Calvary Episcopal Church
Growing Faith in Christ through Worship and Community
Christian Formation
Why do we say Christian Formation instead of Education?
So much of our institutional learning has involved the banking theory of education: placing material inside someone’s head to be drawn out with a check. Teacher and philosopher Paolo Freire condemns this approach in favor of dialogical education where the human person, by virtue of being, has a “vocation to be a subject,” not an object.
This vocation leads one on a journey of meaning-making: a fragile field of trial and error. In our baptism we are called into the full life of the church in God. We are called to a lifetime of learning and growing. No one here has arrived.
H.R. Niebuhr has a phrase, “shipwreck, gladness, and amazement,” to describe the life of faith formation. In the experience of dealing with disaster or threat to one’s sense of self, God, and the world, one enters a cycle of “shipwreck,” or shattering of reality, then “gladness,” or relief that one has survived, then “amazement” or a deepening of faith. Rather than a linear understanding of faith development, Niebuhr implies something more like a spiral or a helix. It is often in these critical points that people seek out communities of faith.
The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago is committed to ongoing formational work in the lives of all of God’s people.
--Adapted from the article, “Groundwork, Ministry with Young Adults & “Next Generation” by Thomas K. Chu (A version of this article first appeared in Disorganized Religion: The Evangelization of Youth and Young Adults, Sheryl Kujawa, editor, Boston: Cowley Publications, 1998.)
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION NEWS
FaceBook Page