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

Everist, Norma Cook

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687045002 ISBN 13: 9780687045006

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Norma Cook Everist, having previously served in parishes and taught at Yale Divinity School, has been professor of church and ministry at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, for over 37 years. She is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She enjoys visiting the places where her former students, as well as many others, now serve. A widely known theologian, keynote speaker, and conference leader, she has published over a dozen books, including: The Church as Learning Community; Church Conflict: From Contention to Collaboration; and, most recently, Seventy Images of Grace in the Epistles That Make All the Difference in Daily Life (Cascade).

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The Church as Learning Community

A Comprehensive Guide to Christian Education

By Norma Cook Everist

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2002 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-687-04500-6

Contents

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, 

CHAPTER 1

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687045002
• ISBN 13: 9780687045006
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland