Learning to Look, Together

The Church, Pastors, and Education

“Only the whole of humanity is the fully developed image of God, his children, his offspring. The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human being may be. It can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members…displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively one after the other and contemporaneously side by side”¹

~ Herman Bavinck

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I’ve thought for a long time that something feels “off” about the white evangelical church.²

Scandals are many and well catalogued—authoritarian and abusive leaders and institutional structures, sexual abuse (and attendant coverups and rationalizations), political idolatry and the glorification of violence, justifying and perpetuating racial and economic segregation, etc.—but there is an undercurrent running deeper than the most visible issues. It is interconnected with them and, if not always the direct cause, certainly facilitates the concentration of money and power that makes such evils possible.

This week, Aimee Byrd puts her finger on this in a post on how pastoral ministry gets distorted in ways that harm both pastors and church members. She notes that while she can have empathy for pastors who lament that they can’t seem to have friends among the members of their churches, it feels a bit self-defeating. What is it, she asks, about the nature of the pastoral vocation and the authority structures of the church that prevents this? Wouldn’t this disconnect naturally happen when we separate “leaders” from everyone else and put them on a pedestal based on a special calling from God?

The More You Know…

It seems to me that this is not only problem of position or power, but a question of practical epistemology—how do we know what we know about ministry? What follows is already too long, and only scratches the surface of the topic, but I want to put some things out into the world that I’ve been musing on.

Christians universally acknowledge our need to know God, and to learn from Him how to live. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10), after all. But we seem to be missing something when it comes to how we get to know Him.

The prevailing model of discipleship is very knowledge-oriented, prioritizing the accumulation of biblical and theological truths as the key indicator of spiritual maturity. The model assumes a one-way flow of supply and demand—A supply of knowledge and a demand from the desire to escape ignorance; a supply of teachers and a demand of eager learners. Ideally, some learners over time become teachers themselves and keep the cycle going.

But this can reduce the mission of the church to content consumption. “Want to be a better Christian? Then come to Worship, but also come to Sunday school, come on Wednesday night, come to a Tuesday afternoon Bible Study, come to a Thursday morning men’s group.” Pastors and church leaders want to make sure that the people are filled with the Word and knowledge of how to live before God. They want to know that people are taking in “the good stuff,” learning from them and the sources they trust, and avoiding “off-label” learning from other Christian traditions or the culture at large.

It’s easy in this model to develop the sense that the truth of the gospel is so important, and its content so particular that only certain people can deliver it. And then that these certain people must be cordoned off from others for study and preparation. And then that they be beyond criticism, or even excused when committing or allowing grievous sin.

As such, this content model of discipleship actually gets the supply and demand backward. Pastors and leaders become the demand-side—a glut of knowledge seeking an audience with a dwindling numbers of willing learners. This spins into anxiety, fearfully wondering whether members are having their “knowledge tanks” filled up at other churches’ programs, by other pastors and leaders (through books, podcasts, or social media), or with ideas of spurious quality from outside the fold altogether. It’s a fierce competition for attention.³

Once that takes hold, being heard and being right start to take precedence over being with the members. The need for certainty and control starts to take precedence over the need for prayer and worship and fellowship. And the downward spiral continues, often with burnout, flameout, or walkout⁴ in its wake, leading many pastors to leave ministry altogether.

Looking at this from the other side, members feel an anxiety of increasing pressure to perform the role of learners that undermines the joy of actually knowing God. This isn’t good for any of us.

A Little Educational Theory

Some educational theory sheds some light here.

The discipleship model I described fits well with what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire⁵ called the “Banking model” of education—an instructor is the “bank” and learners must receive “deposits” of knowledge to fill up the emptiness of their lack of knowledge. This can be well-intentioned, but in practice it becomes inherently dehumanizing to both instructors and learners.

In Freire’s own words, in this model, “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing…. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.”⁶

Surely, we don’t want to set up this type of dynamic within the church, do we? But if knowledge of Scripture and theological formulations (as evidenced by ability to answer questions well) becomes our primary measure of spiritual health, how can we avoid sliding in this direction? What’s the alternative?

Educator and activist bell hooks proposed that true learning does not happen without considering and acknowledging the presence of everyone in the room, with the educator as a host and facilitator for learning together. This supposes that lived experience and the ways we narrate (or “theorize” about) our experience is a way of knowing—not an absolute that invalidates research and tradition, but a valid body of knowledge that impacts the interpretation and application of abstract knowledge.

In hooks’ own words, “capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.” Sometimes, she writes, “the mountain top [of wisdom] is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”⁷

This is not dissimilar from how missiologists think of contextualization and ensuring that the person and work of God as revealed in the Scriptures can enter into (and transform the brokennness of) a given local culture without undermining its unique expressions of imago Dei. This mutual acknowledgement of humanity unlocks the joy of learning something truly transformative for everyone.

These theories (and others) have been developed into a training model called “Dialogue Education” by Jane Vella of Global Learning Partners that focuses on actionable learning that gets concepts applied to life. In this model, a facilitator engages a group of co-learners as equals (rather than one “knower of things” surrounded by others who need to know). It’s become part of the standard best practices of adult learning (more often in community and nonprofit spaces than in the academy).

Every learning task (or unit of training, etc.) is approached by the facilitators through the “Four A’s”: Anchor to learners’ experience and existing knowledge, Add some new content, provide the opportunity for learners to Apply the new content in light of what they already know, and give them an actionable item to take Away from the learning and apply in their daily lives. From the perspective of other learners, learning is approached through the “Four I’s”: Inductive work to reflect on past experience, Input of new information to consider, Implementation of new information in conversation with other learners, and Integration to bring the new understanding back into their own context.⁸

So What?

That’s all well and good, but what does it have to do with church? How can we take the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and treat it like just one more “educational theory” to critique or apply?

There is absolutely content about God that we cannot know unless it is transmitted to us (Rom. 10, e.g.), and the entire story of the gospel is of God reaching into the world He made to ensure that the people He created can know and love Him, even in spite of our sin and brokenness (Ps. 19; John 3:16-17; etc.). He does this ultimately, by being present with us (Heb. 1:1-3). The “content” of Christianity is inseparable from the person of Christ. Spiritual knowledge must be embodied to be truly known.

Eugene Peterson wrote that it was his firm pastoral conviction that “everything in the gospel is livable and…my pastoral task was to get it lived. It was not enough that I announce the gospel, explain it, or whip up enthusiasm for it. I wanted it lived.” Surely every pastor wants people to live out the gospel, not merely to know things, but if our models of prioritize knowing over being—even without our realizing it—are we short-circuiting spiritual formation?

It’s always been the “living” that was the hardest part of the call of God’s people. It was the chronic stumbling block of Israel. It’s why Jesus didn’t just teach—He modeled, He served, He answered questions, He posed problems, He healed, He fellowshipped. Even Jesus’ teaching was peripatetic, going with people through their real lives rather than drawing them out of their lives as often as possible so they could learn more spiritual content. What He left us as we wait for His return—a church, sacraments, and the indwelling Holy Spirit—seems explicitly designed to form a community of learners who interpret and apply the content of His teaching (Scripture) in the way of life He seeks for us.

Jesus after all, taught us that it is the ones who come to Him with the least pretense, and the most honesty who understand best what He is doing in the world: “Jesus called the children to him and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’” (Luke 18:16-17).

If Christians could be fully formed into the likeness of Jesus through content consumption, we should have seen vast strides in faithfulness, love, mercy, and justice in the media age. There is no shortage of biblical content coming at us from every corner these days, but the evidence of lived faith is harder to come by, not least from pastors and leaders who ought to know the faith best.⁹

But what the educational theory I touched on above shows us is that people don't learn how to be someone merely from being told things, they learn in community, by doing, by repetition, by anchoring their stories in God's story through dialogue and having others bear witness to their lives in weeping and rejoicing.

A dialogue approach to discipleship entails bringing together the revealed knowledge of God through Scripture (informed by history, tradition, and theology—I have an MDiv, so this is not unimportant to me)¹⁰ with the knowledge of life in a divinely created yet fallen world that each believer brings to the table. This is the knowledge of God and of ourselves that Calvin speaks of, which must be kept together.¹¹ Where these two bodies of knowledge meet is where the wisdom of God and the power of God show up to empower us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly together with Him. When we don’t make space for this in the church, we should not be at all surprised that so many of our results are sub-Christian, and so many who grew up in the church spend adulthood questioning or re-evaluating their faith.

Hope In the Mess

I wonder what depths of wisdom pastors could learn from members if they saw this learning as a primary part of their job. I wonder how a dialogue-oriented discipleship might turn the dynamic of pastoral ministry in a healthier, more sustainable direction. Ordinary faithfulness in the trenches of daily life is what most Christians want to see in a pastor—we want pastors to be our friends and role models, not “othered” as people set apart to an impossible task and unobtainable knowledge.

The reality is that the souls of women and men are the places of the slow work of the church. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, like yeast. Real growth is slow, often hidden for years before the fruit is seen. If we tend to souls like a faithful gardener, counting on God for the harvest, we are close to the heart of Christ. Every ministry strategy that tries to ignore or circumvent this part of God's design will harm people or at least produce outcomes that fall far short of wholeness.

In her post, Byrd quotes Peterson as describing the pastoral vocation as spiritual direction, “the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation.”¹² The pastor is called to be a facilitator for a group of people and call their attention to God, so that all of us can be transformed together. As Simone Weil says, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

The fullest, truest learning, can only take place with this attention. It recognizes that the Spirit of God is also present in the classroom—not only in the fact of abstract omnipresence, but embodied in each believer there to learn—and He is crying out together with us that we may know Him.

What can a church that lives into this model look like? I don’t know fully, because I’ve never seen it fully worked out. But we can look for it together.

1. Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: God and Creation, John Bolt, trans. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 576-77.

2. Yes, this is an intentional descriptor—call it shorthand for “congregations reflecting the majority-culture within American society that self-consciously identify as theologically conservative, non-Mainline Protestant or non-denominational and putatively lean on the Bible as the authority for faith and practice.” I’m aware that other traditions also have problems, but I’m choosing to throw a few stones from within the glass house I’ve been living in.

3. And, as Ryan Ramsey puts it so well, competition like this has no place in the church: https://substack.com/home/post/p-146348464.

4. For my purposes here: Burnout = working outside of one’s competency and passion for too long and becoming exhausted or bitter. Flameout = looking for love and approval elsewhere through acting out sexually or in various vices. Walkout = looking for a different church or ministry that will provide the learners needed.

5. I am, in fact, aware that Freire was a Marxist, and that his Marxism drove his educational theories. Rejecting insightful observations wholesale from people whose thought-systems you reject is unhealthy. Meat, bones, etc.

6. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 58.

7. From Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994).

8. Adapted from a Wikipedia description of dialogue education, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_education.

9. I recognize and acknowledge that the quiet faithfulness of many good pastors goes un-sung while the misdeeds get told publicly. I also recognize that the consistent stories of misdeeds in congregations of all sizes and denominations gives evidence of enough bad apples that the barrel is in need of inspection.

10. The ways our formal theological educational structures and institutions concretize knowledge over dialogue as the norm for pastors is a WHOLE other topic for another time. I have thoughts….

11. In the famous line near the beginning of Institutes of the Christian Religion: “Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”

12. Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).