christian learning community where all become speakers of the Word as well as hearers, where the three-year-old is teacher and the seventy-six-year-old is learner, the Word comes round once more, as a gift.⁵

Some churches have redesigned their educational ministry programs to become consciously intergenerational. Others have structured the congregation in such a way that everyone, all ages, those who live in family groupings and those who live alone, is in a small group for care and education.⁶ Small congregations have been doing this all along, at least informally. Whether such approaches are formal or informal, they can be intentional. Whatever the strategy, the congregation, and by extension the parish, is one of the few places in society where people of differing ages meet together to do something significant in their lives, and the one place where people can have the luxury of one-on-one teaching /learning relationships.

This group of people, no matter how excited about or how disappointed in them we may at times be, is a gift. Leaders in a religious community often feel lonely, misunderstood, even impatient with God, There's not enough happening here, not enough, to show for our work. We might wish to exchange this confirmation class or men's fellowship group for more interesting and interested learners. Or they might wish to exchange us for a more effective religious educator. These people are here and call us, even in and through their reluctance to ministry, to teach and lead.⁷ The learning community is always sufficient and, paradoxically, always less than whole. In being specifically local we discover we are also part of the church universal, which becomes an impetus for ecumenism and global interdependence to ground and permeate our teaching.⁸

Reflections on Learning Community Context

1. Take time (by yourself or with another religious educator) to describe, journal about, complain about on paper, if you wish, some group you are now teaching that causes you anxiety, or even anger. What is going on? What is the message of their behavior?

2. Now consider a religious group in your congregation that you teach or lead that is vital and growing. Reflect on why that group is going well. What are the characteristics of that learning community?

3. Where in the world are you? Is your parish learning community one block off the main thoroughfare or in the center of things? Do they consider themselves up-and-coming or down-and-out? How else might you or they describe themselves?

4. Consider a connection which could be made between a local parish learning community and the broader church, down the block, in the region, or around the globe. What learning connections have been or could be made with the church of another generation, or even of the future?

Unlikely Community: the Bus Line

Each morning, while my husband and I were visiting New Orleans, we would board the city bus to travel downtown from the guest house where we were staying to our conference meetings, which we assumed would be our primary learning community of the day. We as strangers did not at first recognize the learning community that was the 7:45 bus. But they were a community; they knew each other. They were the regulars, the people who caught that bus each day to travel to their arenas of work. Some people rode occasionally. But that is not unlike a local religious congregation, with regular and occasional attenders.

This morning on the New Orleans bus line, a woman about to exit was greeted at the door by the bus driver: You're all moved into your new house? Yes, yes, I am, the woman replied. I still have to get settled, of course. Do you like it? the driver continued. Yes, very much, but I'm glad I can be on the same bus line. Being known and continuity are crucial to life and growth.

That evening, on another bus, but the same line, a woman with young children was already engrossed in conversation with the bus driver when we boarded. It was an amazingly public yet private conversation. It's too bad that you had your purse stolen, the driver said. The bus tries to keep a regular schedule, but it's only going to be within five minutes or so. You shouldn't be standing there alone at four in the morning. Heck, I wouldn't dare stand on that corner alone at 4:00 A.M. and I'm a pretty big guy. Direct instruction. Bus driver as teacher, beyond mere instruction to direct advice. Most of the time he merely drove the bus.

I use examples of riding a bus precisely because such a routine experience may seem the exact opposite of intentional community. But even there, people want, need, and sometimes find a teaching/learning community. The church cannot keep its people entirely safe in the world; neither can a bus, but looking out for one another was a significant part of this community.

On commuter trains from New Jersey to Manhattan people buy month-long passes. For years people sit side by side. When someone is going to have surgery or be out of town for a few weeks, the passenger feels duty bound to tell the others about it or they will worry. It becomes, strangely enough, a community of care.

Up the New England Coast, in New Haven, Connecticut, one Yale University shuttle bus driver took passengers to and from different parts of the Yale campus his entire shift. People would get on and off, but he carried on a running conversation the entire time. Who knows who or what would start it off in the morning, but as some would leave, others would carry on, adding their opinions. All day the conversation continued with totally different participants.

Holden Village is a retreat center high in the Cascade mountains in western Washington, accessible only by boat up Lake Chelan and then by bus up the winding roads to the Village. Each day during the summer months the bus comes and goes. Most people stay only a week or two. One hears many tentative Hellos and tearful good-byes as bookends to their sweet community in between. It is all too short, everyone says, but they come and go anyway. Staff wonder if they have the energy to greet one more new person. Do they have the emotional stamina to say good-bye one more time? A religious education community in a mobile society frequently wonders the same thing: Do we have the emotional strength to grieve the loss of those who move away and to welcome newcomers to our congregation? In a learning community people come and go, are born and die, but the conversation of faith moves along, rarely in an totally organized, structured way. People gather briefly on their way to work in their arenas of daily life, but on the way they care about one another, and they, for a brief while, become community.

Reflections on Unlikely Learning Communities

1. What is the most unlikely learning community you have experienced? Who was part of it? How did people learn? What could not happen in that setting?

2. Who are the teachers (guides, coaches, and so forth) of people in your congregation all week long? How might people be helped to reflect on the many learning communities of which they are a part?

3. Thinking through the various activities, formal and informal, which take place in and through your congregation during the week, what is being taught? By whom? How are people connected or disconnected from each other? How might more intentional learning be fostered? What learning opportunities exist in the larger parish neighborhood?

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ROOTS

In this chapter we look to 1 Corinthians for some ecclesiological foundations concerning Christian community.⁹ The following is not an exegesis or a commentary, but neither are we merely using Scripture for proof text or inspirational devotions. The scriptural thread of themes and images in this chapter and throughout the book informs our subject.

The church is always both local and universal. Where two or three gather in the name of Jesus, Christ is present, but Christ is never present without the companionship of all Christians globally and historically. The local church implies the universal, and the universal church implies and necessitates the local.¹⁰ Without becoming local, specific in a time and a place, the church does not exist.

Paul begins with this assumption: To the church of God that is in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2).¹¹ Religious education begins that directly and that personally: To the church in Baltimore, To the church in Muscatine. The church, and specifically this church, belongs to God. The church is larger than any one religious community: together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours (v. 2).

This perspective sets a tone for our teaching. These people in this place belong to God. They are saints, which means baptized, beloved, grace-filled children of God. They are already holy, not by their own actions, not by our correct teaching, but by the gift of what Jesus Christ has already done for them in his incarnation, death, and resurrection. The people in this learning community are gathered to be saints together with all those who in every time and place have called on or will call on the name of Jesus. Paul begins purposely, Grace to you and peace.

This community of teachers and learners are called through their learning together to live into God's promised future. The early Christian communities may well have expected Christ to return in their lifetime. Teaching with a timeline certainly involves schedules for a particular session, plans for a year, even goals for three or five years, but the parish learning community is also timeless. We are called to teach expectantly, eschatologically, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (v. 7), and He will also strengthen you to the end (v. 8). This does not mean to teach preparing learners only for the life hereafter. It means radical involvement in the world in which participants live (see chapters 8 and 9).¹²

Paul's significant, substantive beginning is not mere introduction; it is a foundation stressing that everything necessary for salvation has already been accomplished. God promises to keep learners firm in the faith. A contemporary learning community may have reason to doubt that promise. Each year thousands