My good friend and colleague Brett Edwards and I did a seminar together yesterday at the annual Association of Classical Christian Schools Conference, hosted this year here in Atlanta. A link to the presentation (sadly, absent our humorous commentary) can be found on Brett’s website (a website which I recommend you peruse further, especially if you teach math).
“Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’” Luke 10:38-42 (NRSV)
If the enemy wants to take us out of the Lord’s presence, he will use fear and distraction. (I say “fear” here but I could just as easily say “worry” – they are basically the same state of being since they are both rooted in our refusal to believe that God is sovereign.)
But let’s get practical, here. There is a lot to “worry” about – paying our bills on time, making enough money to pay those bills in the first place, getting our kids into the right school, making the right decision about our kids’ education in the first place . . . I could go on, right? You could too, I imagine.
And what about distractions? Sure, there are the distractions that we bring upon ourselves (social media, television, hobbies), but what about those distractions we can do nothing about? Like when I got up early this morning to do some theology reading and my two-year-old woke up an hour early and walked right into the living room as I took my first sip of coffee. She needed some water, and was a bit cranky from rolling out of bed too early. So surely, you say, it is the right thing to tend to her needs. (And, for the record, I did.)
But what about poor Martha? Surely someone had to prepare dinner for Jesus, and it was Martha’s home, so certainly it was her task – a worthy distraction to prepare a meal for her Lord, right?
But Jesus says there is need of only one thing. Why does He always do this? Martha was just trying to be a good host. I was just trying to read a good book. Parents just want their children to be safe and happy.
Now I don’t think Jesus was chastising Martha – obviously it was a good thing for her to serve her Lord, just like it is a good thing for me to read and for parents to want the best for their children.
But Jesus says there is need of only one thing. And in Matthew’s gospel He again tells us to seek that thing first.
I don’t know, maybe Martha should have just chilled out and ordered a pizza. I find myself asking, “Would Jesus rather have had Martha drop everything and join Mary at His feet, even if it meant that no one got to eat that night?” That would not be very practical, right? (never mind the impracticality of Mary dumping a ton of expensive perfume on Jesus feet, which Judas was quick to criticize (John 12))
So if Mary has found “the better part,” then what is keeping us from sitting at the feet of Jesus?
And since this is a blog ultimately about education, I will ask this question another way: what is keeping us from bringing our students to the feet of Jesus? What is distracting us from first and foremost nurturing their souls? What are we afraid of? What are we anxious about? What are we distracted by? (Did you get as far as you had planned in the math book this year?)
I think this is worthy of contemplation.
I recently read an article entitled “Five Temptations for Classical Christian Education,” written by Brian Douglas, a teacher at the Ambrose Classical School in Boise, Idaho and adjunct professor at Boise State University. The entire article is worth reading, and there are many pieces that I would love to discuss, but these two paragraphs really stood out to me:
“It is easy for a classical Christian school to become known more for its uniforms, homework expectations, strictness, and the like, than for its gracious, loving environment. Yet we ought not treat education like a simple input-output situation, in which the right learning environment can program our students to be Christians. While students do need high expectations for their work and conduct, focusing on order becomes hazardous when it overtakes the joy of experiencing God’s grace. When this happens, students may learn to jump through the hoops, obey the rules, do the right things, but they do not learn to love God and others. That is moralism, the worst enemy of true Christianity.
“Creating a truly gracious classroom is much harder than creating an orderly classroom. It is a challenge that requires spiritual preparation far beyond classroom management techniques. But the only Christian education is a thoroughly gracious education. It sounds so basic, but it remains true: Without God’s grace, we can only produce narcissists who are more focused on their own successes and failures than on the eternal reality of God’s love for his people.”
My temptation is to read something like this and say, “YES! So well stated!” then walk away with this abstract ideal in my head: “the truly gracious classroom.” I can then easily leave this definitive characteristic of the Christian classroom at the philosophical level.
But what does this really mean in practice? What does a “truly gracious classroom” look like? How do our students encounter this “joy of experiencing God’s grace” in our classrooms?”
And to make these questions more pointed, let’s get even more specific. Take assessment, for example. What does it look like to be gracious in the assessment of our students? How do we maintain rigor and high expectations while at the same time give grace? Should rigor and grace be opposed? Is allowing a student to retake a test a demonstration of true grace?
Douglas cautions us against moralism, against teaching our students to “jump through the hoops.” And I have seen these moralistic acrobatics in my students in the past. Heck, I have held the hoops up for them. Lord forgive me.
But can grace also be dispensed to our students’ detriment?
I am not going to attempt to answer any of my own questions in this post. Maybe because it’s almost midnight, maybe because I don’t have good answers. But I would love to hear your thoughts.
More in a later post . . .
Tomorrow morning our 8th graders will be graduating from middle school. Since ours is a K-8 school, we are truly sending them forth outside our gates and influence to brave the very different world of high school. This parting will be particularly poignant for me since I have forged a very strong bond with our 8th graders this year, being their homeroom, math, science, and logic teacher. In short, we spend a lot of time together. We have become very much a family, with both all the annoying and all the sacred connotations therein.
For the first time in my six years of teaching, I have been asked to give the parting words to our graduates. My students will tell you that their time in my class is not without the occasional (read: often) “talk about life,” which they know is coming whenever I pull out “the stool.” I have found that the longer I teach the more things I feel like I have to say to my students that have nothing to do with “what we have to cover.” It is almost a feeling of urgency sometimes, as if I want to spare them from something or dispel all the lies of the world or somehow propel them to a state of wisdom that only and necessarily comes through walking on their own feet in Jesus’ wake with their eyes fixed on scripture and their ears trained to the whispers of the Holy Spirit.
So all week I have been viewing my talk tomorrow as the ultimate “stool talk,” my last chance to prick their hearts with God’s truth, my last opportunity to save them from the evils of the world.
Yes, I want to save them. I want to protect them. I want to hold them in my arms and shield them from all that the enemy has to offer.
If only I can choose the perfect scripture, read the best C.S. Lewis quote, say just the right thing – then, THEN, they will be okay. THEN I can send them forth with confidence.
And then God whispers into my heart, “I have them; let them go.”
In the world of education, we rightly place extreme gravity on what we do as teachers, especially if we are involved in “Christ-centered” education. James 3 among other places in scripture suggest that great is our responsibility if we choose to teach. And if you have ever been a teacher in one of those moments when you have every student hanging on your next word, or perhaps you notice that some of your students are starting to imitate you, or one day you realize that they remember a lot more about what you have said than you do – it hits you all of a sudden just how much power and influence you wield behind that classroom door.
And if you’re not careful, you can begin to think that you have too much to do with who they become, or you focus so much on techniques or modes or methods or ideals, or you start a blog in order to discern what true education really means, and before you know it you have supplanted that very thing that you are trying to instill in the hearts of your students in the first place: trust in God.
As someone once said to me, “Either God is sovereign or He is not.”
Or, as Paul said in Philippians 1:4-6: “In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
Yes, my work as a teacher is very important. But it is not me but God in me who works, and it is He who will continue that work. Thank you, Lord Jesus.
Maybe instead of crafting just the right words to say to my graduates I just need to get down on my knees and pray Paul’s prayer from Philippians – and trust in the sovereign work of the Lord.
Oh Sovereign Lord, I prepare now to send forth these graduates confident not in the fact that I have done all I can to prepare them, but confident that you have and will continue to perform a good work in their hearts, carrying it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Thank you, Jesus. Amen.
Most organizations, institutions, universities, or corporations that enjoy any kind of longevity are founded on a set of principles or ideals. Often these are wrapped up in a mission statement. The older an institution becomes, the more likely this institution is to stray, deviate, or “drift” from these foundational ideals. Perhaps those folks who established the ideals are no longer around. Perhaps sound, thoughtful explanations for “why we do it this way” slowly become replaced with legalistic statements of “this is just how it’s done, this is how it’s always been done.” Perhaps the “why” was never really communicated in the first place. Perhaps new players in the institution question the soundness of the original ideals. Perhaps the mission of the institution must change because the original ideals were not timeless in nature and thus have become anachronical. Perhaps the culture changes and so a slight deviation from the original ideals is deemed necessary in order to “remain relevant,” or “remain sustainable.” Whatever the reason, this potentiality and tendency to “deviate from original intent” is a well known characteristic of just about anything in which human beings are involved, the first example of which of course occurred with the first human beings to inhabit the Earth.
Our country was founded on ideals (or at least principles), and one entire branch of our government exists for the explicit purpose of making sure that we maintain the integrity of those principles in practice. But even parts of our constitution have been called into question or brought up for more “relevant interpretation” in recent years.
My question is this: specific to classical Christian education, what are the ideals that must be held to? Or does holding to a set of ideals threaten sustainability? To what extent must we “flex” with the culture in order to “remain relevant for our market”?
I have heard the goal stated as a “healthy tension between ideals and practicality.” And any school who subscribes to both Christian and classical ideals – both of which are quickly becoming “outdated” in the West, particularly in the metropolitan centers of America where the focus on education is largely utilitarian – is going to find its leaders having this discussion of ideals versus practicality.
So should we (and by “we,” now, I mean classical, Christian schools) set as our target some compromise between “theory and practice,” between “an idealistic picture of education and a form of education that is actually sustainable and marketable”? Compromise can be a very good thing. But is it good in this sense? Can a white-knuckled “in the clouds” clinging to ideals morph into self-righteousness and legalism and in the end decrease the actual effectiveness of your mission? Or are there some ideals that must be clung to, regardless of how well they test with the focus groups?
I don’t necessarily intend to answer these questions here, at least not directly. For one thing, I don’t think we can actually begin to answer them until we define what the ideals are.
But let’s say for a moment that we do define some ideals for a school that are not only timeless but also biblically and pedagogically sound. Do we still aim for compromise?
Some may argue that this question can only be answered in practice, that there is not one answer that is universally applicable.
But I’m not totally sure.
There is certainly a time for those of us who are idealists to get our heads out of the clouds and get practical about certain things. But is there a time to cling to ideals in practice? Is this last phrase an oxymoron?
Let’s consider a couple of idealists and see how it worked out for them. (And to be clear, I am not using “idealism” in the philosophical sense, but rather talking about people who had and held to certain high and noble ideals. Note the previous emphasis – I am also NOT talking about people like Hitler whose corrupted, evil ideals did much violence to humanity.)
The obvious first example is Jesus himself. Not only did he live the “ideal” life (a life as it was originally intended: without sin), but he exhorted sinners around him to do the same. “Be perfect, therefore, as your father in heaven is perfect.” “Go and sin no more.” “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (I wonder how many folks in the crowd that day wished he had said, “Okay, if you’ve only sinned ten times today, you get to throw three stones. Those of you who have been extra good and sinned less than five times today can throw six.”)
Did Jesus fail to be relevant to the culture? Well, what those first century Jews really wanted was a political king, a conquering savior. Washing feet and dining with tax collectors – well, that wasn’t really what they had in mind. Turns out it didn’t end too well for Jesus (well, in the short run, that is).
Upon his triumphant resurrection, however, Jesus’ disciples finally “got it.” This “ideal” that Jesus represented, it was worth pursuing, even though it would require a counter-culturalism like the world had never seen before. In fact, this ideal was worth dying for. And die they all did; for most, of course, not by natural causes.
The story then continues with Paul, and thanks to his clinging to an ideal even after having been boiled in oil, beaten, and imprisoned, we have the God-inspired wisdom of the epistles.
The biblical examples are perhaps obvious but I think worth repeating. Our familiarity with scripture can sometimes lull us into thinking that these stories themselves are simply allegories for a set of ideals, instead of the accounts of real men and women who were murdered for their refusal to deviate from something they believed down to the deepest depths of their souls.
There are of course many others in history who clung to ideals and suffered for their convictions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi come to mind, to name a few.
If we make the ideal our target, we will naturally fall short, because we are human. But won’t we get much closer to the ideal than if we make compromise our target?
Further, as regards our Christian faith specifically (personal or corporate), only by aiming at an ideal do we see our true and absolute need for a Savior, our need for God’s daily grace and provision. If we aim at compromise, we just may fool ourselves into thinking that this Christian thing is something we can manage (and define the parameters for) on our own. And if culture drives our compromise, won’t our target constantly drift as culture changes and pulls our compromise further from the ideal?
But ideals are risky. What’s the ultimate risk of holding to an ideal? The examples above would suggest death. And maybe we are not talking about personal death now, but perhaps the death of your institution. What does this mean for a classical Christian school. Well, Andrew Kern has said, “A school that isn’t willing to die is not a school worth living.”
So I will ask again, this time more pointedly: for a classical Christian school, what are those ideals that are worth dying for?
Do we stand firm and embrace “much versus many” in everything we do? Do we in practice hold as our priority the formation of our students’ souls over the filling of their minds? Do we maintain a skepticism towards technology even when iPads would make those backpacks a lot lighter? This list could go and on and we haven’t even scratched the proverbial surface.
Let me leave you with one last story of an institution that embraced an ideal. This example may seem out of place within the context of classical and Christian education, but I think there may be something to learn nevertheless. The institution is ExxonMobil.
Before the merger with Mobil Oil, when Exxon was just Exxon, the company suffered international embarrassment in 1989 when its oil tanker Valdez ran aground and spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into Prince William Sound. This event catalyzed a movement within the company from top down to not only make safety a higher priority, but to establish safety as a defining and driving ideal of the company.
Fast forward 14 years later. I was in the second year of my young career as a neophyte mechanical engineer working for an engineering, procurement, and construction company based in Houston, Texas. After spending a year in “the office,” my supervisor decided it was time for me to “get my feet wet in the field,” so he assigned me to the field engineering team of one of our construction projects in the ExxonMobil Baytown, Texas refinery. (Talk about going from theory to practice, by the way. All the engineering graduate classes in the world could not have prepared me for the “real engineering” that goes on in real-time during onsite construction of complex refinery systems. I’ll never forget taking my brand new shiny white hard hat and scraping it along the asphalt in the parking lot in order to give myself the appearance of a more “seasoned” engineer; my plan failed miserably.)
Before I could even enter the refinery, I had to sit through an entire 8 hour day of training, which included videos, classes, and tests. I remember thinking how much a waste of my time it was – I likened it to being at the DMV.
Upon getting settled in my construction trailer office and then making my way out for a guided tour of the job site, I couldn’t believe how many “safety people” were walking around or just standing around watching what was going on. These were people who were paid solely to enforce safety procedures and perform audits of safety practices.
And boy were the safety procedures and practices numerous! An entire crew had to write up what was called a Job Hazard Analysis before starting ANY work, even if their work only consisted of painting a handrail. It was very clear that a seemingly disproportionate amount of time and money was being spent on “safety.”
But surely all these safety protocols are like speed limits, I thought. Surely when the work really has to get done, these people don’t really follow all these procedures to a T. I mean, that just wouldn’t be practical. That would slow everything down. That would cost too much money.
But they did. Always. Without question. And they were serious about it, too. Nothing about safety was taken lightly.
And then there were all the safety meetings. These were meetings at the beginning of each week, or sometimes in the middle of the week or maybe even on some random day, and everyone on the job site had to attend. We’re talking hundreds of hourly employees, just sitting, sometimes for over an hour, listening to someone talk about tripping hazards. And boy were those meetings serious.
Really? I thought. ExxonMobil is all about maximizing profit. Look at all the money going out the window right now!
The first month I was on the job, a 40 year veteran of ExxonMobil, one of their best and most respected combustion engineers and an all around swell guy, stuck his head in a vessel just to look on the inside (the vessel was out of service), but he did so without a permit. The next morning he was cleaning out his office. Fired. On the spot. No questions asked. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I just getting to really like this guy, but he was my client contact for much of my field engineering work. He was the brain of the operation. And he had served the company faithfully for over 40 years! It made no sense to fire him just for looking into a vessel.
But for ExxonMobil safety had become a nonnegotiable ideal, and no one was exempt from the expectations attached to that ideal. No one.
A few months later, our company was doing some maintenance inside the prime money-making unit of the refinery: the Cat-Cracking Unit, the unit that makes gasoline. This unit produced enough gasoline every day to earn the company $2.5 million in profit. Every day. The maintenance we were contracted to perform required that this unit be shut down for an entire month. You can do the math, but needless to say we were working literally around the clock (two shifts per day), seven days a week to complete our work and bring this unit back on line as soon as possible. Every morning at 6:00 a.m. the lead ExxonMobil project manager would storm into our construction trailer, throw his clipboard or kick a trashcan, and remind us that we were costing him $2.5 million a day. It was a stressful project on a tight budget with an impossibly short schedule that we were daily asked to make improvements on.
Then one day a construction hand accidentally kicked a hammer, which then fell off the level he was standing on and landed on the level beneath him. The hammer didn’t come close to hitting anyone. It was an honest mistake. No harm, no foul, right?
What followed was an all-hands-on-deck safety meeting that lasted the entire afternoon, at the end of which the ExxonMobil refinery owner told us all to go home for three days. “Things were just getting too sloppy,” he said, “and we’re headed towards a serious safety accident if this continues.”
I couldn’t believe it. We were getting yelled at every morning to work faster, spend less money, improve the schedule, and now this guy is telling us all to go home for three days? That’s six shifts worth of work lost and $7.5 million down the drain! But he didn’t even blink an eye when he told us to go home, and no one flinched at his decision.
About a year later we were installing a huge multi-million-dollar piece of equipment (think the size of a 3-story bank), which required a very precise and tenuous lift with the biggest crane you’ve ever seen up and over an existing multi-million-dollar in-service unit. The most senior rigging engineer from our company was on site to oversee the lift, as the stakes were obviously extremely high. A piece of equipment this large is typically lifted with guide ropes tied at each corner, so that men on the ground can hold the ropes and keep the equipment from rotating as it is lifted. However, in this case, the guide ropes had to be released for the apex of the lift as the piece of equipment passed over its highest obstruction. Well, one of the guide ropes became snagged on a corner of the existing unit, and our rigging engineer quickly – instinctly – stood up on a handrail to loose the snag. By doing so he saved the lift. He was a hero.
Then he was promptly removed from the job site and his access to the refinery was permanently revoked. Just like that. It didn’t matter that he acted out of instinct. It didn’t matter that he did the right, practical thing in saving the lift and potentially sparing millions of dollars in damage. He had stood on a handrail, and standing on a handrail was one of the cardinal sins in the book of ExxonMobil safety. I’ll never forget, as soon as his foot hit that handrail, the engineer behind me said, “Well, he’s gone.”
These are just a couple of the crazy “zero tolerance” type stories. Suffice to say, safety at ExxonMobil was a culture, and either you became a part of that culture, or you were given the boot. Two years into my assignment in the refinery, I found that I no longer questioned any of the safety protocols. I never caught myself thinking, “This is such a waste of time, why are we doing this?” What’s more, half the time I didn’t even consciously think about all the safety rules, I was just following them by instinct. In fact, I became hyper sensitive to anything that didn’t feel or look “safe.” At any job site I entered, without even thinking about it, I would automatically scan the area for safety hazards. Even today, 6 years into teaching and 8 years out of the refinery, I still find myself finding things unsafe with even a DOT crew patching a hole on a side street. ExxonMobil had successfully inculcated within me its safety ideal.
Today ExxonMobil is the world’s most valuable company. They are also one of the safest, despite the inherent high risks in much of their operations. One could certainly make the argument that safety simply increases their bottom line in this age of rampant litigation. But whatever the motivation, they embraced an ideal and it became part of who they are. They embraced this ideal even when it cost them big, even when it clashed with practicality.
I wonder what conversations were had in the board room in the early 1990s when this safety initiative was first born. Was anyone called crazy? Impractical?
Let’s chew on this for a while. I could continue, but – on a practical note – it’s past my bedtime.
A friend of mine recently sent me the following video. It’s about 10 minutes long, so if you can take the time, please watch it. I will share my thoughts below the link.
I think you would agree that there are a lot of truths in this video, not least the picture that is painted of the self-centered rat race reality of so much of so many of our adult lives and how quickly dismissive we are of those around us. Perhaps you even felt convicted by some of these truths – I certainly was.
But then the crux of the message presents itself, the “alternative” to this way of interacting with the world:
“If you are aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to think differently . . . it’s hard, it takes will and effort . . . but if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell type situation as not only meaningful but sacred . . . ” (emphases mine)
So what’s wrong with this approach? What’s wrong with paying attention, with making conscious choices that come as the result of right thinking? After all, Jesus tells us to pay attention or “keep awake” in not one but two parables (Matthew 24 & 25), and Paul exhorts us to “be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12). So clearly attentiveness and right thinking are important. We take this to heart at my school where we actually train our students in the habits of attention and critical thinking.
So what is wrong with the thesis of this video? I think what is wrong is that what is presented is a near-truth, and near-truths are more dangerous than lies.
And here’s the near-truth, as I see it being presented (note this will not sound as poetic as the narrator puts forth in the video): “Your interaction with the world does not have to be this way. You just need to wake up out of your zombie state and choose to think differently. Sure it’s going to be hard, but it is within your power and will and effort to change.”
In other words, “Just man up and be a better person! It’s just a matter of choosing to change the way you think about the world.”
Oh, and by the way, the narrator calls this “real freedom,” “real education.”
But does this account accurately describe how we learn, how we change, how we are transformed, how we are “perfected” into God’s image?
Let’s say that I meet an adult who is admittedly very racist against black people. Maybe he is even consciously ashamed of this disposition, but he explains his racism by saying that he grew up in a white home in a white neighborhood where there was an obvious yet unuttered fear of black people, that he went to an all-white school that was “on the other side of town” from the nearest school that housed black kids, and that once he had a friend who was robbed at gunpoint by a black guy.
I guess I should just tell this guy, “Listen, I know this is going to be hard, but you just need to change the way you think about black people.” If he laughs incredulously at this suggestion, I just need to engage his intellect with logical arguments for why racism is evil and how it does great violence to the human soul.
I think you see my point. Again, I am not suggesting that critical, logical thinking has no place in the formation and transformation of a human soul. If that were the case, this blog and a large part of my job as a teacher would be pointless. But what ultimately forms us and our perception of the world is something much closer to our center of being, much more closely linked to what burns in our hearts and stirs in our imaginations, something that often defies logical articulation, something that has been inculcated within us due in part to our experiences, but due also to the fact that we are naturally and primarily loving, desiring beings.
And this brings us back to James K.A. Smith’s thesis which he establishes early on in Desiring the Kingdom. I will quote him again, this time from a different location and said slightly differently:
“. . . education – whether acknowledged or not – is a formation of the desires and imagination that creates a certain kind of person who is part of a certain kind of people. The facts and information learned as part of the process are always situated and embedded in something deeper that is being learned all along: a particular vision of the good life.”
The fictional (yet to some degree, if we are honest with ourselves, representative of some part in all of us that passes dismissive judgement against some class of people, rather it be because of race, religion, social standing, education, the kind of jeans she wears, etc.) racist character I created above received an “unacknowledged” or “implicit” education that painted a picture of the “good life” as “life without black people in it.”
The point is quite simply this: what seems to “stick” in a person’s core identity are those “teachings” that have been directed towards his heart and imagination, and often times this type of learning actually bypasses our conscious, thinking minds and goes straight to our “second nature.”
Said another way by Charlotte Mason, “Education is an atmosphere.”
So what does this mean for education in a Christian school? Everything. The stakes are perhaps even higher because we are Christian. Symmetry in our “being” and “thinking” is paramount. I will leave you with one last quote from Smith:
“Could we offer a Christian education that is loaded with all sorts of Christian ideas and information – and yet be offering a formation that runs counter to that vision?”
I am currently reading James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, upon the recommendation of a colleague and friend. I am about a third of the way through the book and I must say that it is already transforming the way I view education. Smith’s book is one of those that you don’t even bother picking up a highlighter for, because every other sentence would be yellow.
I am sure that I will be referencing this book in probably multiple future posts, but today I want to throw out a quote from his Introduction:
“What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?”
There is so much wrapped up in this quote that it’s hard to know where to start.
So let me pose a couple of questions: To what part of our students’ nature are we making our appeal? Are we filling their minds or engaging their imaginations? Are we primarily honing their intellects or is the stewardship of their hearts a priority?
The great early 20th century educator Charlotte Mason said, “The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care?”
In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith goes on to posit that humans are by nature “desiring” beings first and foremost, rather than “thinking” beings or even “believing” beings. What all humans desire, Smith maintains, is “the kingdom,” which most generally (i.e., not biblically) translated, means “their particular vision of ‘the good life’ or ‘human flourishing.'” Much of the balance of the book is then spent dissecting the implications of this common desire on education, specifically Christian education. There is much more to say about these implications, but that will have to be another post.
What I want to park on at the moment is Smith’s conclusion (informed heavily by St. Augustine and Martin Heidegger) that humans are first and foremost “desiring” beings. Smith continues:
“It’s not so much that we’re intellectually convinced and then muster the willpower to pursue what we ought; rather, at a precognitive level, we are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons. It is not primarily our minds that are captivated but rather our imaginations that are captured, and when our imagination is hooked, we’re hooked (and sometimes our imaginations can be hooked by very different visions than what we’re feeding into our minds).” (emphases by Smith)
Again, there’s a lot we could unpack here, but I want to focus on Smith’s statements about our imaginations. I think he suggests that the type of teaching that truly forms (and transforms) who we are is the type of teaching whose focus is trained on our hearts and imaginations, rather than solely our intellects. In other words, what truly “sticks” in one’s soul – what truly informs how and what he will love – is what he is taught from the heart up, rather than the other way around. And one way to get to our hearts is via our imaginations.
C.S. Lewis clearly got this. His Chronicles of Narnia are so beloved by children and adults alike because the truths embedded in that wonderful series are aimed first at our imaginations. And I believe that true learning – true “education,” true “drawing out” – happens when the hearts and imaginations as well as the minds of our students are engaged. Said another way, what we are feeding the hearts and imaginations of our students (whether explicitly or implicitly), must be consistent with, must shore up what we are feeding into their minds.
I must pause here to make something very clear: This is in no way saying that we should throw the baby out with the bath water and diminish the value of sound thinking and logic; this is certainly a both/and situation rather than an either/or. After all, much of this blog will hopefully be aimed at “the renewal of our minds,” which I believe comes largely from engaging in intellectual discourse. As our pastor often says, “We need to have a rigorous faith,” to think about why we believe what we believe, to engage in deep theological study, to read challenging books.
As my students will tell you, I constantly exhort them to think more critically and rigorously. But why do they take me up on the challenge? I think it’s because I go after their hearts and imaginations first.
But most modern (progressive) education has redefined our students as merely brain-holding containers, which must be filled, rather than spiritual, loving persons, whose natural desire to love must be stewarded.
In other words, what I think I’m saying here (and I have to believe that Smith would agree with me, or worse, find this blog and post to the comments section: “You’re just stealing my ideas and putting them in your blog!”) is that it might be more important to teach our students how and what to love than to teach them how to think or what to believe.
For those of you who teach, we’ve all had those moments in the classroom when we feel like we are just hitting a wall with our students. Sure they may be thinking, they may be processing – and I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that they may even be thinking rigorously – but they are not wholly engaged. Formation of their minds might be happening, but transformation of their souls and spirits may not be happening. In the extreme case, they are simply becoming “more clever devils,” as C.S. Lewis would say.
But then we have those moments when we see the hearts, the true identities (the God-reflections) of our students breaking through to the surface, discussions are charged with life (not just intellectual and rigorous in thought), e ducere is really happening. Our students are being their most human selves. Those are the transformative moments, I believe. And I really don’t believe those moments happen without the hearts and imaginations being involved.
I have a good friend who teaches high school math at another Christian school in the area, and he refers to these moments as “the Narnia moments.” “But then,” he goes on to say, “we all have those days when we just hit the back of the wardrobe.”
Like all good teachers do with good ideas learned from other good teachers, I’ve since stolen his analogy – hence my desire for my students to grasp at fir trees rather than fur coats. If I could put an early 20th century London lamppost in my classroom I would.
So what does this mean for our teaching? Those of you who tire of philosophical discourse and crave practical application, here it comes.
I’m talking to teachers out there now: I don’t know about you, but every teaching methodology/mode that I have read about or been taught remains in the realm of theory until I actually see it work in my classroom in this big “Aha!” moment that I almost always have to giddily share with my students. That’s right, I share some of my teaching secrets with them – they just love being invited “behind the curtain.”
The other day I had one of those “Aha!” moments, and not because I had never used this technique successfully before, but because – for the first time, perhaps – I took notice of what I was doing and realized what was actually happening and why it was working.
So here’s what happened: every year around this time our students start practicing for an end of year performance. It has been the tradition that the middle school students have the responsibility of setting up the risers on the stage every week for practices, and the 8th graders have the distinct honor of being the leaders of the crew. Now why these kids love hauling heavy wooden boxes from the bowels of the sanctuary and setting them up is beyond me, but literally these practice weeks are one of the highlights of the year for them.
But this year our administration decided to get dads to do the setup (maybe the child labor laws were discovered??). Well I had to break this (bad?) news to the 8th graders one morning, and you would have thought I had taken away P.E. class for the rest of the year. They were up in arms. Oh the injustice! How could anyone dare rob them of this pure enjoyment and esteemed honor??
Well they were going on and on, which I let them do for a few minutes, as I typically like to do anytime they are airing their grievances (I mean, you learn so much about them during those few moments), but our science test was only a week away and I just had to get on with the business of teaching them vector diagrams. But it was very clear that this type of transition was going to be nearly impossible.
Younger teacher me would have pulled the authority card and said, “Alright, alright, I get it. You’re upset. It’s so unfair that manual labor has been taken from you. But we have to get to work, so take out your notes and let’s go.” I would have then wrote on the board, in all CAPS and with deliberate and firm pen strokes, “Vector Diagrams,” underlined, of course. Then I would have started teaching from my notes. And sure, because my students do respect me and are very well behaved, they would have done just what I asked them to. They probably would have even engaged their minds. But oh, the irresolution and angst remaining in their hearts! At this point I would have most certainly been simply dumping ideas into their brains.
And I have done just that so many times. Students, please forgive me.
But this particular day I took a different route. While they were still very much in the midst of their gripe session, I drew on the board a picture of a riser sitting on a stage. My drawing skills are mediocre on the best day, but I guess they could tell what I had drawn because they quieted down and look intently and with anticipation. “So here’s one of your risers sitting on the stage, one of the heavier ones, you know. Now, the way I have this riser drawn, is it going to fall off the stage?”
And despite the fact that I was using rectangles to introduce vector diagrams (could it get more plain than that?), they were captivated. No, I wasn’t resolving their dilemma of injustice, but I was still talking about those silly risers. And the doors to their hearts stayed open, and the doors to their imaginations stayed open, and boy did we ever learn about vector diagrams that day! I think it might have been one of the most enjoyable discussions we’ve had this semester and let’s face it: vector diagrams aren’t that particularly fascinating.
Now maybe this was just a coincidence, you say. Or perhaps I was just leveraging the energy from their cries of injustice to fuel the discussion of an otherwise dry topic. Maybe so. But I can tell you this, when our vector diagrams morphed from a riser sitting on a stage into a dinosaur walking a turtle who was running after a cobra . . . well, I think there was some imagination involved – oh, and some thinking going on too. And somehow the riser issue fizzled away naturally – well, at least for that day.
I had the pleasure of interviewing a remarkable 6th grade boy last week for admission into our middle school. He and a girl from his same class were both interviewing the same day. As it turns out they are good friends, having found common ground in the fact that they both enjoy learning (which characteristic apparently and unfortunately exiled them to the margins of the social order at their particular school).
In addition to being good friends, this young boy and girl are also coauthoring a fictional novel, described by the girl (also remarkable) as an “apocalyptic fantasy.” When asked what his major contribution to the writing process was, the boy responded, “I tend to enjoy metaphors and sensory details.” He then went on to describe the female protagonist in their novel as “from humble roots but fierce, with icy blue eyes.”
Actually I spent most of both interviews asking for more details about their novel. I also made them agree to use me as an editor before they seek publication.
But I also always ask interviewees to describe their relationship with Jesus. The reader must recognize that the expectations for the response to this question are not unrealistic; we’re talking 11-year-olds most of the time here. God knows that I still struggle with a vivid articulation of my own faith at 36. However – as I have learned in my teaching experience over and over again – Jesus was not kidding when he said in Matthew 18:3, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” In this interview I was going to be reminded of this truth again.
Since he had been so eloquent with his words thus far in the interview, I decided to ask my faith question to this young boy in a more elevated manner. So, after tearing myself away from further questions about the novel, I asked, “How would you characterize your relationship with Jesus?”
Without hesitation and with the most humble sincerity, he replied, “Well, I sing. I sing to him. That’s what I do for him. And I know he listens. And often he replies.”
At this point it took my full constitution for me to keep it together and finish the interview without freaking this poor child out by crying.
In that moment of honesty Jesus spoke to me through that 6th grade boy. He said, “How does this boy characterize his relationship with me? By worship. Worship characterizes his relationship with his Savior.”
This 6th grade boy gets it. He gets it so much more than I do most of the time. Now he may not get it “intellectually,” but that is the point, isn’t it? This posture of worship – this desire to worship as an expression of his love for the object of his affection – is just what he does, is just who he is, so much so that he says, “I sing,” as simply and matter-of-factly as I would say, “I eat,” if someone asked me what I do when I get hungry.
If there is a good example of virtue, well there it is.
“I will sing of steadfast love and justice; to you, O Lord, I will make music.” Psalm 101:1 (ESV)
In an earlier post I mentioned that part of the reason for starting this blog was a sudden outpouring of thoughts and reflections on education – and my experience with education, specifically – that I felt the need to write down. Whether or not these thoughts are truly for a larger audience or not remains to be determined.
But what catalyzed this compulsion for reflection? Well I think I can answer that question definitively. What follows below is something I wrote a few weeks ago while my students were taking ERB tests. In fact it was very fortuitous that the students were in standardized testing for two hours, because this was just enough time for me to completely soak the computer screen with a story that I just had to get down in writing that morning. Perhaps this story will give better context for where this blog might be headed.
So, without further preface, here is what I wrote that day.
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“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 2:26-27 (NIV)
This morning I had what can only be described as a conversion experience. One of my coworkers recently turned me on to the Circe Institute, an organization whose expressed purpose is to support and promote classical Christian education. The Circe website is loaded with great resources, my discovery of which came at a time of greater than average hunger for better articulation of the classical Christian mission. Well this morning I was listening to a conference talk by the Circe Institute’s founder, Andrew Kern. In this talk Kern articulated so well what had, to that point in my teaching career, only lived and occasionally welled up inside of me as a passion for what I called “Kingdom teaching.” I knew that this teaching gig was serious business – eternally serious. And I felt like I was doing a decent job. But my articulation of what this “Kingdom teaching” looked like was lacking.
Kern helped me with fleshing out this idea. In his talk, Kern stated very poignantly that our whole purpose as teachers is to strive for the blessedness (i.e., “completion,” “perfection”) of our students – to see them fully realized, that is, to see Christ fully realized in them. Said another way, we are to steward them towards their created purpose: to be the reflection of their Creator.
You have heard it said perhaps many times in church or even educational settings, that if you are having trouble loving someone, think of her as being created in the image of God. I would like to go further though and say that the only way to truly love someone is to love him as an image-bearer. And by extension, the only way to educate someone is to love him as an image-bearer. After all, the word “education” comes from two words in Latin, e ducere, which together mean “to bring out from within.” What are we trying to bring out? I would argue that we are trying to bring out – to draw out – that image of God, that Holy reflection, that Kingdom purpose. And since by teaching we are essentially saying to our students, “Imitate me,” the only way we can draw out that image of God within our students is to be that image ourselves. Lord have mercy. Holy Spirit help us.
That moment that we are reflecting God’s image to our students, and we see that reflection when we look out at them – that is the Narnia moment, the moment of passing through the back of the wardrobe. That is the moment at which we cease to tug at fur coats and begin to grasp at fir trees. That is the moment that we transcend fabrications and encounter authenticity. That is the moment at which the lesson plan falls away and the teacher becomes the curriculum. That is the redemptive moment. That is why we teach.
But redemption does not come without repentance. There is a humility that we must embrace as teachers: this high calling spoken about above is not to be undertaken by our own white-knuckled manipulation and toil. It is only by being in right relationship with God – it is only by being broken, by realizing our utter depravity and God’s infinite goodness, by holding our hands out in total surrender to God – that we are in a position to reflect Christ to our students. We must be washed clean. Daily.
And is that not what our students want as well? The request just looks a little different coming from them. Their moment of repentance in the classroom is the moment at which they confess: “I don’t know.” That is the teachable moment. That is the poverty of spirit that invites redemption. As Andrew Kern says, “The person who is not brought to repentance cannot see the Truth.” Our students want to be washed clean – they desire to embody their created purpose, they yearn to reflect their Almighty God. Will we lead them in this transformative experience? Will we cultivate the trusted relationships and create a safe environment in which they are willing and able to be drawn out – ah, to be educated!?
Do our students know that we desire above all else for them to be washed clean and made perfect in the eyes of God – to be made into the image of their Savior – to fulfill their created purpose – to return to the Garden? Do they trust us enough not to be ashamed?
Let me now return to my experience this morning. Immediately after finishing Kern’s talk, I jumped into the shower, as is my morning routine (it was a school day), but I couldn’t get the talk out of my head. I kept thinking about the significance of this Imago Dei approach to teaching. And then it hit me: I was overwhelmed with grief at how much violence I myself have done to this Truth, how I have not taught as if my students were little image bearers. While washing my hair I was compelled to get down on my knees in the shower and repent. I sobbed. I cried out to God with the same phrase over and over: “Wash me clean, wash me clean.” As I felt the hot water raining down on my head and running across my back my request to God left metaphor. It was a baptism like I had never experienced before. I felt as if God himself was pouring water over me. My only possible response at this point was to worship God, and I did – kneeling right then and there in the shower. I praised Him for His goodness, thanked Him for His redeeming power. I felt clean like never before.
Now I should say at this point that rarely do I get overly emotional about my faith. I will lift my hand in worship at church from time to time, but rarely do I allow my arm to be fully extended. In fact, perhaps my biggest sin is that too often my faith lives in my head and forgets the path to my heart. My point in saying this is that I am not a “fall to my knees” kind of Christian – God have mercy on me. This shower moment was not a normal scene in my faith journey. God truly got to me that morning. He drew me out. He educated me.
So as I continued to do the normal, mundane things of my morning routine, I was still walking on air. I had just gotten dressed, though, when I heard my 23-month-old crying at her bedroom door (which we lock from the outside these days, as she is quite capable of exiting her “big girl bed” and, thus, her room). I walked in to see what the problem was (which usually means just putting her back in bed and telling her that it’s not yet time to get up), and she immediately said, quite pitifully and urgently, “Daddy! Poopoo! Tee-tee!”
Now I have to pause here and insert a disclaimer. I am not about to go into unnecessary detail, but for purposes that I hope will soon become readily apparent, this next part is kind of gross. But I know that for you parents out there, the moment I am about to describe will resonate with you, even if discussion of poopy diapers is typically taboo in any formal social setting, particularly one of higher education. For those of you who are not parents, I apologize in advance.
My daughter Alice had what we call in our house “an epic diaper,” one for the record books. This I knew the moment I walked in the room. It was at this point that I said, “Really, God? I guess this is your way of taking me off the mountaintop and back down to reality.” “The end of my enlightened morning,” I thought.
Now for those of you who have or have had toddlers, you know that diaper changing can sometimes be like the calf-roping contest in a rodeo. Often times Alice will try to outrun or out-climb you in order to avoid a diaper change. And even once you get her on the changing table, often she will arch her back or kick her legs. This does not happen every time, but it certainly happens a lot.
This particular morning was not one of those calf-roping experiences, however. As soon as she announced to me the problem – her filthiness – she walked of her own volition over to the changing table and lifted her arms out for me to pick her up. I placed her on the changing table, and rather than put up a fight, she just laid there peacefully – in relief, even – while I changed her diaper. And it was a messy one. Lots of wipes. Parents, you know what I’m talking about.
But as I was cleaning her up, still a bit aggravated by this “down to Earth” moment coming at the end of an otherwise “heavenly encounter,” I saw out of the corner of my eye my daughter looking up at me, so I turned to look her in the eyes. She continued to fix what I can only describe as an adoring gaze on my face and, when our eyes met, she touched my arm gently, smiled, and said, very softly and peacefully, “Daddy.” I replied, “Hi Alice. Daddy loves you.”
It was in that moment that it all clicked for me. I had come to my daughter in a moment in which she was totally helpless to change her state of being. She was filthy, and she knew it. And she could do nothing about it. But rather than run and hide, she called to me, she told me that she was filthy, and she submitted to the process of being cleaned. And in being cleaned, I think she felt truly loved. I can’t help but contemplate the significance of her naming me in that moment: “Daddy.”
Fathers, I hope you are all changing poopy diapers out there. Don’t let your wife steal all the God-moments! In some gross but very human, very real, very palpable way, I now believe that changing a poopy diaper is one of your first opportunities to reflect the image of Christ to your child in a way that he can truly internalize, long before he will be able to articulate. In a moment of vulnerability and helplessness and filth – filth that always seems to be more disgusting to a father – you have the opportunity to wipe your child clean.
I think God used this experience of changing a big, messy diaper because it is so visceral. I mean, there is no avoiding a physical reaction to an “epic diaper.” Rarely does filth take on a more tangible form. But how often, as adults now, do we underestimate or totally ignore our own dirtiness? As infants and then toddlers we are forthcoming with our filth (do we have a choice?), but sometime very quickly thereafter we learn to hide and then we spend our entire lives trying to “clean ourselves up” or at least pretend to be clean. (Is this not what Adam and Eve did with the fig leaves when they first discovered that they were naked?) By the time we are in middle school, like the students I teach, we have gotten so good at hiding and covering that we don’t even know anymore what it is like to stand in the clearing fully naked – to be fully known. Perhaps we don’t even know who we are anymore. And right about this time adolescence kicks in and we are given even more tangible reasons to run and hide. We eagerly want to be known – to be washed clean – to find our true purpose, but we have no idea how to articulate this let alone where to start.
Folks, I am not just describing teenagers growing up in secular families and attending public schools. I am describing so many of the students in our own Christian schools. Am I not? Sure, our children know how to parrot the Sunday school answers, but they might as well be saying, “I know that I am made in the image of a peanut,” as their likeness to a salty ballpark snack is probably just as ethereal as their Godly birthright. And this is because the world – and so often, too, Christian schools – have hijacked (sometimes without realizing it) the true purpose of education.
And so I was reminded this morning – by God speaking through Mr. Kern and then my daughter – that my role as a teacher, as a father, as an adult in authority over children, is to see Christ fully realized in the children who sit under my tutelage. This necessarily requires that I am in right relationship with God so that I can clearly embody the Truth, this necessarily requires that I am in right relationship with my students so that they trust me enough to adopt a posture of spiritual poverty in my presence. This necessarily requires that I restore the true purpose of education IN MY CLASSROOM. Redemption is always a personal experience, so the recovery of education’s good and proper purpose starts when we close our classroom doors, doesn’t it?
The book of Revelation tells us that our students will one day be priests and rulers in God’s kingdom. Do we believe this? Do we discern within even the most frustrating student the very image of our Redeemer, the very countenance of a king? It is there, that much the entire Testament of our Lord tells us. But are we looking for it? Are we listening for it? Do we even hear it within ourselves?
C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory:
“Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”
Do we know what is at stake here? Do we truly know what it means to teach a “Christ-centered” education?
Will we humbly fall at Christ’s feet and let him wash us clean so they we can see the Truth clearly? Will we invite our students into the same transformative relationship?
Will we, as Kern says, “arouse, listen to, and train this inner voice” that Lewis speaks of? Will we regard our students as the very imago dei? Will we draw them out into the clearing? Will we educate them?
I don’t even know Greek. I’ve never studied it. I do recognize and can say most of the alphabet, simply because the math in my graduate level engineering classes was nothing but one Greek letter after another, with perhaps an integral sign thrown in here and there. But that’s about as far as my knowledge of Greek goes.
Which is ashamed, really, since Greek was the original language used to transcribe a large portion of God’s story in the Christian Bible. The pastor at our church frequently talks about the nuances and connotations of “the original Greek” when expositing on a particular New Testament text, and I am always fascinated by the enlightenment one can receive from a study of language. It is also quite alarming how much meaning can be “lost in translation.”
My interest in Greek piqued by our pastor, I began to take New Testament passages from the Daily Lectionary and try to find the original Greek words used for some of the key words or phrases in the text. This practice led me to the discovery of Strong’s Concordance online (true Greek scholars, you may begin your judging of me in earnest now), which turns out to be a treasure trove of lexicons, searches, and cross-referencing capabilities. The search for one word leads to a list of where else that word appears in the Bible, which then leads to other verses where that word has a slightly different connotation, or perhaps where the context in which the word is used in the second text further clarifies its usage in the first. Suffice to say, if you have the tendency to “geek-out” on things, you can quickly find yourself several bifurcations down a deep rabbit hole and an hour later into the evening.
So because I find Greek interesting, and because Strong’s Concordance can now make me look like I’m smart enough to know a little Greek, I decided to use it in my title and byline. Well, not exactly.
But I did want the title and theme of this blog to have “thick” meaning, meaning which is both self-evident but also which will tie into (hopefully) later thoughts on education.
So let’s look at each word.
ποίησις (poiesis) means, in its most literal sense, “a making.” The verb form, ποιέω, literally means “to make,” or, more connotatively, “to create.” But this “creation” need not be a tangible thing; in fact, in Plato’s Symposium, one form of poiesis is described as “poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge.” James K.A. Smith goes a step further in his Desiring the Kingdom and translates poiesis directly as “cultivation.” Thus, poiesis may not only refer to creation ex nihilo, but also cultivation: that is, perfecting something or creating something out of something that is already in existence. Or, as our pastor says, “taking something that is good and making it really good.”
The Greek scholars are probably having a hay day right now with my perhaps inaccurate but for sure weakly supported etymological analysis of poiesis. If you have found error in my analysis, please correct me – I want to learn a little bit of Greek, not use it poorly to support my arguments.
But whatever the scholars will say, I am using poiesis hereafter to mean “cultivation.” Now, why cultivation? Well, that could be another blog post probably. But I will summarize here by saying that “classical education” has often been described as “the cultivation of wisdom and virtue” (note the parallel to (but distinction from) Plato’s quote above). Since I am writing about my experience in education (well, hopefully I will at some point actually write about education when I feel as though I have given this blog sufficient preface), and since I teach in a classical school and wholly subscribe to the classical pedagogy, this idea of “cultivation” is essential to what I envision the theme of this blog becoming. The biblical parallels are of course numerous, but we will stop here for now so that I can talk about the second word before I lose you (if I haven’t already).
ἀνακαίνωσις (anakainosis) is probably best translated “renewal,” the connotation of which suggests a process, like an ongoing renovation. In fact, the verb form, anakainoo, can also connote “to constantly renew by transforming from one stage to a more completed or higher stage.” I will spare you any further etymological analysis and jump straight to Romans 12:2, one of the only two places in the Bible (scholars, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m blaming Strong’s) where this word appears:
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing (anakainōsei (gerund form)) of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will.”
Wow – there’s another blog post just on these two verses. And perhaps even another based on the fact that the one other appearance of anakainosis is in Titus 3:5, when this “renewing” is described as being accomplished “by the Holy Spirit.” And we could do another on the fact that the word for “perfect” (teleios, which is probably better translated as “complete” or “having all its parts” or “full grown”) describing God’s will in Romans 12:2 is the same word used for “perfect” at the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount when he ends with the seemingly impossible exhortation, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Why “seemingly impossible”? Well, if you look at perfection as teleios, or “completion” or “full growness,” in the sense of being completely refined into a new creation, Jesus’ words start to make a little more sense. But I digress . . .
Back to the title of this blog. Why renewal? Well, I take this reasoning directly from Romans 12:2 and Paul’s exhortation for us to renew our minds as a direct antithesis to being swept up by the popular cultural current. I believe that Christian education can and should play a pivotal role in this renewal. So again, as I write about education and Christian education specifically, I hope to find in my ruminations space to elaborate on this theme of renewal.
So there you have it: Pi Alpha, an acronym for ποίησις and ἀνακαίνωσις, or poesis and anakainosis, or “cultivation and renewal.”
Commence the bashing of my Greek analyses.
Pi Alpha 